What a good system for waiving fines and fees does
A person who owes court debt after a criminal case is due in court, where a judge decides whether they can afford to pay it. Here is what a good system does, in order, with a question for you at each step.
The affidavit is the sworn statement of income, expenses, benefits, assets, and circumstances that a judge decides this question from, and the motion is the legal argument filed alongside it. This list comes from a legal aid reentry practice that does this work: the affidavit form they use, the rubric they score a good affidavit against, their account of how these hearings actually go, and the checklists they wrote for the tools they want.
Answer the questions on the parts you know from your own practice. The Commons team reads every answer, fixes what the list gets wrong, and takes the harder questions to the cohort working on this area.
A summons arrives in the mail saying there is a hearing about ability to pay. Some people do not know that a waiver is possible at all. Many arrive frightened that going to court over unpaid debt is what gets a person arrested. Going to the hearing is what stops the court from issuing a warrant.
What a good system does
Say plainly that the hearing is about whether the person can pay, and that having the debt waived in full or in part is one of the things that can come out of it.
Say that going to the hearing is what stops a warrant, and that missing it is what causes one.
Say that a person may bring an advocate and that the court does not provide one.
Explain the process in the plain language somebody who has filled out benefit forms would recognize, rather than in the language of the statute.
Say when the hearing is and how much time there is to prepare.
What it must never do
Promise an outcome.
Leave somebody believing that showing up is what gets them arrested.
What do people believe about this hearing before they reach it?
Answer this
Part 2
Finding everything the person owes
A person’s debt is spread across counties and across separate cases, recorded in more than one online system. Several kinds of fee never appear as a line item on a docket at all. Somebody has to open each case, read the sentencing documents, and sometimes telephone an office to get an answer.
What a good system does
Search every case in the person’s name across the court record systems, and across counties rather than only the one that sent the summons.
Use the date of birth and other identifying details to tell apart people who share a name.
Read the sentencing documents as well as the docket summary, because supervision fees, prosecution costs, and similar charges are not listed separately.
Separate what the court can waive from what it cannot, and say which is which, since restitution owed to a victim cannot be waived.
Say plainly where the record is incomplete, including older cases whose payment history the system does not hold.
Show how it reached the total, including which sources it checked and what it added up.
What it must never do
Report a confident total from a record it could not fully read.
Pull in another person’s cases because the names match.
Leave a case out over a misspelled name without saying that it may have missed one.
Which fees in your courts can be waived, and which ones cannot?
Answer this
Part 3
Checking whether the law presumes the person cannot pay
The statute names circumstances in which a court starts from the position that the person cannot pay, which cover a total disability designation, certain need-based benefit programs, a housing subsidy, and income below a set share of the federal poverty level. Where one of those applies, the person does not have to argue the point from scratch, so it is worth checking before anything else.
What a good system does
Ask about the benefit programs and the disability designations that create a presumption before working through anything else.
Work out household size and income and compare them against the poverty level the statute names, since that one has no box on the form and has to be calculated.
Say which presumption applies and what proof would support it.
Leave child support income, need-based government assistance, and assets exempt from bankruptcy out of the income and asset calculation, because the statute excludes them.
Put the arithmetic somewhere the judge can check it.
What it must never do
Treat a presumption as the whole case, because how much gets waived still depends on the rest of the account.
What proof do your judges want to see for a presumption?
Answer this
Part 4
Filling in the affidavit with the person
The affidavit asks about benefits, household, income, expenses, assets, employment, education, health, and hardship. A thorough one takes the better part of an hour, and the people who do this work say those are the ones that succeed. Many people meet the form for the first time in a courthouse hallway, minutes before the hearing. They fill it in alone under that pressure, and they put down very little.
What a good system does
Ask in plain language, in the order the form asks, and keep the conversation short enough to finish in one sitting.
Take an answer that comes as a paragraph and sort it into the right fields, rather than asking for the same facts again one question at a time.
Ask for each fact once, and recognize where the form asks for the same thing twice so the person does not answer it twice.
Ask a follow-up when an answer is vague, because saying a person is employed and saying they work 10 hours a week at minimum wage read very differently to a judge.
Ask about the past as well as the present, including time in custody, long stretches without work, housing lost, and things sold or pawned to cover a bill.
Offer an example of a full answer when somebody does not know what is wanted.
Say in plain words why a detail matters to the decision.
Point out an answer that contradicts another one, such as reporting no work alongside recent wages.
What it must never do
Accept a one-word answer where the form is asking for an explanation.
Leave a field blank or marked as not applicable without recording why.
Push a person to relive a hardship for detail the decision does not turn on.
What do people leave out when they fill this in on their own?
Answer this
Part 5
Gathering the proof
Some courts take a person’s word that they receive a benefit, and others want to see the card or the award letter. A letter from a case manager or a clergy member can vouch for a situation nobody has paperwork for.
What a good system does
Say which document would support which claim, so the person collects what matters rather than everything.
Tell the person where to get a document they do not have.
Accept a photograph of a card or a letter, since that is what people are able to send.
List the attachments in the filing so the judge can see what was provided.
Say which claims have no document behind them, and show that on the page rather than leaving it unsaid.
What it must never do
Describe support from a document that was never attached.
Which attachments do your judges actually want to see?
