Our client Natalie Jackson testified about what unpayable court debt cost her — testimony powerful enough that opposing witnesses had to acknowledge the current system's pitfalls.
Street Democracy submitted a comment letter to the Michigan Senate Committee on Civil Rights, Judiciary, and Public Safety in support of SB 1089, SB 1090, and SB 1091 — three bills that would replace courtroom-by-courtroom discretion over fines, fees, and costs with one statewide indigency standard and make the waiver mandatory once a person is found indigent.
SB 1089 (Sen. Chang) requires every trial court to use the same three-part indigency test and bars courts from imposing costs and fees on defendants who meet it. SB 1090 (Sen. Damoose) extends that test to probation supervision fees and delayed-sentence fees, so indigent defendants are not charged for the terms of their own sentence. SB 1091 (Sen. Cavanagh) extends the same protection to civil infractions under the Michigan Vehicle Code, so a traffic ticket cannot carry costs and assessments an indigent driver cannot pay.
What a person owes, and whether that debt is ever waived, currently depends less on the law than on which judge they stand in front of. A court can decline to actively punish nonpayment and call that mercy, but the license suspension underneath it doesn't go away on its own — it sits there, destroying whatever momentum a person is fighting to build. A New Jersey study found that 42% of drivers lost their job as a result of a court-ordered suspension, and 45% of those could never find another one.
Our client Natalie Jackson testified before the Committee about what those fees cost her. Her testimony was powerful enough that an organization that came to testify in the same hearing had to acknowledge the pitfalls of the current system. Watch her testimony.
We support the bills as real, substantial progress — but we asked the Committee not to treat them as a finish line, only a first step toward a Michigan justice system that addresses the root cause of an offense long before the court reaches punitively for a fine, a fee, or confinement.
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