A judge in Arkansas makes $147,000 a year for turning poor people into indentured servants
District Judge Mark Derrick is running an egregiously unconstitutional debtors' prison and bragging about it, a new lawsuit documents.
ALAN PYKE AUG 9, 2018, 3:27 PM
The dirt-poor residents of a hardscrabble Arkansas county are routinely sent to jail for being broke by a judge who earns $147,000 a year.
District Judge Mark Derrick routinely violates core principles of the Constitution and sometimes even flouts black-letter laws of the state itself, a lawsuit filed Thursday by the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law says.
Derrick’s practices help keep the White County Detention Center filled to bursting. Although the Constitution forbids the jailing of people simply for being too poor to pay fines, and laws therefore require judges to ascertain a person’s realistic ability to repay court debts before establishing fine levels and repayment schedules, thousands of people unlucky enough to get a traffic ticket or other minor violation in Derrick’s 23rd Judicial District have been repeatedly tossed into cells for missing payments scheduled without any regard for their income, the suit says.
For every three days Kimberly Snodgrass has been alive in the past four years, she’s spent one in the White County jail thanks to Derrick’s practices. Snodgrass is one of six named plaintiffs in the suit, but lawyers are bringing it as a class action on behalf of what they say are more than 20,000 similarly afflicted locals.
https://thinkprogress.org/arkansas-pays-this-judge-147000-a-year-to-lock-tens-of-thousands-of-people-up-for-being-poor-527cfc1d2eca/
What a fucking asshole...................
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