I have previously addressed the how failure to pay fine systems are in reality the creation of a traffic debtor prison for traffic violations. 
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A person’s driver’s license can be suspended not just for traffic offenses but for all kinds of other reasons totally unrelated to driving on the highway.  For instance, falling behind on child support, getting caught with drugs, bouncing checks; or minor juvenile offenses like missing school, using false identification to buy alcohol, or shoplifting.  What was originally intended as a sanction to address poor driving behavior is now used as a mechanism to raise revenue for the State. “Across the country, at any given time, approximately seven percent of drivers are suspended. In 2002, drivers suspended for social non-conformance reasons represented 29 percent of all suspended drivers. By 2006, this group represented 39 percent of all suspended drivers. Drivers are now commonly suspended for reasons such as bounced checks, fuel theft, truancy, vandalism and many more.”  “Best Practices Guide to Reducing Suspended Drivers”  infra., at 2.  Increasingly, people who study driver safety say this makes little sense.  In fact, a 2013 a study by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators entitled “Best Practices Guide to Reducing Suspended Drivers” recommended that “legislatures repeal laws requiring the suspension of driving privileges for non-highway safety related violations.”
 
Chief John Batiste of the Washington State Patrol provided his expert opinion, “A roadside encounter with a suspended driver is a time consuming endeavor for officers. Drivers suspended for non-driving reasons represent 39% of all suspended drivers, and are not the threat to the motoring public as other suspended drivers. Reducing law enforcement roadside encounters with suspended drivers by up to 39% would result in significant time savings allowing officers to be available for calls for service and other proactive highway safety activities.”  Eliminating 39 percent of suspended drivers will result in fewer citations for driving while under suspension and partially alleviate clogged court dockets. Individuals whose offense is unrelated to highway safety will retain their driving privileges, their ability to earn a living, and their ability to contribute to the economy.

However, that same report goes on to detail how “[w]hen a law enforcement officer encounters a suspended driver, their ability to help ensure the safety of drivers on the roadways and their availability to respond to calls for service are reduced. The officer must take appropriate action for the violation and later appear in court for adjudication of the ticket(s). While the officer is in court, there may be little or no enforcement presence in their patrol area. Officers are made unavailable for 911 responses, crash investigation, criminal interdiction, and other enforcement activities, potentially increasing the threat to public safety
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Simply put, using license suspension for non-moving violations enforcement is not a good idea. This idea of holding a driving privilege only causes recidivism and keeps the offender from digging out of the Suspension Snowball.  Plus, it takes away valuable law enforcement time from more serious offenses.
​

Previously under Mississippi law, the State would automatically suspend a license, without asking people why they could not pay and without giving them extra time to pay or an alternative punishment like community service.  Worse under Mississippi law, people were being thrown in jail for non-payment of the fine.  Municipal charges would result in a person being held in jail until they paid bail money or their fine, without taking into account their ability to pay.  

All in the name of revenue.  Forget justice.

This practice was followed despite the absence of legal authority to do so.  “Incarceration shall not follow the nonpayment of a fine, restitution, and/or court costs. Incarceration may be employed only after the court has conducted a hearing and examined the reasons for nonpayment and finds, on the record, that the defendant could have made payment but refused to do so.”  Cassibry v. State, 453 So. 2d 1298, 1299 (Miss. 1984) (If a defendant is “‘financially unable to pay a fine’ and the trial court so finds, [the defendant] may not be imprisoned, period.” (emphasis in original)). 

For instance, the city of Corinth, Mississippi and Municipal Court Judge John C. Ross were operating a modern-day debtors’ prison, unlawfully jailing poor people for their inability to pay bail and fines.  If Judge Ross does not order the defendant to pay the fine amount in full but instead allows the person to pay in installments, he would typically direct the defendant to go to the clerk’s office to arrange for a payment plan, which the court refered to as “part pay.”  Deputy clerks, under Judge Ross’s direction, would detain in the clerk’s office any person who Judge Ross ordered to pay a fine until the individual could come up with the minimum amount needed to participate in a payment plan. If a person was unable to make the required down payment by the end of the day, they are jailed until the fine is paid or the person has sat out the fine at a rate of $25 per day.  While state law required any payment plan to be “realistic,” Cassibry, 453 So. 2d at 1299, Judge Ross did not tailor the amount of the payment plan to what a defendant could realistically afford to pay. He instead used a standard $100 per month plan.  Judge Ross generally instructed the deputy clerks to require a person to pay an additional $50 fee to participate in the payment plan and required any person placed on a payment plan to pay a minimum of $100 per month toward the balance on the fine and court costs.  Judge Ross did not inquire into ability to pay or willfulness before sending a person to the clerk’s office with instructions to jail them for non-payment.

