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Some good news: A Florida judge has announced that he will invalidate 21,000 arrest orders for people whose crime was being in debt. The Orlando Sentinel reports:
"Orange-Osceola Chief Judge Frederick Lauten announced Wednesday that he will quash more than 21,000 arrest orders for people who failed to appear at collections court, ending the long-standing practice of jailing the defendants when they are located.
[…] he said judges would no longer issue what's known as a "writ of bodily attachment" for people who don't appear at the debt-collection hearings and have missed their monthly payments."
Modern day debtors' prisons have gotten a lot of attention lately. The fact that they are finally ending in some places is a relief for millions of poor Americans who were unable to pay debts, then levied with fines, and finally illegally threatened and punished with jail time.
"The net that was cast by the use of these writs was a wide one, and today the clerk and I have concluded that at times that net was too wide," said the judge. "It resulted at times in low-values arrests of indigent defendants who had no means to pay."
This collections court was the only one in Florida who still issued these writs, so this effectively ends the practice across the state.
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