Public servants are meant to serve the public good, as their title suggests.
They certainly don’t exist merely to flex muscle and exercise control over those who have little means to fight back, twisting the poor and depressed into submission. Unfortunately, and to our great national shame, there are many public officials who enjoy doing exactly that.
Case in point: Judge John Shirley, who resigned recently from the Pearl, Miss., Youth Court after questions were raised about his treatment of an African-American defendant who owed court-imposed fees.
The following press release, which comes from the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi, explains part of what got the judge into hot water [emphasis added]:
In August 2016, “Mother A,” an African-American resident of Jackson, was traveling through Pearl while looking for employment. She was a passenger in a friend’s car, and her child rode with them in a car seat. When the car was stopped for a minor traffic violation, it was discovered that both adults had outstanding warrants for routine misdemeanor offenses. Upon arresting the women, the officer contacted DHS claiming that the child was “abandoned” as a result of the women being detained. The baby’s grandmother arrived on the scene within minutes, yet the officer still insisted that the child be taken before Judge [John] Shirley at the Pearl Youth Court. Less than half an hour later, Judge Shirley awarded custody to the baby’s grandmother. An order was later entered prohibiting “Mother A” from having any contact with her baby until court fees were paid in full.
Just so we understand exactly what happened here, a police officer detained a mother over an unpaid misdemeanor, and then claimed the mother had abandoned her child. A judge then barred the mother from seeing her newborn child for 14 of its 18 months on earth – and all over unpaid court fees.
Justice indeed.
The upside to the story is that Judge Shirley has resigned and the Pearl Municipal Youth Court has been closed permanently. However, Mississippi’s problems appear to run much deeper than just one compassionless judge or police officer, according to the Washington Post’s Radley Balko, who was first to flag the Pearl story.
“Over the past few years, it has become clear that public officials across the state have been doing things to poor people that are almost too cruel to believe,” he wrote.
Balko then cited several corroborating headlines, including:
- Police roadblocks are rights-free zones in Madison County, Mississippi — For generations, poor, black residents of Canton, Mississippi have lived under siege from a heavy-handed sheriff’s department
- Lawsuit: Jackson runs what amounts to debtors’ prison
- A debtors’ prison in (Biloxi) Mississippi
- Inside Mississippi’s asset forfeiture extortion racket
- Bogus charge, 96 days in jail in Mississippi for a 34-year-old mother, and no justice
- Mississippi jails people for months with no charges
- Settlement will stop four Mississippi counties from jailing people indefinitely without a lawyer or because they can’t afford bail
It’s nice that Judge Shirley has resigned. Good riddance, we say. One cruel and petty government bureaucrat down, several more to go.
