Ferguson, Mo., Agrees to Pay $4.5 Million to Settle ‘Debtor’s Jail’ Lawsuit
The city of Ferguson, Missouri, has agreed to pay $4.5 million to settle a federal lawsuit accusing it of violating the constitutional rights of thousands of people who said they were jailed without due process because they could not pay the fines.
The lawsuit was filed in 2015 amid protests over the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white Ferguson police officer. It accused the city of jailing the plaintiffs under “deplorable” conditions simply because they could not pay debts for traffic tickets or other minor violations.
“They were threatened, abused and languished in jail,” plaintiffs’ attorneys argued in the lawsuit, noting that these conditions lasted until families could raise enough money for bail, or until prison officials decided to release them.
On Tuesday, ArchCity Defenders, the St. Louis nonprofit that filed the suit, said in a message rack that checks would be sent to more than 15,000 people incarcerated by the city between February 8, 2010 and December 30, 2022, and that the amount would depend on the number of hours each had spent in jail.
David Musgrave, Ferguson’s assistant city manager, said in an email Thursday that the city would not comment “while the settlement agreement is pending final approval by the Court.”
Mr Musgrave asked further questions to the city’s lawyers, one of whom, Apollo Carey, declined to comment. Another lawyer did not immediately respond to an email and telephone call. Neither the mayor nor Ferguson police could be reached for comment Thursday evening.
The lawsuit was one of several in recent years accusing municipalities in the St. Louis area of wrongfully imprisoning impoverished people. Last year, the city of Maplewood, Missouri agreed to pay $3.25 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the city of imprisoning at least 7,000 people in a so-called debtor’s prison system. The city of Jennings, another suburb in St. Louis County, paid $4.75 million in 2016 to settle a similar lawsuit.
ArchCity Defenders has reached “some settlement terms” in seven such cases, Blake Strode, the organization’s executive director, said in an interview. In the meantime, he added, the kinds of practices that landed people who couldn’t pay small fines in jail had declined significantly.
“It’s a really powerful demonstration of what it can mean when people fight back,” Mr Strode said. “When combined with other forms of advocacy and organizing and public pressure,” he added, “litigation can be a tool that can really bring injustice into the spotlight.”
In a 2015 interview with The New York Times, Allison Nelson, one of nine lead prosecutors in the Ferguson trial, described receiving her first traffic ticket at age 18 and then being held for days in lockups that she described as filthy and smelly. from mold, sewage and sweat.
“It was traumatizing to deal with this situation because of the way we were treated,” Ms. Nelson, 32, said in a statement released by ArchCity Defenders on Thursday. “The cells were disgusting, we were fed honey buns and there was human feces all over the walls. It didn’t matter to them.”
She said she wishes the case could have been resolved before her mother, Tonya DeBerry, who was also a prosecutor, died in 2018.
“All I can say is, ‘finally,’” she said.