The Institute for Justice, a Conservative group that advocates for individuals affected by government overreach, is filing a federal lawsuit against the city of Doraville challenging its aggressive – and possibly illegal – use of tickets and fines to fund its annual budget.
According to IJ, in 2016 Doraville resident Hilda Brucker was summoned to city court for having cracks in her driveway that violated city code, despite not having been warned over the issue. A city judge issued a fine and six months of probation, turning Brucker into a convicted criminal over a cracked driveway.
Brucker and three other Doraville residents are plaintiffs in the case, hoping to end their city’s reliance on fines and tickets which the IJ claims “violates fundamental principles of due process.”
Yesterday IJ held a press conference announcing the suit, marking one of the first of its kind in Georgia. Doraville budgets between 17 and 30% of its annual budget to come from fees, fines, and forfeitures, which according to a 2015 city newsletter is “averaging nearly 15,000 cases and bringing in over $3 million annually.” Where other municipalities balance their books by raising taxes or cutting spending, IJ and its plaintiffs argue that Doraville does so by aggressively seeking out residents and passers-through alike to ticket and in some cases turn into criminals.
In fact, according to a 2017 study from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Doraville ranks 6th in the U.S. for cities with populations of 5,000 or more in terms of its traffic fines per capita.
While ticketing and fining is of course not illegal, the suit challenges that the city’s over-reliance on them may be. IJ claims that the over-aggressive ticketing process violates certain civil rights protections in the Constitution by encouraging law enforcement and city officials to find even the slightest of infractions in order to drum up money for the city.
