Letters To My Country - Wis. judges on 7th Circuit uphold jail booking fee, over strong dissent

January 11, 2014

Wis. judges on 7th Circuit uphold jail booking fee, over strong dissent - JSOnline

From the article:

A federal appeals court decision by two Wisconsin judges that it’s OK for an Illinois jail to charge every arrested person a $30 booking fee was blasted by a third dissenting judge who compared the practice to something from “Alice in Wonderland” or “1984.”

This is an excellent example of a court abusing the doctrine of Standing to uphold a law that is unconstitutional on its face. The majority engages in a long and completely irrelevant analysis of the Standing doctrine, followed by a Kafkaesque analysis of the Plaintiff’s procedural due process claim that manages to completely miss the point at every turn. As Judge Hamilton says in his dissent:

This should be a simple case. The village’s booking fee ordinance is unconstitutional on its face. It takes property from all arrestees—the guilty and the innocent alike—without due process of law. The deprivation occurs at the time of arrest, immediately and finally. It occurs based on only the say-so and perhaps even the whim of one arresting officer. By no stretch of the imagination can that be due process of law. The fee is in substance a criminal fine, modest but a fine nonetheless, and it is imposed regardless of the validity of the arrest and regardless of whether there is any criminal prosecution or what its outcome might be.

This is how blatantly unconstitutional laws get upheld in the courts. Overly technical judges place form over substance to reach legally absurd results. The Standing doctrine is supposed to be used to prevent the courts from being flooded with claims asserted by people who haven’t actually suffered a legal injury. It certainly doesn’t apply when the Plaintiff is challenging a facially unconstitutional law, which would be invalid when applied to the innocent and guilty alike. So the fact that the Plaintiff pled guilty to the crime he was arrested for is completely irrelevant to the constitutionality of the law. The 7th Circuit majority in this case missed the forest through the trees.

12:36pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZMMjnx13_XiRQ

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