Use Of 'Cash Register Justice' By Financially-Strapped Municipality Leads To Arrest Over Unpaid Administrative Fee For Ex-Offender Long After Probation Term Ended

In Augusta, Georgia, NBC News reports:

• Kathleen Hucks was walking her dogs down the dirt road that leads out of Mim’s Rentals, a small trailer park in rural Augusta, Ga., when a police officer in a cruiser stopped her on Labor Day weekend.
  
  The officer asked the slight 57-year-old for identification and ran her name through the system. Nothing came up for Richmond County, where she lives. Then the officer ran one more search.
  “He says, ‘Ma'am I have to place you under arrest -- Columbia County’s got a hold on you for violation of probation,’” Hucks remembered.
  
  When her husband, 64-year-old James Hucks, saw his wife getting arrested even though she was no longer on probation, he thought there had been an error. “I said, ‘Look here, don’t y’all realize this case is dead?’”
  
  It was no mistake. A warrant for Hucks’ arrest had been issued in 2010, long after she completed a 24-month probation term arising from a 2006 conviction for drunken driving, possession of marijuana and driving with a suspended license. The reason: She hadn’t paid all the fees she owed to the for-profit company that supervised her probation.
  
  Even though the company’s ability to collect the debt had expired when her probation did, she was arrested. Hucks spent 20 days in jail before a judge freed her.
  
  Last week, Hucks filed suit against Sentinel Offender Services alleging that the Irvine, Calif.,-based company violated her civil rights. The outcome has implications beyond the case of one woman in Augusta because it claims that the Georgia law that allows for a for-profit company to act in a judicial capacity violates the due process clause of the state Constitution.
  
  Hucks’ case is the latest of several lawsuits filed in Georgia and elsewhere challenging private probation companies, which operate in about 20 states.

For more, see 'Cash register justice': Private probation services face legal counterattack.

Thanks to Deontos for the heads-up on the story.