In Louisiana, Some Court Officials Get Paid to Evict

Latoria George’s home was in bad shape. The apartment in Baton Rouge, where she’d lived for four years, had no heat and no smoke detectors. The mold in her bedroom had gotten so bad she’d started sleeping on the couch. When her stove caught fire, she paid out of pocket to replace it, just like she’d paid for other repairs that her landlord refused to cover. That put George, who works two jobs, behind on rent. Her landlord wanted to kick her out. He’d already summoned her to eviction proceedings four times.

George worried she wouldn’t get a fair hearing over the eviction, because her landlord had chosen to file it with Justice of the Peace Steven Sanders in Baton Rouge, a city that sees about a quarter of the evictions in the state. Sanders had already evicted three of George’s neighbors. And if Sanders ruled in favor of the landlord again—as he almost always does, often within just a few minutes—the money George had scraped together to pay court costs would go not to the state’s coffers, but into Sanders’ pocket. 

That’s because George and her neighbors had undergone eviction proceedings not before a sworn judge, but before a justice of the peace—a far more informal venue, with very different rules. In addition to overseeing most evictions in the state, Louisiana’s nearly 400 justices of the peace can perform marriage ceremonies and settle small-claims disputes. They are elected, and don’t need to be lawyers or even receive legal training to qualify. 

Other states have similar officials, but Louisiana is the only state where justices of the peace can pad their own salaries with eviction fees—a rule that critics warn incentivizes them to rule in favor of landlords and grant evictions

This was how Sanders collected the vast majority of his take-home salary, which, in 2023, came to nearly $255,000, more than even federal circuit court judges. 

George is now the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit the Southern Poverty Law Center and National Housing Law Project filed in February, alleging that Louisiana’s system for funding eviction courts entices justices of the peace to order evictions—both to collect the resulting fees, and to prompt landlords to bring more evictions before their court—and violates due process and equal protection rights of Louisiana’s poorest tenants.

“These courts end up being eviction mills,” says Hannah Adams, a senior attorney with National Housing Law Project and co-counsel on the complaint. “These courts operate in a total vacuum, where they have almost zero oversight. They can basically do whatever they want, with basically no consequences.”

The suit specifically names as a defendant Justice Steven Sanders because of his high volume of eviction cases and high income. Sanders eventually recused himself from George’s case, but by his own estimates, he hears upwards of 300 eviction cases per month, which make up about 90 percent of his total case load. His salary from the state is only about $5,000, while the vast majority of his actual take-home pay comes from court fees. Sanders typically grants most of the eviction petitions he receives.(Sanders did not respond to requests for comment for this article, and has previously declined to speak to other media while the case is pending.)

“It’s just a really staggering amount of money that he’s able to take home at the end of the day,” said Anjana Joshi, a senior attorney with SPLC and co-counsel on the case.

But the suit also takes aim at the court system itself, alleging a serious conflict of interest for Louisiana’s justices of the peace. The state allows these fees to fund not just their salaries but also their own expenses—telephone bills, office supplies, and even storage. In 2023, Sanders’ court collected $629,000 in fees; after drawing from it to pay his salary of more than a quarter million dollars, he disbursed $147,000 to his chief deputy constable, spent $2,400 on storage, and another $4,800 on telephone expenses.

The justices of the peace can charge up to $180 in fees if they issue a judgment of eviction against a single defendant. They collect a bit more if they’re evicting families, since they can charge for multiple defendants. 

Justices of the peace don’t have assigned courtrooms, and so they typically hold hearings in offices or even more informal venues. Adams has attended hearings at a kitchen table, at a cell phone shop, and even at an old jail that had been turned into a museum—it can be “like the Wild West,” said Adams. “Literally these laws have not been updated since the 1800s.” And although these roles are elected, they receive little attention from voters relative to the power they hold. In a special election in St. Charles Parish near New Orleans in March, a new justice of the peace was elected with the support of less than two percent of registered voters. 

These local officials can be very difficult to reach: They often have no official website, and some don’t use email at all. There is no standardized way to find their contact information or hours. Their courts don’t observe the rules of evidence, and even if a justice of the peace makes a mistake, tenants have no functional right to appeal.

The suit alleges that this last element, especially, violates tenants’ rights to equal protection.

To contest an eviction, tenants cannot appeal to a higher court, but instead must request a “de novo” trial, essentially paying the costs for a new trial before an actual judge in district court. First, to stop the eviction, they need to get a signature from a district court judge within 24 hours. “But the judge might be on vacation, or might not be on the bench,” says Adams. “You can’t get that signature, and then the justice of the peace just goes ahead and kicks you out. So it’s a really challenging process to get that new trial.”