Wisconsin follows a similar practice in suspending a driver’s license for nonpayment of a fine without ever taking into account a person’s ability to pay.

With poverty skyrocketing in our society, this type of government sanctioned debtor prison is an abomination.  Ultimately, this Mississippi practice resulted in a federal lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).  As said by Sam Brooke, SPLC deputy legal director, “Poverty is not a traffic crime. There is a growing recognition across the country that people should not face additional punishment just because of their poverty, and that includes taking away their driver’s licenses when they can’t pay fines.”
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Unlike Wisconsin, Mississippi has come to its senses.  Mississippi will reinstate more than 100,000 driver’s licenses that were suspended for non-payment of traffic tickets and will no longer suspend licenses for failure to pay fines, under an agreement that was announced between the SPLC, the Mississippi Department of Public Safety (DPS) and another organization.

Police departments are widely admired for their overall effectiveness; most jurors find officers more credible than persons accused of crimes.  Yet, there are uncomfortably too many like the above New York Times story.  For instance, in 2013, Newsday reviewed more than 900 lawsuits, 7,000 pages of county legislative transcripts, union agreements and 1,700 proposed state laws to find more than 200 police officers have shot innocent people, falsified official reports, manipulated DWI arrests to increase overtime pay and lied to district attorneys and investigators.  Police misconduct hidden from public by secrecy law, weak oversight.  Newsday, Dec. 18, 2013.
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As one commentator discussing police officer veracity indicates: some experts on police practice treat lying by police (police perjury is referred to by officers as “testilying,” a term coined by the Mollen Commission (1994), formally known as The City of New York Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Procedures of the Police Department) at trials and in their paperwork as the “norm,” “commonplace,” or “routine.”  Michelle Alexander, Why Police Lie Under Oath, N.Y. Times, Feb. 2, 2013 (“In 2011, [in New York City] hundreds of drug cases were dismissed after several police officers were accused of mishandling evidence. That year, Justice Gustin L. Reichbach of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn condemned a widespread culture of lying and corruption in the department’s drug enforcement units . . . ‘this court was shocked, not only by the seeming pervasive scope of misconduct but even more distressingly by the seeming casualness by which such conduct is employed.’").  The Mollen Commission concluded in its July 1994 report that:

Today's corruption is not the corruption of Knapp Commission days. Corruption then was largely a corruption of accommodation, of criminals and police officers giving and taking bribes, buying and selling protection. Corruption was, in its essence, consensual. Today's corruption is characterized by brutality, theft, abuse of authority and active police criminality.  Cf. The Rampart Scandal (widespread police corruption in the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) anti-gang unit of the LAPD's Rampart Division in the late 1990s).

The commission found that if corruption itself was not systemwide, the department's failure to address it was: "We find as shocking the incompetence and the inadequacies of the department to police itself," Milton Mollen, the commission chairman, said as the panel released an interim report on its principal findings. Will They Be Followed?”  Sadly, the commission noted that there was a "reluctance to uncover and effectively investigate corruption" and that "no one seemed to care."  Instead the report found that "a deep-rooted institutional reluctance to uncover corruption in the department." It said the department had "abandoned its responsibility to insure integrity" and had failed to instill in supervisors, from the highest commanders to sergeants in the field, the message "that fighting corruption must be one of the department's highest priorities.  From the top brass down to local precinct commanders and supervisors," the commission said, "there was a pervasive belief that uncovering serious corruption would harm careers and the reputation of the department."

Ms. Alexander explains that “[r]esearch shows that ordinary human beings lie a lot (it should be noted that of professions, nurses are thought to lie the least;  labor union leaders, lawyers, congressman and lobbyists the worst) — multiple times a day — even when there’s no clear benefit to lying. Generally, humans lie about relatively minor things like “I lost your phone number; that’s why I didn’t call” or “No, really, you don’t look fat.” But humans can also be persuaded to lie about far more important matters, especially if the lie will enhance or protect their reputation or standing in a group.  The natural tendency to lie makes quota systems and financial incentives that reward the police for the sheer numbers of people stopped, frisked or arrested especially dangerous.  In 2010, a New York City police officer named Adil Polanco told a local ABC News reporter that “our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them.” He continued: “At the end of the night you have to come back with something.  You have to write somebody, you have to arrest somebody, even if the crime is not committed, the number’s there. So our choice is to come up with the number.”

