In April 2015, Ashley Sprague was making $2.13 an hour plus tips as a waitress at Waffle House when she was pulled over for speeding in a small city near her home outside Nashville. The speeding ticket, plus another citation for failure to have proof of insurance, totaled $477.50, a sum that might as well have been a million dollars. Over the course of the next 13 months, she was cited twice more for administrative infractions, including — she was surprised to discover — driving on a suspended license.
Tennessee is one of 43 states, plus the District of Columbia, that suspends driver's licenses for people with unpaid court debt, according a recent report by the Legal Aid Justice Center, a Virginia-based organization that filed a lawsuit there challenging the practice. Although Tennessee says it gives drivers 30 days notice before suspending a license, Sprague and her lawyers say she was not told about her suspension and the state does not notify people in every case. Only four states require a hearing beforehand to determine whether the failure to pay is willful or simply a reflection of poverty, the report found. Almost a million people in Virginia and 150,000 in Tennessee currently have their licenses suspended for failure to pay, according to documents filed in lawsuits there.
The lawsuits in Virginia and Tennessee are part of a nascent trend around the country: lawmakers are beginning to reconsider the practice, and lawsuits in at least five states are challenging it. They argue that suspending driver's licenses for unpaid court debt traps poor people in an unfair and counterproductive cycle: if they can’t drive, they can’t work; if they can’t work, they can’t pay; if they can’t pay, they can’t drive.
[For more on this story by BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL, go to https://www.themarshallproject...ut-that-could-change]
Photo: A motor vehicles office in Columbia, S.C. The state is one of 43, plus the District of Columbia, that suspends driver's licenses for people with unpaid court debt. BRUCE SMITH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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