Answer this
Part 6
Writing the hardship account and the motion
The affidavit is a financial breakdown and a persuasive document at the same time. The motion filed with it ties each part of the person’s situation to the factor in the statute that it answers. The filings that succeed tell a connected account of employment, housing, health, and family, with the figures inside that account.
What a good system does
Write in complete sentences and say how long something has been true, since a disability of 3 years’ standing reads differently from a disability with no date on it.
Connect each hardship to the statutory factor it answers.
Describe what a diagnosis means for a person day to day rather than naming it and stopping, because a judge cannot be assumed to know.
Keep the person’s own words where they are the clearest account of what happened.
Show the effort alongside the hardship, since an account that is only about effort reads as a person who can pay.
Put the poverty level arithmetic in a form the judge can follow.
Mark the places where a human reviewer has to decide something.
What it must never do
Invent a fact, a figure, or a date the person did not give.
Write a hardship the person did not describe.
Polish an account into something the person would not recognize or could not defend out loud.
What makes one of these persuasive in your court?
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Part 7
Deciding what goes in the public file
Medical records, mental health history, and disability detail help a judge decide, and a public court file is not where a person wants them. Teams file the motion and the exhibits on the record and deliver the sensitive material to the judge’s office instead, and in some places the law keeps the affidavit off a court-controlled website.
What a good system does
Separate what goes on the record from what reaches the judge privately, and say which is which before anything is sent.
Say which parts of the filing the law keeps off a public website.
Ask the person before anything sensitive goes into a public filing.
Keep the person’s information inside the organization’s own systems.
Say where any part of the file goes when a model reads it.
What it must never do
Put a medical or mental health detail into a public filing because it strengthens the argument.
What do you file under seal in these cases?
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Part 8
Preparing the argument for the hearing
In some courts the judge has read the filing beforehand, and the argument answers the questions the judge still has. In others the judge reads nothing until the advocate is standing in front of them, and the spoken argument carries the whole case. One advocate reports that where the filing is read in advance, the decision is usually made before anybody speaks.
What a good system does
Produce talking points that follow the filing, so the spoken version and the written version agree with each other.
Put the presumptions first, then the account of the hardship, then the arithmetic.
Give a short version and a long version, because some judges want the law gone through in detail and some cut an advocate off.
Prepare answers to what a judge asks first, starting with how much the person can pay each month.
Label the talking points with the court they were prepared for, since what one judge expects is different from the next county.
What it must never do
Coach a person into naming a monthly amount, since a number said out loud usually ends the hearing on a payment plan.
What does your judge ask you first?
Answer this
Part 9
Recording what the judge decided
A judge can waive all of the debt, waive part of it, waive none of it, set a payment plan, allow community service at an hourly credit, or give credit for staying in treatment. A judge can also decline to decide and set another date, which leaves the person coming back while nothing changes.
What a good system does
Record which outcome the judge reached, including a date set instead of a decision.
Tell the person what the outcome means in money and in dates, in plain language.
Say what happens next when the case was reset rather than decided.
Keep the work so a second appearance does not start from a blank form.
Record what the judge asked and what answer moved them, so the next case in that court is better prepared.
What it must never do
Count a payment plan as a successful outcome by default.
What do you do when a hearing ends without a decision?
Answer this
Part 10
Keeping the law and the local practice up to date
Every filing is built on the statutory factors and the presumptions, and what a court expects around them varies from one county to the next. Whether an affidavit alone can decide the question, whether a motion has to be on file, and whether the judge reads anything before the hearing are local answers that change from court to court and over time.
What a good system does
Hold the statutory factors and the presumptions as data, with the citation on each one.
Record what each court expects, and keep that record beside the statute rather than in somebody’s head.
Give one person the job of updating both when the law or the practice changes.
Say which court a piece of guidance came from and when it was last checked.
What it must never do
Present one county’s practice as the rule everywhere.
What does your court expect that the next county over does not?
Answer this
Part 11
Knowing whether it works
The measures are how much debt gets waived, how often a hearing ends in a decision, and whether the person understood what was happening to them. A rubric for scoring an affidavit already exists, written by the people who prepare them for these judges.
What a good system does
Score an affidavit the system produced against that rubric, and against one the legal team wrote by hand for the same person.
Measure the amount waived against what the person owed, case by case.
Measure how often a hearing ends in a decision rather than another date.
Check the totals it found against the court records, since a wrong total asks the judge for the wrong relief.
Count what the reviewing attorney changes, and use the pattern to fix the questions and the drafting.
Measure the preparation time against what this work takes by hand today.
Ask the person whether they understood what the hearing was for and what came out of it.
What would you need to see before you would file something this produced?
Answer this
What happens to what you write
Every note comes to the Commons team. We read it, correct what this list gets wrong, and publish a new version saying what changed. The questions that need practitioners to argue them out go to the cohort for this area, which writes the detailed specification from what comes back.
A note about one line is as useful as a note that adds a whole step. If what you know is which fees your court will and will not waive, write about that.
The two agendas for this workflow
You are reading this one
Step-by-step agenda
This is the first round, and it collects what the people who do this work say a tool has to do, in the order the work happens and in plain words. Read it to argue with it, to correct it, and to say what your jurisdiction needs.
Not written yet
Functional agenda
The cohort writes the detailed specification after this round, using the answers that come back from this page. It numbers every capability, states the standard each one has to meet, and sorts them by the scope of the system being built, so a builder can build against it and an evaluator can test against it.