Moreover as Senior District Judge Jack Weinsten responded to the NYPD official who took the position that the problem of perjury is not pervasive within the department, and that the tendency of police officers to fabricate testimony is no greater than that of non-police witnesses in Cordero v. The City of New York, 15-cv-3436, such statement misses the point. “Police officers, unlike civilians, have the power to terminate constitutionally protected liberty; with this power comes great responsibility; as well as the need for appropriate oversight.”  The basis of that lawsuit was “the failure to take reasonable steps to control lying by police officers is a policy of the NYPD.”  The judge allowed Cordero to proceed against the city on grounds that the city failed “to take reasonable steps to control lying by police officers,” citing Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658. 

Peter Keane, a former San Francisco Police commissioner, wrote an article in The San Francisco Chronicle decrying a police culture that treats lying as the norm: “Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.”

Alexander looks at two major circumstances where this occurs.  The first is in the context of drug arrests.  She quotes a former San Francisco police commissioner as saying police perjury to justify illegal dope searches is “commonplace.”  The former commissioner further describes the process as “the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.”  Furthermore, in 2011, hundreds of drug cases were dismissed due to police corruption and lying.   Additionally, the Bronx District Attorney discover that a high number of people were being falsely arrested for trespassing at housing projects.  Alexander explains that “Jeannette Rucker, the chief of arraignments for the Bronx district attorney, explained in a letter that it had become apparent that the police were arresting people even when there was convincing evidence that they were innocent. To justify the arrests, Ms. Rucker claimed, police officers provided false written statements, and in depositions, the arresting officers gave false testimony.”  The second situation arises where there is pressure to meet arrest quotas.  In New York, police officers felt pressure (denied by the Police Commissioner) to arrest someone even if the crime is not committed.  In addition, Alexander notes that the number of arrests may impact whether state and local law enforcement agencies receive federal grant program funding.  Agencies feel that the funding will cease if the numbers are not up to expectations.

Keane asks why do police, whom we trust as role models of legal conduct, show contempt for the law by systematically perjuring themselves?  The first reason is because they get away with it.  There is evidence to support Keane’s assertion.  Sadly, there are little consequences for a police officer who lies on the witness stand.  Police departments do little to detect, combat or punish these police lies.  For instance, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, in February 2014 overruled a recommendation to prosecute two police officers who had freely admitted to lying about a shooting case.  “It's a powerful example of State's Attorney Alvarez's refusal to address systemic perjury by Chicago police,” says Craig Futterman, a civil rights attorney and professor at University of Chicago Law School who reviewed the case at Salon's request.
 
Police also know that in a swearing match between a drug defendant and a police officer, the judge always rules in favor of the officer. Often in search hearings, it is embarrassingly clear to everyone - judge, prosecutor, defense attorney, even spectators - that the officer is lying under oath. Yet nothing is done about it. There are rare cases in which the nature of the testimony and the physical evidence make it absolutely impossible to credit an officer's version and the judge must rule the search illegal. When this happens, the judge rules hesitatingly and grudgingly for the defense. Indeed, judges sometimes apologize to the officer for tossing out illegally seized evidence where the cop has just committed felony perjury in the judge's presence. Another reason is the nature of most drug cases and the likely type of person involved. Usually police illegally enter a home, search it and find drugs. The defendant is poor, uneducated, frequently a minority, with a criminal record, and he does have drugs. Police know that no one cares about these people.

Now you tell me where that leaves someone accused of a crime?  A false report leads to a false arrest which then puts the defendant in a bind.  As Alexander noted above, the jury will most likely believe the officer’s version of events.  At this point, the defendant may also feel pressure to falsely plead guilty to the crime.  Even if the defendant has committed a crime, the officer’s lying may result in a more serious charge and additional prison time.  But the main reason is the drug war.  A cops professional advancement depends on nabbing dopers.  Narcotics officers promoted to top levels in the police department despite contempt for the law shown by bullying, brutality and perjury in carrying out illegal searches and arrests.  So the modern narcotics officer is just following a well-worn path.

With resources scarce in the criminal system, can the criminal justice system afford to continue operate this way?   Alexander sums it up best when she writes that the “fact that our legal system has become so tolerant of police lying indicates how corrupted our criminal justice system has become by declarations of war, “get tough” mantras, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for locking up and locking out the poorest and darkest among us.”

