NEWSWORKS TONIGHT

Last year, the Philadelphia court system announced that it was aggressively pursuing about $1.5 billion in debts owed by hundreds of thousands of people. Now, legal advocates are saying that some of the folks being hounded don't owe any money.

Evelyn Piner is stuck in a Catch-22. Last year, she got a letter from the Philadelphia court system saying she owed $900 in fines for skipping a hearing in early 1990. But she says she was in city prison at that time. Piner, a feisty 53-year-old, looked for records to prove it, but found that all of the Prison System's documents prior to 1991 were destroyed due to water damage. According to her lawyer, a court administrator told Piner that her fines couldn't be waived completely unless she could document that she was incarcerated. But there is no conceivable way for her to do that.

"They [are] telling us to come to court, prove it. How can you prove it when you ain't got no records?" questions Piner.

According to legal advocates, Piner is just one of many people being inaccurately and unjustly saddled with large debts by the court.  Last year, court officials announced plans to aggressively go after folks like Piner. This was a big change: In 2009, The Inquirer revealed that the court had failed to pursue about $1 billion in forfeited bail. That total had accumulated over 30 years.

The debts piled up, in part, because the Clerk of Quarter Sessions -- which was charged with collecting the money at the time -- had shoddy records. That office was later abolished.

Now, the court is in the process of chasing down about 400,000 people for debts dating as far back as the 1970s. Advocates say as many as thousands of them could be wrong. Pamela Dembe, President Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, says it's only fair to collect debts from people who have been ducking the courts for years.

"They don't owe it to me. They don't owe it to the courts to go out and, you know, spend on race cars or something," said Dembe. "They owe it to the taxpayers." 

Bookkeeping faulted

But Sharon Dietrich, an attorney for Community Legal Services, said the court can't substantiate that many of those people actually owe money. Why? The same poor bookkeeping that led to the debt in the first place. 

"It's sort of reminiscent of the whole robo-signing mortgage thing where people are being charged with debt without there being adequate investigation that there really is a debt," said Dietrich.

Take Leon Thomas. The 61-year-old North Philly man found out last year that he owed more than $20,000 for allegedly failing to show up for court in September of 1991. His debts were wiped from the books months later, but only after he contacted Community Legal Services.  The group found federal prison records showing that Thomas was incarcerated at the time. 

There are more like him: Harrison Womack, a homeless man, was told he owes more than $55,000 in various court costs. A pro-bono lawyer was able to have that bill reduced by several thousand dollars after showing that Womack was charged twice for the same fines. But attorneys from Community Legal Services and the American Civil Liberties Union say happy endings like these are the exception. The ACLU's Mary Catherine Roper says fighting the charges is hard.

"This particular system is set up in a way that just gives no chance at all to the person without a lawyer and the person without funds," Roper said. "The scary thing is, that's almost everybody." 

Advocates want the court to do a better job of proving that people actually owe debts before charging them. They also want many of these debts waived -- perhaps everything before 2005.

Judge Dembe acknowledges that some records are flawed. "But the fact them some of them are erroneous doesn't mean that they're all erroneous, or that we should walk away from doing this." 

Dembe says the court has made several reforms at the behest of advocates, including being more lenient with people who can reasonably explain that they were incarcerated. But waiving large swaths of debts, she said, isn't going to happen.

It's Our Money is a joint project of the Philadelphia Daily News and WHYY funded by a grant from the William Penn Foundation.