Wednesday, December 12, 2001
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Wednesday, December 12, 2001 |
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City courts should not be just 'money makers' I applaud County Commissioner Peter Pfeifer's efforts to communicate with the public and was glad to read his letter to the editor in last week's Citizen. I wish more of our public officials would communicate directly with the public as he does, and so forthrightly. There is one statement in his letter that I find most troubling. Mr. Pfeifer states that "we need to understand that municipal courts are set up to be revenue generators, money makers, for the municipality." Elsewhere he writes that for some cities that's the main reason. If that truly is the purpose for which these courts are set up, then it is a purpose that is illegitimate and totally un-American. No one who truly understands the American justice system can allow this statement to stand unchallenged. Human experience has taught us that laws are often ineffective unless they are enforced. There are many people in our society who understand that the law is the foundation of a peaceful society and who gladly abide by the law. But there are people who don't understand that and whose lawless behavior threatens society. As a civilized nation, we have developed a law enforcement mechanism to handle these people. We have prosecutors to catch them and bring them to justice, and we have impartial and fair judges to adjudicate their guilt or innocence, and to pronounce sentence when they are found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt after they have been given a full opportunity to defend themselves. One form of punishment is a fine. It is a relatively mild punishment designed for lesser offenses. Things can escalate from there into probation (which can provide restrictions on what one can do), incarceration (for a short time, a long time, or somewhere in between), and death. A fine extracts money from the defendant, and that money has to go somewhere. Under current Georgia law, when a city judge imposes a fine, the money goes to the city. When a county judge imposes a fine, it goes to the county. (When a federal judge imposes a fine, it goes to the U.S. Treasury.) You don't need to be a genius to figure out that, so long as it gets to keep the fines, a city could make money out of its municipal court. Perhaps the solution to avoiding municipal greed and to restoring city courts to their only proper purpose of enforcing the law would be to divert their fine income to the county or the state. Until that solution is imposed, it is important to impress upon everyone that no facet of our justice system exists to make money. When city officials, including municipal court judges, take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Georgia, they undertake to support the Bill of Rights in each of these constitutions. Those who set up municipal courts "to be revenue generators, money makers, for the municipality" and who choose like-minded judges violate their solemn oath of office and deserve no respect from us. They certainly get none from me. I hope Commissioner Pfeifer was wrong when he wrote that municipal courts are set up to be money makers. A society with a true understanding of justice should reject so abhorrent an objective, not just shrug it off and accommodate it. If Mr. Pfeifer had written, "regretfully and as a total perversion of what both justice and our Constitution demand, municipal courts are set up to be revenue generators," I would have let this go. Frankly, it's our whining, do-nothing state legislators who are in the best position to improve our justice system, not our county commissioners. Just the same, everybody should recognize that greed and justice don't go together. Claude Y. Paquin Fayetteville cypaquin@msn.com
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