“The comparatively lengthy sentences in this case are made necessary by mandatory minimums but also by the finding that the available alternatives to incarceration or diversion programs are either insufficient or unavailable for violent defendants, like the present ones who have been trapped in a gang culture, and condemned to a life of poverty and probable crime.  Thus even youthful offenders, charged with violent offenses, are typically not given the opportunity to avoid incarceration or participate in programming that would enhance their skills and reduce recidivism.  More court sentencing alternatives and community programming, in addition to [ ] targeted policing, are necessary to discourage gang violence, as well as to assist defendants attempting to escape their environs after a conviction or sentence.  Lengthy mandatory minimums, and the penological theory of incapacitation continue to be justified by a lack of sentencing alternatives for society’s “unredeemables.  Incapacitation cannot be the sole purpose of a sentence.  Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012), Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48 (2010).  [R]emoving individuals from society does not decrease crime.”  Judge Jack Weinstein, Senior Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Statement of Reasons ( a court order) U.S. v. Rivera, Folks, and Cruz, 16-CR-323-002, 004 and 005, http://blog.federaldefendersny.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/12.7.17-Statement-of-Reasons.pdf

I love the movie Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre.  Set during World War II, the movie focuses on an American expatriate, Rick Blaine who owns an upscale nightclub and gambling den in Casablanca (Bogart), who must choose between his love for a woman, Ilsa Lund (Bergman), and helping her and her husband, Victor Laszlo a Czech Resistance leader, escape from the Vichy-controlled city of Casablanca to continue his fight against the Nazis.  German Major Strasser has come to Casablanca to oversee the unabashedly corrupt Vichy prefect of police, Captain Louis Renault, to see that Laszlo never leaves Casablanca.
 
In one scene, Strasser leads a group of German officers in singing at the nightclub, "Die Wacht am Rhein" ("The Watch on the Rhine").  In response, Laszlo orders the house band to play "La Marseillaise".  When the band looks to Rick, he nods his head. Laszlo starts singing, alone at first, then the crowd joins in, drowning out the Germans. Strasser has Renault close the club because of the patriotic fervor of Laszlo enabled by Rick. 
 
However, when Rick confronts Renault to explain why his nightclub is being closed, the following memorable dialogue occurs:
 
Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
[aloud]
Captain Renault: Everybody out at once!
 
In statements that echo the incredulity of the French prefect of police in the movie Casablanca, law enforcement has professed themselves shocked to discover that anyone could object to the idea of stash house stings on racial grounds.

An unprecedented panel of nine federal trial judges has begun hearing evidence in Chicago on whether phony stash-house stings are racially biased.  As explained in a Chicago Tribune article, stash house stings typically begin when an informant provides information to the ATF about a potential target who has expressed interest in taking part in a robbery.  The ATF orchestrates every aspect of the fictitious stash house operation.  This includes the hand-picking of all of its targets for the fictitious stash house operation.  Agents are required to sign off on all of their targets before arrest, not just the initial target. The playbook even entitles agents to walk away on the day of arrest if the ATF cannot conclude that the targets are a viable robbery crew or otherwise have met the Operation’s criteria.

Specifically, an undercover ATF agent or confidential informant (CI) offers his targets an enticing jackpot: an opportunity to rob a stash house that contains large quantities of drugs, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, guarded only by a few men with guns.  In a series of conversations captured in undercover recordings, the target is told if he is interested he must assemble an armed team to commit the robbery. The target and his crew are arrested after they show up on the day of the supposed crime.  In order to avoid a defendant raising an entrapment defense, the stings are supposed to target only suspects who are already experienced robbers. ATF criteria also require that at least two of the participants have violent backgrounds and that all must be criminally active at the time the investigation is launched.

However, in practice the lucrative-seeming opportunity of a stash house robbery were only offered to black and Hispanic suspects, not to those similarly situated in criminal background and interests but of other ethnicity.  “[T]he equal protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment” constrains the exercise of both law enforcement discretion and prosecutorial discretion. United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456, 464–65 (1996). Selective enforcement and prosecution claims “draw on ordinary equal protection standards.” Id. at 465 (internal quotation marks omitted). To prevail on a selective enforcement claim, a defendant must show that law enforcement’s conduct (1) had a discriminatory effect, and (2) was motivated by a discriminatory purpose or intent. Id.; Chavez v. Illinois State Police, 251 F.3d 612, 635–36 (7th Cir. 2001). The ATF’s Stash House Operations produced a discriminatory effect, and were motivated by a discriminatory purpose.

