St. Louis Post Dispatch - February 2, 2014, by Jeffrey Kohler - While law professors and activists call for dramatic reforms for municipal courts in St. Louis County — including getting rid of them — more moderate changes are being pushed by an ad-hoc committee of municipal court officials.

The Municipal Court Improvement Committee, mostly judges, prosecutors and court officials, has introduced several proposed changes, according to a memo written by its chairman, Frank Vatterott, a defense attorney and veteran municipal court official who has been a judge in Overland since 1991.

But a rival group says the proposals do not go far enough and said the committee was “the foxes guarding the henhouse.”

The committee’s first change would be to encourage the courts to adopt uniform schedules for fines, Vatterott said. Several courts vary widely in the fines assessed for the same charge, which, he said, was unfair.

Next, the committee would push for a uniform schedule for bonds, although it still polling the courts to determine how significant the problem is.

Then the committee would make volunteer lawyers available to offer legal advice to municipal court defendants. The committee also would advocate for cities to establish municipal court fees to pay for public defenders.

The committee also proposes expanding the use of community service in lieu of fines for ordinance violations. The change could end the problem of poor people burdening their families with requests to help pay fines. The committee also proposes setting up a uniform system for allowing financially strapped defendants to pay fines in installments.

The changes would be voluntary, but in a memo to the county’s 79 municipal courts, Vatterott urged full participation. “Keep an open mind and consider the beauty of uniformity,” he wrote.

The next step would be getting courts to agree to the changes.

Vatterott said the courts should bring about the reforms, not activists, law professors or the state Supreme Court. “Our judges and our court personnel are the road warriors. We know best how to improve our courts.”

The committee’s ideas seem to have support from higher in the state courts.

In a letter to the committee, Maura B. McShane, presiding judge of the St. Louis County Circuit Court, which oversees the municipal courts, wrote that municipal court judges should support the committee “to bring integrity and fairness to the court.”

“I agree with your committee that our municipal courts should consider adopting changes voluntarily and as soon as possible wherever they need to be made to restore confidence in our courts,” she wrote.

Roy L. Richter, a judge with Missouri Court of Appeals Eastern District who serves as chairman of a committee that trains municipal judges, wrote in a letter to the committee that most municipal courts were operating properly and the media’s coverage of them has been inaccurate. But he urged court officials to make a good system better.

Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, a grass-roots group that has rallied for municipal court changes, on Monday questioned the wisdom of leaving reform to the lawyers and judges who benefit most from the money-making aspects of the system.

Jeff Ordower, executive director of the group, said while Vatterott’s committee has offered some ideas that they agree with — such as creating standard fines and allowing people who cannot pay to do community service — the proposals do not go far enough.

“It starts with the police and how they profile and then it ends with the justice system, where you have a cabal of lawyers and judges who benefit from that,” he said. “We need to change the status quo, shake it up and abolish it.”

Ordower’s group held a press conference outside the office of St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger, after releasing its own proposals in a five-page report: “Transforming St. Louis County’s Racist Municipal Courts.”

MORE has proposed eliminating “failure to appear” charges altogether, challenging the notion that “if you roll a stop sign you’re now a hardened criminal and should be facing jail time,” Ordower said.

The group is also calling on the courts to provide “real amnesty” by eliminating their backlog of fines on old traffic cases.

And jail time should not be an option for nonviolent municipal offenses, the group argued. MORE has also proposed that fines be proportionate to a person’s ability to pay.

While Vatterott’s committee wants to bring in volunteer lawyers to advise people on court days, MORE wants public defenders appointed routinely for indigent defendants, just like in state court.

Vatterott said he did not want to comment on the MORE report.

MORE pointed out that someone can be charged with failing to appear in one municipal court even if it was because they were already locked up on a charge from another municipal court.

“If I’m physically unable to appear because I’m in the custody of another court, then there should be some kind of dispensation for that — and there’s not, and that happens to many, many people,” said Derek Laney, an organizer with MORE who said it happened to him recently.

The group pointed out that it is impossible for a person who is arrested on a traffic warrant to take care of all their outstanding warrants from multiple municipalities without being shipped from one jail to the next.

MORE wants four regional courts to handle all of the county’s municipal cases, similar to the three courts that are now used for the county’s unincorporated regions.

The group held its press conference outside Stenger’s office to pressure him to pressure the courts.

Stenger responded with a statement: “During my campaign, I talked about the need for changes in the courts located in St. Louis County municipalities. Among other things, I would like to see these courts reduce fines and costs for indigent defendants. The courts also need to give some latitude regarding warrants issued for failure to appear. I will support any reasonable state legislation that addresses the current problems.”

Some drivers interviewed Monday were unconvinced municipal courts were anything but revenue generators. Nerissa Grigsby of Olivette said she recently mailed in a check for a speeding ticket in St. Ann. She said she hadn’t been speeding, and said she couldn’t reach court officials to discuss the case. Speaking about proposals to abolish municipal court, she said, “I totally agree with that.”

Sean Bailey, 35, is homeless with a 3-year-old daughter. He just got a part-time job in the restaurant business and is staying with a friend in south St. Louis. While trying to get his life back on track, municipal court fines are both far from his mind and an unavoidable reality. He said any reforms of the municipal courts would be welcome, but they’d have to be far-reaching — like the ones MORE is proposing — to make a difference.

Bailey had tickets in Ferguson and Florissant for which he accumulated fines totaling $1,950.

Bailey said he’s tried to show up to court and pay when he could but missed court when he couldn’t and that just resulted in more fines. More recently he tried to participate in an amnesty program in Florissant, but the court “wouldn’t budge” from a $100 fee to cancel his arrest warrant.

He couldn’t afford it, so his warrant remains.

“The reason these people aren’t paying like everybody else is simply because they don’t have it,” he said. “Nobody wants to go to jail. I think a fresh start would definitely help.”

Steve Giegerich of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

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