In 2010, four residents of Harpersville, Alabama filed suit against several local officials and private prison company Judicial Corrections Services, alleging that they were illegally imprisoned in the Shelby County jail.

The charges were alarming: the four inmates claim low income defendants are routinely denied adequate counsel, are not advised on their constitutional rights and — most egregiously — are saddled with outrageously high fines and bond rates that the indigent have no way of paying.

On Wednesday, Shelby County Circuit Court Judge Hub Harrington handed down his decision, and tore into the defendants:

When viewed in a light most favorable to Defendants, their testimony concerning the City’s court system could reasonably be characterized as the operation of a debtors prison. The court notes that these generally fell into disfavor by the early 1800′s, though the practice appears to have remained common place in Harpersville. From a fair reading of the defendants’ testimony one night ascertain that a more apt description of the Harpersville Municipal Court practices is that of a judicially sanctioned extortion racket. Most distressing is that these abuses have been perpetrated by what is supposed to be a court of law. Disgraceful.

Judge Harrington goes on say that defendants appearing before the Harpersville Municipal Court are “subjected to repeated and ongoing violations of almost every safeguard afforded by the Unite[d] States Constitution, the laws of Alabama and the Rules of Criminal Procedure.”

At issue are the fines that JCS is authorized to impose if an individual convicted of a crime is not immediately able to pay the imposed fine. That person is placed on “probation,” and JCS begins to collect an additional $35 fee every day the individual does not pay in full his or her penalty. If the mounting debt is not paid, JCS forwards the case back to the court and the person is imprisoned for “probation violations” with no adjudication.

The ruling, which enjoined the court and JCS from further imprisoning probation violators and added a 30 day grace period for individuals to pay off a court-ordered penalty before JCS begins to charge their $35 fee, highlights yet another problem with states’ growing reliance on private companies to run corrections services.

In Florida, lawmakers who accepted thousands of dollars from private prison companies have passed legislation to expand private prison contracts, in Arizona Governor Jan Brewer accepted more than $60,000 from another private prison company in exchange for favorable legislation, and in Pennsylvania, a judge was sentenced to 28 years in prison after it was revealed he channeled hundreds of young people into privately run juvenile detention facilities in exchange for lofty payouts.

Yesterday, three doctors — represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Arizona, and the Center for Reproductive Rights — sued Arizona over the state’s 20-week abortion ban, calling it the most extreme ban in the nation.

Arizona’s law, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) in April, criminalizes almost all abortions after 20 weeks, even though, at 20 weeks, a fetus firmly pre-viability. Viability is generally agreed to occur in week 23 or 24. The only exception to the law is for immediate medical emergencies.

The ACLU argues that the law violates patients’ right to due process of law:

“Any number of things can happen during a pregnancy, and a woman has to be able to make the right decision for herself and her family,” said Talcott Camp, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. “Whether a woman decides to continue with a high-risk pregnancy or terminate it, the important thing is that women, families and physicians make these decisions – not politicians without any medical training.”

“No court has ever upheld such an extreme and dangerous abortion ban,” said Dan Pochoda, legal director of the ACLU of Arizona. “Instead of passing unconstitutional laws and blocking women’s access to critical health services, our legislators should be working to ensure that all women get the care they need to have healthy pregnancies and protect their families.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court set up the original framework for when states can intrude on a woman’s right to privacy. The court instituted the viability standard and ruled that state’s can ban abortion outright — with exceptions for a women’s life and health — only after viability. More recently, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey reaffirmed that standard, specifying viability as “the earliest point at which the State’s interest in fetal life is constitutionally adequate to justify a legislative ban on nontherapeutic abortions.” Arizona’s law clearly appears to violate that standard.

At least six other states have enacted 20-week bans: Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, and Oklahoma.

–Alex Brown

Warren Lee Hill was found by a court in 2002 to be intellectually disabled. He has scored below or close to the standard diagnostic threshold on tests of mental capability. Yet despite the Supreme Court’s ruling that executing people with limited cognitive capacity is unconstitutional, Hill will be executed next week unless a clemency board intervenes:

The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles was due to hear a clemency appeal on behalf of the prisoner, Warren Hill, on Friday and has the power to commute his death penalty to life without parole.

But should the five-member board decide to dismiss his plea, Hill will be executed by lethal injection at 7pm on Wednesday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson in a move that could pit Georgia against the clear will of the supreme court, the highest judicial panel in the nation.

“We are heading into a constitutional crisis,” Hill’s lawyer, Brian Kammer, said. “The supreme court banned executions of mentally retarded prisoners, but here we are in Georgia about to execute a man who is mentally retarded.“

Georgia can do this as a consequence of a quirk in the law. Georgia is the only state that requires defense attorneys to meet a “beyond a reasonable doubt” test to prove their client is disabled. Many other death penalty states use a less stringent “preponderance of the evidence” test, which was employed in the 2002 holding in Hill’s favor. However, according to Ken Levine, who teaches law at Emory University, Georgia’s standard places a near-impossible burden on defense attorneys:

“Beyond a reasonable doubt can never be met if you’re simply not sure which side is unequivocally telling the truth and which side is not,” said Levine, who has no connection to the Hill case. “The issue with Georgia setting its mental health standard as high as it’s set is that it requires such a high level of certainty that even scientists will rarely reach.”

