The traffic defense portion/aspect of the case is one of many reasons I have co-founded www.tickettitan.com . With proper representation at that level, this likely would never have escalated to 25 days in jail. That said rural Louisiana is not alone, Florida has many "speed trap cities" and in fact Waldo, Florida was so bad the Chief of police was suspended and then the entire police department was disbanded.

While Larvadain is referencing the Civil side, it is possible though difficult to obtain a pro bono lawyer, but I would have reasonable expectation most lawyers would accept this on contingency so there would be no out of pocket legal fees (hourly billable cases almost never make sense against the Gov. because of statutory caps on damages).

After losing she filed a civil lawsuit against the city and the officer, that is what took 6 years (including appeals) and that is where her monetary judgment came from. That was my point, it is confusing to non-lawyers, but generally they should be aware that defendant's do not win monetary judgments in traffic/criminal cases.

We've had this sort of problem in Missouri for some time. An interesting case was Macks Creek. [0] That link claims that the new law "limited" traffic ticket revenue. It didn't, actually, it just said that any revenue over the limit wouldn't stay with the municipality, but would be transferred to the local public school district. That got rid of Macks Creek! I suspect that if that law were expanded from traffic tickets to encompass court fees as well, it would do quite a bit to discourage the municipal courts in Ferguson and neighboring towns from victimizing the public as they have. Sadly, I also suspect that racism will prevent this obvious fix from ever being implemented, even though poor whites throughout the state are victimized in similar ways.

Maybe I'm overstating my case. From a governance perspective, St. Louis is kind of a mess anyway. The city-county split in 1877 [1] set the tone for the constant division and re-division the area has seen ever since. Every time some suburban nitwit gets pissed off about something, instead of trying to fix it directly through existing channels, he starts circulating a petition to set up some new barely-incorporated village or district or whatever. Since these entities are tiny, no one pays attention to them, so corruption is rampant. The long practice of locating limited-access highways so as to destroy less-favored neighborhoods is also pretty terrible.

[0] http://articles.latimes.com/1998/aug/02/news/mn-9388

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_County,_Missouri#Sep...

Holy crap I have tears in my eye as I type this. I guess we can improve.

[0] http://www.missourinet.com/2015/07/09/missouri-governor-sign... [1] http://www.missourinet.com/2015/08/31/new-municipal-court-la... [2] http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/municipa... [3] http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/muni-cou...

...young lawyers are less concerned with right and wrong than with chasing dollars.

then:

But matching people who need help to lawyers who have the time and institutional resources to take on these projects pro bono isn't easy...

Sounds like an excellent opportunity for a startup that is more concerned with right and wrong than with chasing dollars.

Any takers?

We have other vocabulary terms like "business" and "firm" (e.g. a law firm) and "nonprofit" and "charity"; I suspect that one of them would probably describe what you have in mind better.

:)

My buddy at the ACLU work with firms in the same type of arrangement.

The real problem is that a traffic stop isn't worth litigating.

There's a useful debate to be had over the usefulness of the many traffic regulations we're required to follow, but it's hard to have that debate here, when the entire event started with an illegal stop by an officer, and none of the rest would have happened without that.

Umm... Did you read the story? The original stop was illegal to begin with (that is, the cop was doing an illegal activity). Then the driver in question had all her papers in order (which she proved to the Mayor/Judge with documentation). But the fine was not just not dropped... they arrested her for not paying that unjust fine and threw her in prison for 25 days.

"When Godwin ran Parker’s license, the computer said it was suspended. He also said the registration card was expired."

That's the root problem, not the stop. There was, from the cops perspective, a real infraction here. So rather than debate the constitutionality of the stop, we should address the overly-complex system that resulted in this perceived infraction. If the computer was wrong, fix the machine. If the paperwork was actually expired, why are they still using paper? If we don't want cops issuing onerous citations for these things, change the laws so they cannot. We should not patch over bad laws by simply not enforcing them.

In many jurisdictions (ie mine) the entire stop would have been perfectly legal. We display out registration/insurance details on a license plates. So cops are perfectly justified in pulling cars over with expired registration/insurance/plates. They need not speculate. They cannot claim suspicion or the need to check paperwork when the plate shows validity. And and driver stepping into a car can see on the plate whether everything is correct. Every cop should be able to lookup a plate and check all the paperwork prior to pulling anyone over.

Lawyers have argued about the stop and the verdict has been reached and upheld on appeal. The rest of your arguments are just as ignorant of the actual case.

"There was, from the cops perspective, a real infraction here"

No there wasn't. The cop himself said so.

"officer hit his lights and pulled her over. The officer, David Godwin, later testified that he stopped the pickup “just to check and see” and to “find out what was going on.”

Once again, please read the OP and for the love of god, stop spewing ignorant opinion.

No, the root problem is that a police officer decided to unconstitutionally stop a car with 3 African Americans, because they had committed the crime of being African American.

I am curious about racial motivations and racial disparity though. It might be reasonable to think that the cop didn't pull over the people due to their race, as it was dark and I don't know if there was any way he could have seen that well. I wonder though if there is a way to find out a stops vs "run the license" ratio and if it indicates any racial biases. The run the license part should be gleanable from logs, but the number of stops part may be difficult - I don't know how those are recorded and how accurately they are recorded.

> Absent a traffic violation, so far as can be gleaned from this record, the only visible attribute of Parker and her passengers that might have distinguished them from other motorists turning on Methodist Parkway was they are all African Americans. There simply is no other distinguishing thing that can be surmised.

Based, of course, on the corrupt system created and sustained and protected by the old lawyers who can't see far enough past their own biases to realize that they are the same horrible people.

I mean, look at Woodsworth. There's no lobbyists, SuperPAC funding, Koch Brothers money. There's no excuses. The people could vote every wrongdoer in this story out of office tomorrow. They choose not to.