On Thursday, an Augusta, Ga., judge issued the latest rebuke against a private probation firm that is holding poor individuals criminally responsible for their failure to pay fees. This time, Sentinel Offender Services had held open an arrest warrant on an individual whose probation term for reckless driving had expired two years earlier. When William Stephen Carter was pulled over for speeding, he was arrested and put in jail for allegedly owing court fines and probation fees. Carter says he already paid all his fees, but he could not get out of jail until he paid the $655 Sentinel said he owed.

The case is one of many challenging this perverse jailing of the poor after they fail to keep up with mounting fees on offenses like rolling through stop signs and public drunkenness.  In Georgia, a law passed in part through bribes and corruption that later landed a public official in jail authorizes every county to hire its own private probationers. Georgia is also the only state in which traffic violations are criminal infractions. The result is a dangerous system in which private probation firms are using every means they have to extract funds from low-level offenders, including jail time. NBC News explained the system in a 2012 report:

In most cases, the system works like this: A person is issued a summons for a relatively minor crime, such as speeding, driving with a suspended license or public intoxication. Upon conviction, those who can pay the fine at once usually are done with the Georgia justice system. But in Richmond County, where Census data show nearly a quarter of its population of about 200,000 live in poverty, and others, many cannot pay in full.

Those who can’t are put on private probation. For an additional monthly fee of between $25 and $45, they can pay the fine over the duration of their probation term.

Probationers may also find themselves responsible for additional costs, such as a one-time “start-up” fee of $15, a daily fee of $7 to $12 for electronic monitoring, a $25 photo fee required for DUI convictions, among others.

Adding to the cost, defendants in Georgia must pay $50 to the court to apply for a public defender, though the judge can waive the fee if a defendant is unable to pay.

Under Georgia law, an indigent person cannot be jailed for inability to pay a fine, unless the refusal is willful. But critics say neither courts nor probation companies make an effort to determine ability to pay. Instead, they say, companies routinely use the threat of jail against probationers for failing to pay not only court fines, but the private fees generated by what is known as “offender-funded supervision.”

Even though the lawsuits challenging this practice are pouring in, individuals are still fighting these battles one at a time, and they frequently don’t even have access to a free lawyer to defend them against minor infractions like traffic violations. Even those who do eventually win their case are often held in jail in the interim. In another lawsuit, a man living on monthly veterans benefits of $243 a month was fined $270 for public drunkenness and put on probation. The company charged an additional $15 per month and $39 a month for the privilege of paying monthly installations. Over the period of a year, that cost amounted to $700, and the man was ultimately jailed for failure to pay.

This criminal justice “debt” problem does not only affect individuals on private probation. But private probation services, like private prisons, make money off criminalizing conduct, and have an incentive to lobby for policies that land more people on probation and/or in jail. In fact, Georgia’s private probationers law passed after a private probation company paid the head of the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles $75,000 to lobby for the law. That official was eventually convicted of public corruption, but the law he backed remains on the books. Thanks in no small part to that law, probation firms can and do threaten their debtors with jail when they do not pay — a power debt collectors normally do not have. Moreover, the state House of Representatives is poised to take up a bill next year that would expand the power of private probationers to operate with limited court oversight.

Currently, Georgia law prohibits carrying a gun in a bar or “place of worship. A bill that passed the state house late last week, however, would change this, permitting firearms in both locations.

Guns in bars is a particularly volatile combination. Although high profile, premeditated mass killings such as the Sandy Hook massacre draw an unusual amount of attention in public perceptions of gun violence, the reality is that most murders are committed under very different circumstances. According to Washington State Sociology Professor Jennifer Schwartz, “[n]early half of all homicides, committed by men or women, were preceded by some sort of argument or fight, such as a conflict over money or property, anger over one partner cheating on another, severe punishment of a child or abuse of a partner, retaliation for an earlier dispute, or a drunken fight over an insult or other affront.” So keeping guns away from environments where many people are engaged in heavy drinking can ensure that bar brawls and alcohol-induced arguments do not escalate into a homicide. Schwartz estimates that “40% of male offenders were drinking alcohol at the time” that they committed a homicide offense, and that about one in three female offenders were also engaged in drinking.

Although the Supreme Court recognized an individual right to carry firearms in District of Columbia v. Heller, that opinion allows guns to be prohibited in “sensitive places.”

A city in Georgia is considering a proposal as soon as next month that requires every homeowner to own a gun. Citing limited police resources and slow response time, Nelson City Councilman Duane Cronic said armed residents would deter crime instead:

“When he’s not here we rely on county sheriffs–however it takes a while for them to get here,” said Nelson City Councilman Duane Cronic. [..]

“It’s a deterrent ordinance,” Cronic said. “It tells the potential intruder you better think twice.”

Another city, Kennesaw, Georgia, already has a mandatory gun ownership law, although it is not enforced. And outside of Georgia, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin sheriff recently urged residents to “get in the game” with a gun for emergencies, rather than call 911.

Cronic and others tend to argue that more guns mean less crime, based on scant evidence from two methodologicaly flawed studies. But academic consensus finds the opposite to be true: A survey by researchers at the Harvard University School of Public Health makes a strong case for the idea that more people die from gun homicides in areas with higher rates of gun ownership.

(HT: Buzzfeed)

The Seventeenth Amendment, which guarantees that voters will elect their own U.S. senators — rather than having those senators chosen for them by the state legislature — is strangely unpopular in Tea Party circles. Both Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) believe their own elections to the United States Senate should be unconstitutional. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) called empowering voters to elect senators a mistake, and even Justice Antonin Scalia lamented the “decline of so-called states’ rights throughout the rest of the 20th century” as a result of the Seventeenth Amendment.

Earlier this month, six Georgia state lawmakers, Reps. Dustin Hightower (R), Mike Dudgeon (R), Buzz Brockway (R), Josh Clark (R), Kevin Cooke (R) and Delvis Dutton (R) decided to get in on this action, introducing a resolution calling for the Seventeenth Amendment to be repealed:

[T]he United States Senate was designed to protect the rights and interests of the individual states, and the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment would help to prevent the many unfunded mandates and unconstitutional laws passed onto those states by the federal government . . . . NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF GEORGIA that the members of this body request the United States Congress to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Of course, in reality, state lawmakers themselves agreed to enact the Seventeenth Amendment in the first place because the previous system resulted in a kind of Citizens United on steroids. As David Gans explains, the previous system “led to rampant and blatant corruption, letting corporations and other moneyed interests effectively buy U.S. Senators, and tied state legislatures up in numerous, lengthy deadlocks over whom to send to Washington, leaving those bodies with far less time to devote to the job of enacting the laws their states needed for the welfare of the people.”

Warren Lee Hill

Hill’s execution could take place despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Atkins because of an potential loophole in that opinion. Although Atkins forbids executions of the intellectually disabled, it also left “to the State[s] the task of developing appropriate ways to enforce the constitutional restriction upon [their] execution of sentences.” Georgia essentially decided to “enforce the constitutional restriction” on the execution of intellectually disabled inmates by creating a standard that makes it nearly impossible for an inmate to prove that they are constitutionally ineligible for execution.

The Supreme Court could still intervene to prevent Georgia from flouting Atkins. If a court does not intervene soon, then Hill is scheduled to be executed at 7pm today.