The defense asked Professor Jeffrey Fagan “to conduct a comparative empirical analysis to determine whether the race disparities in the pool of stash house defendants result from a selection process that is influenced by race.”  The analysis of the possible racial disparities found that the race of the defendant’s were inexplicable on grounds other than race.  Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation, 429 U.S. 252, 266 (1977).

The Fagan Report found clear evidence of racial discrimination:

[A]fter controlling for the ATF criteria as well as several indicia of criminal propensity, race remains a statistically significant predictor of selection as a Stash House defendant. These analyses show that the ATF is discriminating on the basis of race in selecting Stash House defendants.
 
Professor Fagan’s statistical analyses are evidence not just of correlation but also of causation: They rule out race-neutral explanations, creating the inescapable conclusion that the ATF selected the stash house defendants on the basis of race.  In spite of directives, the ATF disregarded its Operations’ many substantive and procedural selection criteria for Black people and other defendants of color. The result is a group of defendants who are 92% people of color—enormously more targets of color than a non-race based selection process would capture.
 
Worse as expressed by Judge Posner in United States v. Kindle, 698 F.3d 401 (2012) stash house stings make it safer for drug dealers to run stash houses:
 
[C]onsider the role of such stings in the “war on drugs.” Are they likely to reduce the sale and use of illegal drugs? No; they are likely to have the opposite effect. Stash house robbers do not increase the amount of drugs in circulation, since they steal their drugs instead of making or importing them. The effect of a fictitious stash house sting, when the person stung is, unlike Mayfield, a real stash house robber, is therefore to make stash houses more secure by reducing the likelihood of their being robbed. A sting both eliminates one potential stash house robber (unless the defendant was entrapped) and deters other criminals from joining stash house robberies, since they may turn out to be stings. The greater security that fictitious stash house stings confer on real stash houses — security obtained at no cost to the operators of stash houses — reduces their cost of self-protection, which is a principal cost of the illegal-drug business. The lower a business’s costs, the lower the prices charged consumers, and so the greater the demand for illegal drugs and the more sales and consumption of them. The operators of stash houses would pay law enforcement to sting potential stash house robbers.
 
As indicated by Judge Otis Wright II in U.S. v. Hudson, Whitfield and Dunlop, the stash house stings represent not law enforcement but crime creation making the government an oppressor of the people.  These reverse sting operations ensnare chronically unemployed people of color in poverty ridden areas in fake stash house robberies.

​Last Thursday I died momentarily.  I experienced V-tach or ventricular tachycardia which is a type of fast heart rate that arises from improper electrical activity in the heart. My heart short-circuited and was beating at 267 beats a minute.  I was saved by the doctors getting my heart to beat correctly with a defibrillator.  Now my mind is wandering about various implications of this experience.  Clearly, the practice of law screws with your head because the first thing I wondered is why the doctors did what they did with the defibrillator.   I mean if I was dead, I was not a person, right?  Doctor’s only help “persons” so why help me?  Fortunately, I had smart doctors who did not think like me and revived me.
 
That lead me to how does the law define what it is to be a “person.”   How you define what a “person” is under the law is not an idle question given the headlines of today about sexual harassment by one person like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, George H. W. Bush, Matt Lauer, Al Franken, Garrison Keillor, Louis C.K., Mark Halperin, Charlie Rose, Glenn Thrush who are all supposed to have engaged in sexual harassment of another person. But what is sexual harassment?  I think sexual harassment is simple: it is a dignitary injury to the very person of another. Craven, Personhood: The Right to Be Let Alone, 1976 Duke L.J. 699, 701 (1976).
 
Thinking of harassment in this manner causes one to realize that harassment is simply an offense against the basic right to be left alone. Of course, the right to be left alone is a huge subject, implicating important constitutional interests relating to family life, procreation, and child rearing; areas of human experience which the Supreme Court has long held must be accorded special protection. Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494 (1977); Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965); Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1924); Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).  The synergistic coupling between several Bill of Rights guarantees to create by the operation of all of them together a constitutional right not locatable upon any one of them. See Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589, 598-599 n. 23 (1977).  This follows from the text of the Ninth Amendment itself: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 491-492 (Goldberg, J., concurring).  Sexual harassment is simply an invasion of personal dignity. Ehrenreich, Dignity and Discrimination: Toward a Pluralistic Understanding of Workplace  Harassment, 88 Geo. L.J. 1, 22-24 (1999). 
 
In other words, we need to respect the personhood of each other.