State panel says rising court fees are barrier to justice
Court fees in Illinois are rapidly increasing, threatening the viability of the court system as a means of resolving disputes.
That’s the conclusion of a state panel which is recommending sweeping changes to court fees in Illinois. The panel’s report, released in June, calls the current system “opaque and inconsistent,” calling on state lawmakers to reduce “skyrocketing” fees and standardize how courts apply them.
Last year, the Illinois Supreme Court organized a 15-member Statutory Court Fee Task Force to examine the rapidly rising cost of going to court in Illinois. Composed of retired and active judges, state lawmakers, county-level circuit clerks and lawyers in private practice, the panel concluded that Illinois’ byzantine system of court fees hinders access to justice by placing a financial burden on court patrons.
Illinois courts charge fees for civil, criminal, and traffic cases. The fees are on top of any fines a court may impose as punishment.
The report found that court fees are rising faster than inflation, threatening to make the court system inaccessible to some segments of society. In some large counties, the maximum filing fee in civil cases such as divorces or lawsuits has increased by 80 percent from $220 in 2000 to $358 in 2015. For some small claims cases, the report notes, filing fees may be higher than the amount of money at stake. There are additional fees imposed by state law, like a court security fee and a document storage fee, plus county-level fees that differ by location. In Sangamon County, all parties in civil cases pay a $10 law library fee in addition to several statewide mandatory fees.
In criminal and traffic cases, the fees tacked on to a person’s fine may be disproportionate to the offense and may even be higher than the fine itself. The report highlighted DUI convictions in DuPage County, where there were nine add-on fees in 1995. That increased to 27 fees in 2015. The cost increased, as well, from $300 to $2,175. Adjusted for inflation, that $300 in 1995 would have only been about $467 in 2015.
“This same kind of growth is happening in every county throughout the state,” the report warns.
Criminal cases also carry a base fee which the report says “essentially requires a criminal defendant to subsidize the prosecution’s costs in bringing the case against him or her.”
“We knew going into our work last year it would be important, but we came away from it with a new appreciation for just how far we must go to provide fairer, more transparent and more affordable justice in Illinois,” said Steven Pflaum, chairman of the task force and a partner at the Chicago law firm Neal, Gerber and Eisenberg.
The panel recommends collecting Illinois’ scattered laws on court fees into one place. Although the proposal wouldn’t create uniform fees in civil cases across the state – a task which the panel concluded “cannot realistically be achieved in the immediate future” – it would reduce variation between counties and make it easier to determine what fees apply to a case.
For low-income or indigent people, the panel suggests expanding the current rules on waiving court fees. People earning less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level would automatically have fees waived, with a sliding scale for people earning up to 200 percent of the poverty level.
The panel also called on the legislature to enact uniform fees for criminal and traffic cases, taking power to set local fees away from county boards and circuit clerks. In minor traffic cases, the panel recommends limiting the total of all fees imposed on a guilty party to $150.
Rep. Elaine Nekritz, D-Northbrook, served as a member of the task force. She says it’s sometimes tempting as a lawmaker to “add a fee here and there to benefit a good cause,” without thinking about the cumulative effect.
“I would ask the legislature and the (Supreme) Court to look … carefully at the problems we uncovered and our proposed solutions,” she said, “and work with us to root out the inequities in how justice is dispensed around the state.”
Contact Patrick Yeagle at [email protected].
