In Louisiana, the judge who evicts you is paid by the case

A judge can be paid the same whoever wins and still have a reason to keep one side coming back. That is the problem the Guardian laid out on October 20, after nine months inside Louisiana's justice of the peace courts.

Louisiana's 390 justices are part-time and elected, and they're paid from the fees their own courts charge. Chuck Cusimano II made more than $400,000 last year, more than the chief justice of the United States. Landlords choose where to file, so the business can always go elsewhere, and one property company brought over 60 percent of Cusimano's cases. His court is also fast. In twelve months it ordered 3,276 evictions and ruled for tenants 141 times, mostly when the landlord didn't show up. On June 18, the morning after a tropical storm, he heard 86 cases in 36 minutes.

"I don't see a conflict at all," Cusimano told the Guardian. "It's fee based, and they pay upfront to us, irrespective of the outcome." He's right that nobody pays him for a verdict, and landlords are owed their rent, so plenty of evictions are just. Still, a fee can do damage without buying a single verdict, by rewarding speed and by reminding the judge who could take the business elsewhere. Lisa Foster, a retired judge, calls the system "blatantly unconstitutional," pointing to a 1927 Supreme Court case, Tumey v. Ohio.

Moses faced a crowded docket too. Near the start of Deuteronomy he remembers the wilderness, when Israel's quarrels piled up past what one man could hear, so he appointed captains over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. The verse at the top of this page is his charge to those new judges. It names both of Louisiana's dangers: rushing past the small, and fearing the people whose business pays you.

Marchana Watts was the small. She was an insurance analyst with five children, and she brought receipts showing eighteen months of $950 rent. In her complaint to the state judiciary commission, she says Justice Tracy Batieste ignored them. Then, Watts recalls, Batieste turned to the court fee itself and told the trailer park's manager to pay it. He handed over a folded bundle of cash with a hundred-dollar bill on top, and the justice "stuck it in her robe." Right after that, by her account, came the ruling: "You have 24 hours to move." Batieste told the commission some materials were missing, and she resigned last December after it found probable cause she had charged unlawful fees. Watts slept in her car for four weeks and prayed for strength each night in the back seat.

Centuries after Moses, the prophet Micah indicted Jerusalem's leaders for the blindness he had warned against:

Micah 3:11Her leaders judge for bribes, and her priests teach for a price, and her prophets of it tell fortunes for money: yet they lean on Yahweh, and say, "Isn't Yahweh in the midst of us? No disaster will come on us."

Louisiana's comfort is that the fee is legal, and a filing fee is no bribe. Micah's charge still reaches it. What he condemns is a judge whose own income rides on the case in front of him, and Louisiana has written that stake into law. Moses' word "alike" protects landlords too. A tenant who really is six months behind deserves a judge who won't wave her through out of pity, just as Watts deserved one who would read her receipts.

Moses met a flood of cases with more judges, and with the hard ones sent up to him. Louisiana pays its judges more for every case they take, and the cost falls on the people standing there with receipts nobody reads.