From The Brennan Center for Justice:
On a spring afternoon in 2014, a husband and wife left a local community center in St. Louis County, Missouri, to return home to their seven children. Within seconds, they were stopped by a police squad car. When officers approached the vehicle, they went to the passenger’s side and asked the husband for his name, claiming that there had been a recent report about someone who matched his description. Despite his assurances that he was not the man in question, the husband was asked to step out of the car and was placed under arrest moments later. (He was, indeed, never charged with any of the wrongdoing that formed the pretext for the stop.) When his wife stepped out of the car in protest, she, too, was placed under arrest.
The couple was taken to a local jail, placed in filthy, overcrowded cells, and given bonds of $2,000 each. They would both remain in jail for a month, unable to post bail and not once appearing before a judge. While incarcerated, their children were uprooted from their home and taken into the care of multiple relatives. Eventually, exhausted and desperate, they both agreed to plead guilty to a series of municipal charges in exchange for their release. They would still be responsible, they were told, for paying nearly $2,000 each, this time as fines and fees for their supposed offenses.
I met this husband and wife more than a year later, in my very first month as a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney with ArchCity Defenders, a legal advocacy organization in St. Louis. When I met them, their memories from that harrowing month were still fresh. They had lost a full month of earnings for their household, placing them and their entire family under even more dire financial strain than they already had to bear as a large family with inconsistent sources of income. They were struggling to pay rent and utilities, care for their children, and find more stable employment. Continue reading >>>
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