Judge resigns and youth court shut down after baby is taken from mother over unpaid court fees

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/28/judicial-kidnapping.html

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Does he also order injunctions against the consumption of Apple Pie?

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The fucked up thing is that the Republican zealots will hold him up as a hero for screwing over an African-American woman. SMH

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This kind of thing happens in courts all the time, although maybe not so much restricting mothers from their babies, but systematically locking up people of color until they can pay their court fees. Prisons are full of POCs who have not been convicted of anything, waiting for their court appearances, being kept from their lawyers, or held for many months or years to to pay court fees- many times for bogus charges they are often forced to plead lesser charges to.

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More on what you just said:

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I wonder how many of the Federal judges Trump is currently installing are from the same mold? They’ll be going off like forgotten land mines for the next 30 years. (Or quietly remaining in place and not quite managing to step over the boundaries of outrageous.)

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Well, you know what I think? Prisons are the new plantations.

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What’s a baby worth in court fees these days? I’m guessing about 300 bucks.

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Ah, surely this must be one of the people George W. Bush’s GOP was referring to when they coined the term “Activist Judges.”

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They don’t care if you’re guilty or innocent either. They just want another notch in their win column and they don’t care how many lives they ruin to get it. Half of our legal system should be dragged out into the street and shot.

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hardly new tho

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New York Times
MARKET PRICE OF SLAVES.
Published: August 22, 1863

– Slaves command a higher price in Kentucky, taking gold as the standard of value, than in any other of the Southern States. In Missouri they are sold at from forty dollars to four hundred, according to age, quality, and especially according to place. In Tennessee they cannot be said to be sold at all. In Maryland the negroes upon an estate were lately sold, and fetched an average price of $18 a head. In the farther States of the Southern Confederacy we frequently see reports of negro sales, and we occasionally see boasts from rebel newspapers as to the high prices the slaves bring, notwithstanding the war and the collapse of Southern industry. We notice in the Savannah Republican of the 5th, a report of a negro sale in that city, at which, we are told, high prices prevailed, and at which two girls of 18 years of age were sold for about $2,500 apiece, two matured boys for about the same price, a man of 45 for $1,850, and at woman of 23, with her child of 5, for $3,950. Twenty-five hundred dollars, then, may be taken as the standard price of first-class slaves in the Confederacy; but when it is remembered that this is in Confederate money, which is worth less than one-twelfth its face in gold, it will be seen that the real price, by this standard, is only about $200. In Kentucky, on the other hand, though there is but little buying or selling of slave stock going on, we understand that negroes are still held at from seven to twelve hundred dollars apiece.

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That’s not hyperbole in the slightest. They even specifically put in an exception in the 13th Amendment,

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

And, as a result, the Confederate States did their best to continue slavery under a new guise: Prison Labor in America: How Is It Legal? - The Atlantic

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What a fucking scumbag.

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America’s private sector has found a myriad of ways to make it expensive to be poor, so why shouldn’t the corporation-worshipping GOP get in on the act, too? Though it is interesting how their attitude toward the coercive power of the state changes when it comes to extracting money from poor PoCs.

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All he ever wanted was for his mother to say she loved him.

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Gorsuch and Sessions are from that mold. At least Sessions will likely be gone in 4 years.

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Under current law, all physically able inmates who are not a security risk or have a health exception are required to work, either for UNICOR or at some other prison job. Inmates earn from US$0.23 per hour up to a maximum of US$1.15 per hour, and all inmates with court-ordered financial obligations must use at least 50% of this UNICOR income to satisfy those debts

Slavery never stopped. It just changed form.

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