‘LaPolitics’: Who should pay for Louisiana’s judicial system?

The Police Jury Association’s executive board recently adopted policy priorities that include a constitutional amendment to require the state government to pay for Louisiana’s entire judicial system. 

Guy Cormier, the association’s executive director, said in an interview that members aren’t actually pushing for an amendment, at least not yet. But they have started to study the judicial funding issue internally, looking for a solution to relieve the financial pressure the current system puts on local governments. 

“The nuclear option would probably be [an amendment], but we’re not ready to go there just yet,” he said.

The Legislature appropriates funding annually for the Louisiana Supreme Court and the five courts of appeal, along with the salaries and benefits for all state court judges. But local governments pay for the operations of district, parish and city courts. 

In 1991, lawmakers and voters passed a constitutional amendment to ban state government from imposing unfunded mandates on the locals. But the amendment was prospective only, so the patchwork judicial funding system that was in place was unaffected. 

“It’s getting harder and harder for us to do that with the cost of things going up so high,” Cormier said. “We want to look at the law in its present form and see where we can help these parishes stay afloat.”

He said local officials see funding the judicial system as primarily a state responsibility. The courts primarily are dealing with state laws, after all. 

State Supreme Court Chief Justice John Weimer agrees, and has long called for paying for the system as such. 

“We have a state judicial system that is funded on the backs of local government entities,” Weimer says. “I believe that the state should fund the state judiciary.” 

Some parishes simply have scarce resources. But even highly populated parishes with large economies have struggled to win approval for taxes to pay for criminal justice costs, perhaps most notably in St. Tammany, where voters have rejected six propositions since 2016. 

“When a parish lacks the financial resources to provide competent [staff] and the necessary tools, then we end up with a system that could potentially have justice delivered differently in one area as opposed to the next,” Weimer says. 

When he was in the Legislature, Tanner Magee was a leading voice calling for moving toward a unified court system in Louisiana. He says the current system with its disparate funding streams is “antiquated,” though the people involved in many cases don’t want to give up control. 

The impetus for the Commission on Justice System Funding that Magee chaired was to move away from a reliance on fines and fees. Beyond the fact that relying on fines is unpredictable and inefficient, the costs can pile up on often poor defendants, potentially trapping them in a cycle of debt and incarceration.

There’s also the inherent conflict of interest in a judge assessing fines on a defendant to pay for their expenses, which has drawn scrutiny in the federal courts. 

Magee says a more streamlined system would be cheaper and easier to navigate for everyone involved. 

“I don’t know that we’ll ever get to a true 100% state-funded, unified system, but I think you can start putting pieces together and make it more unified than what it is right now,” he says. 

Rep. Jerome Zeringue, who chairs the Judicial Structure Task Force, says moving to a fully state-funded system is worth considering. But he also wants to look for efficiencies, and many judges have resisted efforts to gather information about where the needs are. 

For example, Louisiana has far more judges than some other states with similar populations, he says. 

“Let’s look at it and completely evaluate the judiciary and look at ways how we can better fund the judiciary,” he says.