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Battering The Poor: How Georgia’S Mandatory Family Violence Classes Deny Indigent Defendants Equal Protection Of The Law, Whitney Scherck
Battering The Poor: How Georgia’S Mandatory Family Violence Classes Deny Indigent Defendants Equal Protection Of The Law, Whitney Scherck
Whitney Scherck
Thirty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court in Bearden v. Georgia held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prevents a court from incarcerating an individual for failure to pay a fine unless it first inquires into their reasons for failing to do so and determines that the defendant willfully failed to make bona fide efforts to pay. However, recently, a new kind of legal debt has emerged. As states’ budgets tighten, so-called user fees are becoming an increasingly common way for legislatures to toughen the criminal justice system without having to come up with funding for it. …