Josh Marquis - Should $1B In Criminal Fines Be Forgiven?

Oregon is sitting on over $1 billion in unpaid criminal fines and fees—and now there’s a push to write much of it off. Supporters say the debt is uncollectible and burdens offenders, but critics argue it ignores victims and undermines accountability.

Josh Marquis, former VP of the National District Attorneys Association, joins the program to break down whether wiping the slate clean makes sense—or sends the wrong message.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome back to the program. It's First Amendment Friday. It's a pleasure to be with you live on the Radio Northwest Network and always glad to get to your calls. And we'll get to that in a moment at 866-Hey Lars. That's 866-439-5277. Send your emails to talk at LarsLarsen.com. I want to talk, though, about something that's going on. The Daily Dead Fish Rapper, in this case, the Oregonian or OregonLive.com, because the physical paper doesn't really exist anymore, they have published something. And here's what the argument is. They say we've got criminals who owe over a billion dollars in unpaid fines and fees because of the crimes they committed. And you'd expect to say, well, let's go out and collect those monies. No, instead, the fish wrapper is arguing that the psychological pressure of owing all that money, all those criminals out there who owe a fine here and a fine there and compensation and everything else, that this is putting so much psychic pressure on the criminals that they're having a difficult time with their lives. They're feeling very verquempt, or whatever it is that they're saying. So I thought I'd ask our friend Josh Marquis about that. Assistant to the district attorney of Lynn County. So he's carefully on his lunch hour, off the property, outside the courthouse. He's done all the things to make sure he doesn't get his boss in trouble. Josh, what should we make of this argument from the loons at the fish wrapper that somehow the psychic pressure of owing fines and fees because you committed crimes against people is making it difficult for these people to recover?

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Well, it's what's even more outrageous to me is once upon a time the Oregonian was a real newspaper. And this is just further evidence that it's not. This is actually not even an Oregonian reporter. It's some outfit uh that is a uh some sort of you know online paper that does advocacy. Uh in any event, uh they publish this so-called report, very, very glossy, and um, and it basically says, oh, there's a billion dollars offered, and and we just can't do this because people just keep getting in trouble. Well, let's let's know a couple of things. One, as the report says, judges are free to just waive these and most of the time do. And so most of the time, we're not talking about fines, we're talking about restitution. Restitution means what the judge hands down in a courtroom after someone's A, convicted of a crime, and B, had their own lawyer object to why they can't pay or shouldn't pay, and it's actually reimbursing victims who have a measurable loss, i.e., their car was trashed, or they had thousands of dollars of hospital bills or other things as the direct result of a crime. We're not generally talking about fines that go to the state of Oregon. And in fact, one of the many things this quote report doesn't talk about is that in many cases, victims' uh services provided throughout the state by either DAs or counties are funded almost entirely by what are called fines and assessments. And if the judges don't assess them, the money doesn't exist. But what's more outrageous about this is it it's a so-called study, but it it it it basically talks about uh what the Germans do, which I have a hard time understanding, or what happened in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Now, for those of you who might have forgotten, uh that was Hands up, don't shoot Michael Brown, who assaulted a cop twice and got shot to death for his trouble, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Well, he was yes, he was he was a thug who had just robbed a place and he attacked a Ferguson police officer. And even though the Obama administration really wanted to prosecute, even they had to concede after a Federal Justice Department investigation that the officer was justified. So that was nonsense. And then what's even more amazing in this study, and I actually read it, uh, it's about ten actually the the executive summary is ten pages, the whole thing is like 70, is it's all anecdotal, Lars. They don't they they they don't ever quote a single judge, a single DA, or even a single defendant by name. In other words, there's no way to assess the credibility or truthfulness of anything in it. And the terrifying part is I'll bet you the legislature uses this next session to even further make it difficult to collect fees.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

I'm talking to Josh Marquis, who's the former DA in Cladsub County, now working as uh, you know, second ban. I think he's shining the shoes of all the lawyers in Lynn County right now. So he's take so he's they're gonna have him. What are the fascinating can you say what fascinating cases they put you on yet? Is it parking tickets?

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Yeah, I've got a couple murder cases, and then I do I also have you know uh bread and butter assaults and uh everything down to drunk driving. I'm I'm doing you know the stuff that actually I missed uh prosecuting when I was an elected official for 25 years.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

He's the full service prosecutor, and and he gets to do this, and and it sounds like uh Martini, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Doug Martini, great guy, uh right-thinking American, and this is Lynn County, which is not like much of Oregon, or at least Western Oregon.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

No, but he's gonna get his money's worth out of you. He's gonna say, if I'm paying Josh to do this, we're gonna have him do some murders and stuff like that. So tell me that. That makes sense. Yeah. I mean that's what I've been doing for those years. Do you think there's any case to be made that somehow uh finding because to me, the least a criminal should expect to do is pay some money to compensate the victim. Even if the victim said, I had to go to the emergency room, I was there for 15 hours, I had a copay to pay, I missed work the next day. At the very least, victims of crimes ought to get some of that back, shouldn't they? Do they routinely get it back, or do they routinely get denied by this system that this report condemns?

SPEAKER_00 5:50

They routinely get denied by the system. I I've worked in that system for over 40 years. It's been very, very difficult to hammer money out. We pay hundreds of millions of dollars for court-appointed attorneys. We recover less than one percent of that. And we're not talking about from people who were not found guilty. We're talking about people who were found guilty of felonies, and in many cases, we're talking about restitution, not fines. So we're not talking about money that's that is just arbitrarily fined against someone who is, say, convicted of a, let's say, run-of-the-mill case, maybe not murder or you know, rape, but uh but theft. But the irony is that some of the worst uh uh injustices happen when just ordinary working victims um uh are deprived of their property and they don't have say uh uh insurance to cover uh, for example, comprehensive if you don't have comprehensive on your car, if some junkie comes in and steals it and and and and wrecks it, you're not gonna get compensated for the company.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

I mean, let's let's say you work in construction and you have even a few hundred dollars, usually it's a few thousand dollars worth of tools that are in your vehicle, and your vehicle disappears and the tools uh get pawned off, and all of a sudden you may be denied the ability to make a living. I think that criminal ought to be paying a lot of money to that victim.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Well, they're not. And and and what we try to do is is as prosecutors and some judges is to at least you know say, okay, well, you're probably not going to go to jail, or you're gonna go to jail for just a day or two, but you're at least gonna pay restitution. This advocates for abolishing all fines, all restitution, because of course, you know, the this is an over underserved population. They quote somebody from Medford saying, Oh, these people are overwhelmingly people of color. So as if that should be careful for not paying.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Does it mat and and by the way, Josh, when they say it makes it harder to pursue rehab, the fact that these people have to pay fines? I would think that if you had to pay fines every month, you said, Yeah, I gotta pay two hundred bucks a month to to compensate my victim, that doing that for a few years might actually be a better rehabilitation than all the uh group therapy in the world. That's Josh Marquee. Back in a moment. It's First Amendment Friday.