An Arkansas cancer survivor is getting support to fight the courts after being jailed over bounced checks and unpaid debt.
The Huffington Post reports that in 2009, Lee Robertson was undergoing his first chemotherapy treatments when he started to have money problems.
He was unable to work because of pancreatic cancer, and over two weeks, Robertson wrote 11 check for amounts between $5 and $41. Although the checks only totaled about $200, he spent six years and seven arrests racking up more debts until he was sentenced to 90 days in jail for owing the courts $3,054.51.
Robertson tried to cut his imprisonment shorter by doing manual labor for the jail and was released August 15, but during his month-long stay, he claims to have been denied medications for his pancreatitis and high blood pressure.
On top of the fines for the money he owes the court, Robertson was also charged $35 per month by a private probation company called ProTrac, which made his financial burden greater.
This week, Robertson and several others in similar situations filed a lawsuit with the Arkansas Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law against Sherwood’s “Hot Check Division” of the municipal court.
The division has been compared to a modern-day “debtor’s prison,” and several civil rights groups are attacking it and other systems like it for violating constitutional rights.
“This is a broken court system that disregards due process rights at every turn,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law told HuffPost. Clarke also went on to say that the court pays “no attention” to due process.
“People are doomed for failure when they appear before the court, and most significantly trapped in this never-ending cycle of expanding debt,” she said. “With the resurgence of debtors’ prisons, we will continue to see people cycle in and our of jails and prisons across our country merely because of their inability to pay fines and fees tied to low-level, nonviolent offenses.”
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