Inscrutable Court Fines

It's not necessarily obvious why keeping track of legal debt is so impossible

An important addendum to my post about voter right restoration in Florida requires elaborating on why exactly tracking court-ordered fines/fees/costs is such a mess.

A federal court had issued a painstakingly detailed 125-page opinion about this issue if you really want to dive into the weeds but this post provides a quick summary and excerpts.

The default system in Florida before 2018 was that anyone convicted of a felony was barred from voting unless the Board of Executive Clemency said otherwise. Floridians apparently were not a fan of this system, so they voted overwhelmingly in favor of a state constitutional amendment to implement automatic voting right restoration.

Finding out whether someone is convicted is relatively simple, all you need is to point to a judgment & sentence document issued by a court. Finding out when someone's sentence ends, including parole, is a bit more complicated but still feasible. Whatever agency in charge of prisons is usually the one also tasked with synthesizing court orders, calculating credit for good behavior, and even calculating parole extensions or suspensions. In my work, I rely heavily on the state police to keep track of arrests and convictions, and the state prison agency to keep track of when a sentence concluded. All this can be cumbersome, but there's a tried-and-true apparatus to keep track of things.

All this is thrown out the window when you start considering legal fines. Even as someone who deals with this on a near-daily basis, I can't even begin to wrap my head around what all the fines are or who they go to. Some fines are ordered as restitution that goes directly to the victim, but some other victim fines instead go to a state-run victim compensation fund. Some fines are for DNA collection or HIV testing, and those go to the local health department. Some courts even impose a "public defense recoupment" as a way to reimburse someone's court-appointed attorney. Et cetera, as this list doesn't even begin to cover the possibilities.

The district court opinion gives examples of exactly this on Pg 10-11:

An example is a flat $225 assessment in every felony case, $200 of which is used to fund the clerk’s office and $25 of which is remitted to the Florida Department of Revenue for deposit in the state’s general revenue fund. Another example is a flat $3 assessment in every case that is remitted to the Department of Revenue for further distribution in specified percentages for, among other things, a domestic-violence program and a law-enforcement training fund.

Restitution is ordered in a minority of cases and is payable to a victim in the amount of loss as determined by the court. Restitution is sometimes awarded jointly and severally against participants in the same crime, even when they are charged in different cases. Most restitution orders require payment directly to the victim, but some orders provide for payment through the Clerk of Court or Department of Corrections, who charge a fee before payment of the remainder to the victim. Over time, the fee has sometimes been a percentage, sometimes a flat amount.

The opinion also highlights multiple cases of felons trying their hardest to answer the very basic question of “how much do I owe?” and utterly failing. An example from Pg 18:

Mr. Wrench was convicted of felonies under two case numbers on December 15, 2008. The State introduced copies of the judgments, but it is unclear whether the copies are complete. The criminal judgments, or at least the portion in the record, do not show any financial obligations. But on February 2, 2009, a civil judgment was entered under the first case number for $1,874 in “financial obligations”—no further description was provided—that, according to the civil judgment, had been ordered as part of the sentence. Similarly, on March 15, 2011, more than two years later, a civil judgment was entered under the second case number for $601 in unspecified “financial obligations” that, again according to the civil judgment, had been ordered as part of the sentence. It is unclear what amount, if any, the State asserts Mr. Wrench must pay on these convictions to be eligible to vote.

I am not aware of any state that managed to successfully keep track of every possible court-ordered fine [Edit 10/28/22: Florida is not the only state that requires paying all LFOs before voter restoration, so it’s likely other states have figured something out]. Sometimes the entities who the debt is owed to just don't give a shit, sometimes the debt get repackaged and sold to some random private debt collector, sometimes the fines just sit in a court clerk's drawers, and sometimes a computer system upgrade just erases them.

When outstanding debt is so easily chopped up and distributed, even if someone decides to pay it there remains the nagging question of who to pay. Florida suggested a confusing “first-dollar method” of accounting and the court addressed it on page 57:

Recall [hypothetical scenario where a judgment] required payment of $300; the county imposed, and the felon paid, a $25 fee to set up a payment plan; and the felon paid $100 to a collection agency, which kept $40 and remitted $60 to the county. This left an actual balance of $240, calculated as $300 - $60. Now, though, the State says the individual needs to pay only $175 to vote, calculated as $300 - $25 - $100. The State treats the $25 fee that the felon paid to set up a payment plan not as having been paid on that fee but as having been paid on the original $300 obligation. And the State treats the entire $100 paid to the collection agency as having been paid on the original $300 obligation, even though $40 of that amount never made it to the county, was not credited on the $300 obligation, and is not even reflected in the county’s records.

I personally think Amendment 4 was rather clear in its intent, but the Republican Legislature apparently was extremely reluctant to let convicted felons regain the right to vote (as you can expect, felons are disproportionally black, who in turn are disproportionally democrats) and their gambit was to latch on to the "complete all terms" language in the amendment as a way to create a stumbling block to voting right restoration. The Florida supreme court agreed with this argument, and ruled that "all terms" must include any unpaid fines, and the Legislature codified this requirement into law.

They did this fully aware just how much of a headache it would be to actually investigate whether everyone convicted of a felony actually paid every single one of the court-ordered fines. State officials have admitted this multiple times, and yet they remain the people best positioned to actually come up with an answer. It's obviously faulty, but what do you expect local officials to do instead?

The confusion here was entirely an unforced error. They were willing to create an explicitly chaotic system for the sole purpose of prioritizing the goal of ensuring felons remain as disenfranchised as possible. You can be the judge on whether this is a worthwhile trade-off.