As a civilized nation, we have

developed a law enforcement mechanism to handle these people. We have

prosecutors to catch them and bring them to justice, and we have impartial

and fair judges to adjudicate their guilt or innocence, and to pronounce

sentence when they are found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt after they

have been given a full opportunity to defend themselves.

One form of punishment is a

fine. It is a relatively mild punishment designed for lesser offenses.

Things can escalate from there into probation (which can provide restrictions

on what one can do), incarceration (for a short time, a long time, or

somewhere in between), and death.

A fine extracts money from

the defendant, and that money has to go somewhere. Under current Georgia

law, when a city judge imposes a fine, the money goes to the city. When

a county judge imposes a fine, it goes to the county. (When a federal

judge imposes a fine, it goes to the U.S. Treasury.)

You don't need to be a genius

to figure out that, so long as it gets to keep the fines, a city could

make money out of its municipal court. Perhaps the solution to avoiding

municipal greed and to restoring city courts to their only proper purpose

of enforcing the law would be to divert their fine income to the county

or the state. Until that solution is imposed, it is important to impress

upon everyone that no facet of our justice system exists to make money.

When city officials, including

municipal court judges, take an oath to support and defend the Constitution

of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Georgia, they

undertake to support the Bill of Rights in each of these constitutions.

Those who set up municipal courts "to be revenue generators, money

makers, for the municipality" and who choose like-minded judges violate

their solemn oath of office and deserve no respect from us. They certainly

get none from me.

I hope Commissioner Pfeifer

was wrong when he wrote that municipal courts are set up to be money makers.

A society with a true understanding of justice should reject so abhorrent

an objective, not just shrug it off and accommodate it.

If Mr. Pfeifer had written,

"regretfully and as a total perversion of what both justice and our

Constitution demand, municipal courts are set up to be revenue generators,"

I would have let this go. Frankly, it's our whining, do-nothing state

legislators who are in the best position to improve our justice system,

not our county commissioners. Just the same, everybody should recognize

that greed and justice don't go together.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayetteville

[email protected]

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