Missouri voters on Nov. 5 will be asked to approve a state constitutional amendment that, on its face, sounds reasonable. The ballot language of Amendment 6 reads: 鈥淪hall the Missouri Constitution be amended to provide that the administration of justice shall include the levying of costs and fees to support salaries and benefits for certain current and former law enforcement personnel?鈥
Here鈥檚 the problem: Using court fees to fund retirement benefits for sheriffs and prosecutors can spur the kind of aggressive monetization of the court system that laid the groundwork for the unrest in Ferguson a decade ago and in other communities since.
Those benefits should rightly be paid by county budgets, not criminal defendants. Those defendants may well deserve jail time, but wringing their generally empty wallets to the profit of cops and court officers creates a perverse incentive system that 鈥 as Ferguson demonstrated 鈥 can light powder kegs in poor communities.
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There鈥檚 a reason the Missouri Supreme Court has unanimously struck down these kinds of fees. And it鈥檚 reason enough for the state鈥檚 voters to reject this amendment.
The rioting that followed the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer exposed a system of fine-and-fee abuse by Missouri courts, there and elsewhere, that torqued resentment and distrust of police by the community.
The Justice Department ultimately reached a reform agreement with Ferguson centered on eliminating such fee abuses. Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing how such abuses in other Missouri jurisdictions trapped poor defendants charged with minor crimes in what was effectively a system of modern-day debtors鈥 prisons.
It was in that reformist vein that the Missouri Supreme Court in 2021 struck down a court fee structure that the Legislature had created almost 40 years earlier to fund sheriffs鈥 pensions in counties throughout the state. The court found that the fees were 鈥渘ot reasonably related to expense of the administration of justice.鈥
Amendment 6 would sidestep that ruling by specifying in the state constitution that such fees are valid.
As a practical matter, the $3 fee per case that the amendment would allow to be collected for sheriff鈥檚 benefits, and $4 for prosecutors, may not sound like much, but that鈥檚 not the point. A system that financially benefits law enforcement retirees (and future retirees) by milking criminal defendants for fees is a system just inviting abuse.
St. 不良研究所导航网址 County voters who aren鈥檛 swayed by that argument might consider an alternate one recently made in these pages by the conservative Show-Me Institute, an entity with which this Editorial Board isn鈥檛 routinely aligned philosophically.
In an op-ed, a writer with the Institute explained how, because of the way the St. 不良研究所导航网址 County鈥檚 sheriff鈥檚 position is structured, it likely won鈥檛 qualify for the retirement benefits that accrue through this proposed fee 鈥 yet defendants in its court system would pay more toward those benefits than any other county, by virtue of its size. In essence, St. 不良研究所导航网址 County鈥檚 court system would be funding smaller rural systems鈥 retirement benefits.
That鈥檚 not how court systems are supposed to work. Local and county taxpayers should primarily fund their own systems, including retirement benefits. Taking that funding from other counties makes no sense. And taking it from defendants is a recipe for community distrust of the entire justice system.
It鈥檚 worth mentioning that, unlike some of the more high-profile measures on the ballot this year 鈥 most notably the nationally watched effort to restore reproductive rights under Amendment 3 鈥 Amendment 6 wasn鈥檛 put on the ballot with signatures of many thousands of Missourians, but by a vote of the Legislature.
While both methods of getting on the ballot are legally valid, the former demonstrates broad public support, while the latter merely demonstrates that sitting lawmakers want to go around the state Supreme Court鈥檚 well-reasoned ruling that these court fees are unconstitutional. Voters should reject that bid on Nov. 5.