City court judges are beholden to city councils, which hinder their ability to ensure due process rights, according to a new report from the Goldwater Institute. For too many Arizonans that is not news, but the finding might relieve their feelings of paranoia.
City Court: Money, Power and Politics Make It Tough to Beat the Rap by the Goldwater Institute’s Mark Flatten looks into the ways in which city courts in several states are influenced by political forces.
Municipal courts are also the biggest moneymakers in the Arizona judicial system. They raise almost half of all the money generated by the court system in Arizona, about $167 million in 2016. Yet they account for only about 13 percent of the cost of running the state’s courts.
Arizona law requires all cities to have municipal courts. There are 82 in Arizona, depending on how they are counted. Cities can contract with each other or with justice of the peace courts to provide judicial services if they are within the same county.
Municipal judges do not have to be lawyers in Arizona. Each city sets its own minimum qualifications.
City court judges have criminal jurisdiction over misdemeanor crimes and petty offenses committed within town limits. That includes misdemeanor traffic offenses such as driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI), reckless driving, and leaving the scene of an accident.
Municipal courts also have primary jurisdiction over violations of city ordinances, which are also frequently classified as criminal misdemeanors. Those can range from prostitution and obstructing a police officer to seemingly minor offenses such as having excessively tall weeds in your yard, littering, failing to return a library book, and violating city smoking ordinances, all of which are considered criminal infractions in some municipal codes across Arizona.
Last year, 11 people were booked into Maricopa County jail for violating Mesa’s smoking ordinance, a criminal offense under the city code, according to records from the sheriff’s office.
Spitting on the sidewalk is a criminal misdemeanor in Mesa, and last year that was among the charges one man faced when he was booked into jail after threatening police.In Peoria, two people were jailed for the crime of having weeds taller than six inches on their property. Others were jailed for having disabled vehicles parked on their property, also a criminal offense in Peoria.
According to the Goldwater Institute, in the state of Arizona, more than half of all cases are handled in city court, totaling more than 1 million cases every year. But unlike many other states, city court judges in the Grand Canyon State never have to face voters through elections; rather, the city councils appoint city court judges, retain them, and can fire them at any time if council members determine there is sufficient cause.
Furthermore, city courts can receive pressure—direct or indirect—from political office holders to raise more money to help meet revenue projections, which puts their judicial independence into question. In Arizona, almost half of all the money generated by the court system in the state comes from the city courts.
“The danger of political pressures skewing city court decisions is not just a hypothetical concern, nor just an Arizona concern,” explains Flatten. “After the shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation in Ferguson, Missouri, found that city officials pressured city judges to continually raise revenue, which they did through abusive and potentially illegal fees for minor infractions. Many of those tactics are standard practice in Arizona and other states.”
In Arizona, multiple task forces since the 1950s have recommended the elimination of municipal courts and taking away the power of city councils to appoint judges.
Along with this new investigative report, the Goldwater Institute is also releasing a set of policy recommendations to address problems in the city court system and better protect the rights of ordinary citizens. “It’s not the people involved who are bad—it’s the system that’s bad,” says Timothy Sandefur, vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute. “The city court system in states like Arizona impedes due process protections, and it disproportionately hurts people who are unable to pay steep fines. Fixing the system will require substantive change, like consolidating city courts into the county court system or making city court judges answerable to voters.”