The first month of Donald Trump’s presidency has unleashed a wave of emotions and fears for the clients we serve at the East Bay Community Law Center (“EBCLC”).
From demonizing our non-citizen immigrant community through inhumane crackdowns to the announcement from Attorney General Sessions that police departments need not fear investigation for their routine mistreatment of communities of color, we watched with debilitating angst as Trump sought to deliver on every promise of inhumanity.
Throughout all of this, our great state of California has vowed to stand up, resist, and persist, to show and prove the depth of our morals and the strength of our resolve in the face of injustice. However, as we have seen in great parables of the past, sometimes the monster we seek to destroy outside of our walls merely distracts our attention from reckoning with the monster within.
The monster within our great state, the monster we continue both to feed and ignore, is the monster of indifference. This is the indifference that allows us to justify the criminalization of the poor. The indifference that allows us to fund our local government and our courts off of the plight of the poor merely because we lack the resolve to create funding streams that aren’t designed to thrive off of their misery. This is the indifference that would rather see an indigent person locked up for driving on a suspended license than muster the courage to enact policy that recognizes that driving shouldn’t be the privilege of the privileged. The time for indifference has ended. Now is the time for action - the time for honesty. The honesty to say that our system of ever inflating fines and fees for minor offenses is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme whereby we institutionalize the degradation of already economically fragile communities.
A heartbreaking snapshot of this monster in action is the case of Velia Dueñas. Ms. Dueñas is a homeless, Latina, young mother of two children who suffers from cerebral palsy. Her driver’s license had been suspended due to her inability to pay past court debt. When she later faced a misdemeanor conviction of driving with a suspended license, she was sentenced to thirty days in county jail and fined $300. She served an additional nine days in jail because she could not afford to pay the $300 fine. Just when Ms. Dueñas thought the monster had had its fill, Ms. Dueñas was assessed an additional $220 in court fees and restitution – fees that were not dismissed, despite her proven indigence. The reason? The judge said that he didn’t have the discretion to dismiss them.
This case and the issues it presents are currently being appealed by Public Counsel in Los Angeles.
In addition, an amicus brief drafted by EBCLC and supported by over twenty organizations was filed in support.
EBCLC also supports S.B. 185, introduced in January by State Senator Hertzberg, which would stop the practice automatic driver’s license suspension because of inability to pay fines and fees.
Our clients and the community we serve know all too well what it feels like to be hunted by the monster of indifference.
We cannot and will not allow our great state to continue to unleash this monster on our most vulnerable Californians.
It is true that there are tremendous threats emanating from the White House, but we have no moral ground to stand on if we don’t truly endeavor to banish forever the leviathan of injustice that has long resided in our own state.