Being married to me is hard. My husband makes an off-hand comment about how the city must need money since the police are pulling people over left and right for speeding on the road he travels to work. What does he get in response? A lecture on the state’s uniform court system and the fines and forfeitures clause of our state constitution. Thankfully, he is a patient man. He took it so well that I thought I’d share the finer points of that discussion with you. We are not Ferguson. North Carolina rid itself more than fifty years ago of the policing and prosecutorial practices that have been blamed for corrupting law enforcement and municipal court in Ferguson, Missouri, namely, policing and adjudicating for profit. Unified court system. Before the 1960s, as my colleague Michael Crowell explains here, thousands of local courts scattered throughout North Carolina were presided over by judges who were paid by the fees they collected. That practice changed when the state constitution was amended to create a uniform statewide court system. Under that system, all judges and court employees are salaried; they do not depend on the collection of fees for payment. Article IV, Section 20 of the constitution requires that the legislature establish a uniform statewide schedule of fees and that the operating expenses of the judicial department be paid from State funds. Fines go to the public schools. The elimination of city policing for profit dates even further back. Article IX, Section 7, of the [...]
Faculty Coordinators
