On July 21, 2005, fifteen named indigent plaintiffs, individually and on behalf of a putative class, filed this suit in in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and state law against the City of Gulfport, Mississippi.
The plaintiffs, ...
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On July 21, 2005, fifteen named indigent plaintiffs, individually and on behalf of a putative class, filed this suit in in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and state law against the City of Gulfport, Mississippi.
The plaintiffs, represented by the Southern Center for Human Rights and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund,
asked the court for class certification and injunctive relief, claiming that various city policies and practices related to the processing, fining, and jailing of indigent accused and convicted misdemeanor offenders violated the First, Sixth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and Mississippi state law. Specifically, the plaintiffs alleged that the following policies and practices were illegal: incarcerating indigent debtors for failure to pay court-imposed fines and fees; denying accused misdemeanants the right to counsel at hearings where the accused faced incarceration; and effectively denying indigent persons access to public court records by levying unreasonably high record retrieval fees.
On August 9, 2005, the plaintiffs filed an
amended complaint, adding three more named plaintiffs to the suit. Seven months later, the defendants filed a motion to quash and dismiss, arguing that the plaintiffs' service of the complaint was improper and insufficient to confer jurisdiction. The District Court (Judge Louis Guirola)
denied the motion on August 23, 2006.
On September 27, 2006, the District Court stayed the case for 120 days pending settlement discussions. Following these discussions, the parties jointly filed a stipulation of dismissal on January 31, 2007, and the court closed the case.
According to a February 1, 2007
article in Mississippi's Sun Herald newspaper, the plaintiffs agreed to the dismissal after the city: created a program allowing indigent debtors to perform community service in lieu of paying fines; granted temporary amnesty to debtors with overdue fines; implemented a new court document filing and retrieval system; and doubled its budget for public defenders.
Robert Lake - 11/10/2015
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