Though the Supreme Court declined to hear Hill’s challenge to the Georgia law this year, his lawyers are trying one last appeal to the high court. This is not the only recent case in which someone with mental difficulties has been ill-treated by existing death penalty law. Perhaps that’s part of why the death penalty is becoming increasingly unpopular and uncommon.

HOUSTON, Texas — All Sabu Williams wanted to do on Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend was register voters.

One can imagine his surprise, then, when soon thereafter he received a letter from the state supervisor of elections threatening him with prosecution.

The letter claimed Williams, president of the Okaloosa County NAACP, had run afoul of Florida’s new voter suppression law, which was passed by the Republican-controlled legislature last year. The law cut the state’s early voting period in half and enacted a host of new requirements on voter registration groups, including that they must turn in completed forms within 48 hours exactly or face a fine. (The 48-hour rule has since been blocked by a federal judge.)

After the rule was first put in place, the NAACP was the only group in Okaloosa County that braved the new pitfalls and continued to register voters. However, when they registered voters over MLK weekend, they were charged with submitting the forms an hour late on Tuesday, despite the fact that they were unable to submit forms on Monday because it was a holiday.

“We’re here the very first day that you’re open at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and you’re saying that we’re an hour late?” Williams asked. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He soon received a letter from the state supervisor of elections. “We appreciate you going out and registering voters,” the letter read. “However, you were late for two of those and if you’re late anymore we’re going to turn this over to the Florida Department of Justice for prosecution.”

Watch highlights from his interview with ThinkProgress:

In a letter opposing the DISCLOSE Act of 2012 — a bill to allow citizens to know what corporations and wealthy donors are paying for the “independent expenditure” attack ads enabled by the 5-4 Citizens United ruling — the National Rifle Association (NRA) is warning Senators it will score the issue in its legislative scorecard for this Congress.

The NRA opposes the measure — arguing that its “provisions require organizations to turn membership and donor lists over to the government” and would unconstitutionally abridge the right of citizens “to speak and associate privately and anonymously.” The legislation would merely require groups that opt to run outside political ads to tell voters which donors funded those efforts. By setting up a separate bank account for independent political spending, a group like the NRA would be able to keep its membership list private and would need only disclose the large money donors paying for the group’s campaign ads. Far from being unconstitutional, this sort of disclosure was explicitly endorsed in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Citizens United majority opinion as “the less-restrictive alternative to more comprehensive speech regulations.”

In 2010, after supporters of the DISCLOSE Act agreed to exempt just the NRA from the bill, the group dropped its opposition. Now, without those special protections in the 2012 version, the group is taking no chances and is issuing a strong message to any Senator who might support political transparency. The NRA letter warns:

Due to the importance of the fundamental speech and associational rights of the National Rifle Association’s four million members, and considering the blatant attack on those rights that S. 3369 represents, we strongly oppose the DISCLOSE Act and will consider votes on this legislation in future candidate evaluations.

In other words, vulnerable Senators facing re-election may face secret-money attack ads should they back transparency for secret money attack ads.
Read more

Yesterday, the Justice Department announced an agreement by Wells Fargo to pay $175 million in order to settle claims that its independent brokers discriminated against black and Hispanic borrowers. The Wells Fargo settlement, if approved, will be the second largest residential fair-lending settlement in DOJ’s history.

DOJ found that Wells Fargo’s discriminatory lending practices resulted in African-American and Hispanic borrowers paying higher rates for loans solely because of the color of their skin. Minority borrowers were both steered into sub-prime loans and charged higher fees.

An investigation by the department’s civil rights division found that mortgage brokers working with Wells Fargo had charged higher fees and rates to more than 30,000 minority borrowers across the country than they had to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk, according to a complaint filed on Thursday along with the proposed settlement.

Wells Fargo brokers also steered more than 4,000 minority borrowers into costlier subprime mortgages when white borrowers with similar credit risk profiles had received regular loans, a Justice Department complaint found. The deal covers the subprime bubble years of 2004 to 2009.

Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, said the practices amounted to a “racial surtax,” adding: “All too frequently, Wells Fargo’s African-American and Latino borrowers had no idea they could have gotten a better deal — no idea that white borrowers with similar credit would pay less.”

Federal law requires only that a lending practice have a disparate effect on minority borrowers to be illegal. No discriminatory intent is necessary. Data analyzed by DOJ showed that African-American borrowers, who qualified for a regular loan, were 2.9 times more likely to be steered into a sub-prime loan than white borrowers with similar credit ratings. Similarly, Hispanic borrowers were 1.8 times more likely than their white-counterparts to be steered into a sub-prime loan.

$125 million of the settlement will go to individual borrowers, while the remaining $50 million will go to a program that assists people in Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, an area east of Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco/Oakland, Philadelphia, and Washington make down payments and home repairs. Those metropolitan areas were found to have particularly large numbers of individual discrimination victims. In addition to ending subprime lending in 2008, Wells Fargo annouced that it will no longer finance mortgages through independent brokers.

–Alex Brown