In December, after this page the Missouri Supreme Court to exercise its constitutionally granted power to supervise municipal courts, the president of the Missouri Bar wrote us to suggest we and other court reform advocates had it wrong.
“Changes to how these courts operate must be sought at the local level or in the Legislature,†. “The remedy you seek is simply not available through the Missouri Supreme Court.â€
The letter may have been a trial balloon sent out with the knowledge of at least some members of a skittish court; the court has been known to test the public winds on sensitive issues. Reforming municipal courts is not uniformly popular within the legal profession. A lot of lawyers have made a good living working in municipal courts, even though over the years, some of those courts have violated the civil rights of generations of St. Louisans.
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On Monday, the state’s highest court found its courage.
In a historic move that is to date the most important government response to the Ferguson protests, the Missouri Supreme Court from his job and transferred all Ferguson Municipal Court cases to the St. Louis County Circuit Court.
The court assigned Missouri Appeals Court Judge Roy Richter to handle the Ferguson cases and gave him the power “to implement needed reforms.â€
This is a very big deal.
This is the state’s court recognizing the power it has in , in Article V, Section 4, which reads, in part: “Supervisory authority over all courts is vested in the supreme court which may make appropriate delegations of this power.â€
Removing a ticket-fixing judge from a job in which the court was used as a fundraising tool by preying on poor people is an extremely appropriate delegation of the Supreme Court’s power.
But here’s the thing: As historic as the decision is, as much as Chief Justice Mary Russell must be praised for her leadership, it must be just the beginning.
Ferguson is one of 81 municipal courts in St. Louis County, many of which have the same problems, according to clear evidence outlined in the past few months by the , various St. Louis University law school professors, the Better Together group studying divided government in the region, and the Department of Justice. Now that the court recognizes its power, it must methodically use it to clean up the entire troubled municipal court system in St. Louis County. If it can fix the Ferguson court, it can fix all of them. And it should.
Here are a few good next steps.
On the same day the state’s high court acted, the city of Dellwood announced it would that Dellwood police officers had written before April 11, 2012, when Dellwood disbanded its police force and began contracting for service with the county police department. Any failure to appear warrants stemming from those tickets also were dismissed. Everyone gets a fresh start.
That will create a dent in the more than 400,000 such warrants that are outstanding in St. Louis County, but not a huge dent. Every municipality that doesn’t want to be painted with the stain of the Justice Department’s Ferguson report, every one that has used their police and courts as municipal ATM machines, every one that has regularly arrested black people for such violations as improper “manner of walking in roadway,†should do the same thing.
Clearly some of those citations were written for legitimate violations; not every traffic stop is bogus. But they’ve all been cast into doubt by the DOJ report. Wipe them all out. Start new as the Legislature and the Supreme Court work on dismantling the old municipal courts and replacing them with something — perhaps a full-time countywide court, or a transfer to circuit courts — that is more just, and actually focused on public safety.
As it happened, even as the Supreme Court cracked down in Ferguson, SLU law professor Brendan Roediger was in Jefferson City testifying before a Senate committee studying municipal court reform. He suggested a small change to state law that would accomplish for all 81 municipal courts in St. Louis County what the Supreme Court just did in Ferguson: Transfer all municipal cases to circuit court, where there are full-time professional judges without conflicts of interest, where there is no financial incentive to game the system, where people aren’t jailed because they can’t afford fines, where public defenders can be made available to those threatened with loss of liberty.
This would be justice. This would be the Missouri Supreme Court and the Missouri Legislature working together to fix a broken system.
“We must not sacrifice individual rights and society’s collective commitment to justice,†Justice Russell said in a statement announcing the court’s unprecedented action on Monday.
If justice comes first, Monday’s move by the court was simply the first step.
