Ripples of Hope
Our team lost at trial in our class-action lawsuit challenging pretrial fees in Ravalli County, Montana. It’s a sentence I hoped I would never write, and one that, as trial prep and trial commenced throughout the last few months, I firmly believed I’d never have to. What began as a lawsuit with a handful of named plaintiffs back in August of 2021 evolved over the course of nearly five years into something bigger than our individual plaintiffs, bigger than Equal Justice Under Law, and bigger than Ravalli County. Through thousands of hours of work (I logged over 1,500 hours myself), our team uncovered thousands and thousands of documents and records, hundreds of affected class members, dozens of devastating stories, and hundreds of thousands of dollars collected by the Ravalli County Sheriff’s Office, on threat of incarceration, on the backs of the community’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens. Taken together, the evidence revealed a disturbing picture of a grossly unjust system: one in which the Ravalli County Sheriff’s Office extracts exorbitant and uncapped fees from people forced to sacrifice basic necessities, in which individuals who are legally guaranteed the presumption of innocence are treated as guilty from the moment they are arrested, and in which the very people tasked with ensuring community safety are profiting off of each and every arrest they make.
Our team and our class members believed firmly that the evidence and testimony we presented at trial proved our due process claims. There is no adequate notice: The Sheriff’s Office does not provide advance notice of the exorbitant pretrial fees, informing arrestees of their payment obligations only at the moment of enrollment, which is often the very moment that initial fees are due. There is no adequate opportunity to be heard: The Sheriff’s Office does not provide an opportunity to be heard on whether the pretrial fees are erroneous, offering no fee-waivers or fee reductions for people who are indigent, and offering no reimbursements for people who are eventually acquitted. While local courts assign conditions of release and can adjust those conditions, the local judges have no authority whatsoever to waive or reduce the fees themselves. And there is no impartial decisionmaker: The Sheriff’s Office cannot be impartial because the fees they collect fund their salaries and division. The courts, though impartial, cannot be decisionmakers because they have no authority to adjust, reduce, or waive the fees absent a change in the conditions, which may not always be appropriate or justified. The system is unfair, unjust, and fails to meet the elements required for due process. A jury of Montanans disagreed, but that does not mean that we have to accept this system as fair or just, and it does not mean that we will stop fighting for indigent criminal defendants in Montana and around the country.
As many cases tend to, this case became more than a case for me. It wasn’t just legal arguments on a page — it was real people, with real stories, who I came to know deeply. It was Charles Post — a 71-year-old disabled man who, for the first time in his life, is experiencing homelessness because despite having only $1,100 per month in income from Social Security Disability Insurance, he’s being charged more than $1,000 in pretrial fees. It was Sandra Martin — a grandmother and wife of an ailing and aging log-peeler, who was subject to eviction when she was forced to skip rent to afford her $600 monthly pretrial fees. It was Heidi Hutchison — a single mom of three boys and gas station deli manager, who turned the Internet off in the 5-wheeler she lives in with her kids and skipped meals to make her $600 monthly pretrial fee payments, who never got her money reimbursed to her when, 10 weeks after being arrested for a suspected DUI, got back completely clean toxicology results. It was Richard Churchill — a class representative and a disabled man in his sixties living off of Social Security Disability Insurance, who was forced to move into his car when his $500 monthly pretrial fees forced him to forego rent money. It was the dozens and dozens of other class members we spoke to since 2021 who were forced to pay money they did not have before ever being found guilty, and without any process at all. Their stories were real, and they matter. Regardless of the outcome of the case, they matter.
Litigation and lawyering can sometimes feel disconnected from real people and real stories, and the silver lining of this loss — the part that doesn’t feel like a loss — is that we got to listen to our clients’ stories, validate them, and give them a platform in the courtroom and in the press to tell those stories to others who had to listen, including people who have never cared to listen before. That is a win; so too is the reminder to all of us committed to using the power of the law to address injustice that, at the end of the day, we are in the business of telling people’s stories, making people listen, and hoping that — regardless of the verdict — someone or something has been changed by the process.
And justice and fairness still matter, too. Our Executive Director, Phil Telfeyan, closed arguments last week by telling the jury that there is injustice everywhere, that it can feel helpless and overwhelming, but that due process is what makes our system just for everyone and that the government is not above the law. The “injustice everywhere” part rang true when Phil said it, and rings even truer having heard the jury’s verdict. It does feel helpless and overwhelming at times, and hearing the verdict was one of those times for all of us and for our clients. But we all agreed that the promises of due process, of equal justice, and of government accountability also ring true; that we have to keep going, keep pushing, keep fighting to uphold the Constitutional ideals on which our legal system is built. And we all agreed, after substantial commiseration, that we would rather keep fighting this fight, even if it means sometimes losing, than not be in the fight at all.
There are myriad ways to conceptualize how and why to keep going after a loss of this magnitude; to keep putting one foot in front of the other in hopes that we are indeed moving forward. In 1857, celebrating the emancipation of British West Indian enslaved people and advocating for abolition on this side of the Atlantic, Frederick Douglass said, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Around the same time, abolitionist Theodore Parker noted that, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” a quote popularized nearly a century later by Martin Luther King Jr. And a contemporary of MLK Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, gave a speech in 1966 at the University of Cape Town, linking struggles for freedom in South Africa, the United States, and Vietnam by telling students that: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
The walls of oppression are many and high, and in some places and cases, growing higher. But we the people still have the power to sue governments; to listen to and tell and amplify stories of the marginalized; to force our institutions — albeit incrementally — to live up to their promises. For those of us who refuse to accept injustice as the norm, these powers are obligations. We lost our trial, and that is a difficult reality to face, but we told stories that matter and we are committed to continuing to do just that. Each Complaint we file, each motion we argue, and each story we tell is itself a win — a “tiny ripple of hope” that, when crossing and intersecting with the million different Complaints filed and motions argued by our partners in this work, and with the million stories of real people, with real experiences, who deserve real justice, build a mighty current. We lost this one, but we are not defeated, and we are more proud than ever to stand with our clients as even one small part of that mighty current. Onward is the only way to go.