Adams recalls a particularly hard case representing a client getting evicted in St. Bernard Parish in front of a justice of the peace who she thinks made legal errors. “The tenant did not get a fair shot in front of the justice of the peace, and we didn’t have an opportunity to fairly raise his defenses,” she says, before the justice granted an eviction. Adams ran to the district court to try to get the eviction stayed. But it was a Friday, and judges were already heading home for the weekend. She couldn’t find a judge who would sign the order to stay the eviction. The tenant was put out of their home.

And justices of the peace do make errors—at times startling ones, says Chris Kerrigan, an attorney with Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, a nonprofit that provides legal services for low-income people.

Kerrigan recalls once calling a justice of the peace court to file a form that would waive court costs for an indigent client with less than $5 in her checking account. He was told “that they don’t do [fee waiver] applications because they’re a ‘for-profit court,’” Kerrigan recalled, still laughing in disbelief at the memory. (A “for-profit court” is not a legal entity in the US.) 

But because “they’re incentivized in court by eviction filing fees,” says Kerrigan, “it can feel almost like the landlord is the customer of the justice of the peace.”

A review of dozens of financial disclosure statements by Bolts showed enormous discrepancies in how much justices of the peace across the state collected and spent through their office. In Caddo Parish, one justice collected over $108,000 in fees in 2023, while another justice in the same parish collected just $900. In Jefferson Parish, one justice collected more than $270,000 in fees and fines last year, while no other Jefferson Parish justice reported collecting more than $45,000. That’s a reflection of the number of evictions granted: One former justice who collected just $500 in a year told Bolts this was because his ward was very small and saw few evictions. 

In East Baton Rouge Parish, Justice of the Peace Larry Spencer collected $442,965 in 2023. Some justices listed healthcare as an expense. One justice included the $15 cost of her “JoP on-line prep course.” Other justices listed no expenses at all.

Justices making up to $200,000 only have to file sworn statements regarding their income and expenses with the state, which are not typically reviewed for accuracy, according to Judy Dettwiller of the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office. Other state entities, like municipalities or water utilities, can only use sworn statements for revenue up to $75,000; when revenue exceeds that number, they must file reports prepared by a certified public accountant.

Tasking justices of the peace with most eviction proceedings is not a system unique to Louisiana, and it wasn’t always the only state where justices of the peace pad their salaries with court fees. Mississippi also used to allow them to fund their salaries from fines and fees, but the federal Fifth Circuit appeals court rolled that back in 1981, declaring it a violation of due process, since it motivated judges to fill up their docket.

In other states where justices of the peace oversee eviction proceedings, people must still pay fees to the court or some local government office to help fund those operations, much like any other fine or administrative fee—a practice some states and counties are starting to reform in light of the extreme burden that court debt can have, especially on low-income people.

Arizona, Texas, and Michigan, for example, have all eliminated fines and fees for juvenile court, so as not to saddle young people with unwieldy debt. In one Michigan county, the new sheriff has enacted a policy of eliminating low-level traffic stops, in part to reduce the county’s reliance on traffic enforcement as a revenue generator. Oklahoma will stop imposing several legal fees this November, including ones for electronic monitoring, after a study showed it often costs the state more to collect on fee assessments than it brings in. Still, nationwide, states and localities collect tens of billions of dollars in fines and fees in civil and criminal courts. 

In Louisiana, the case against Sanders and the state’s system for funding eviction courts is just entering the discovery process, which is expected to take months. The suit asks a district court judge to declare the Louisiana statutes establishing the funding structure to be unconstitutional, in hopes that’ll force legislative reform.

But even if the suit succeeds in changing eviction court fees, those are just a small part of a much larger patchwork of predatory court fines and fees in Louisiana.

Louisiana’s district courts collect fees for a Judicial Expense Fund, which is meant to cover things like staff salaries and operational costs, but which judges have also used to pay for everything from BMW leases to rooms at the Ritz-Carlton. A federal court found this unconstitutional in 2019. The same year, a state commission was formed to address the issue, but it dissolved three years later without making any meaningful recommendations. Local judicial workers, like city marshals, have opposed reforming court fees, saying they’ll face irreparable budget shortfalls if the system were to change.

In the meantime, financially-motivated evictions continue to dole out real harm—and do so disproportionately.

Black women, like George, and Black children experience the highest eviction rates nationwide. The majority of evictions filed in New Orleans are against Black women.

When a justice orders one of these evictions, says Adams, a constable will be at the tenant’s door 24 hours later “to the minute, and if you’re not out, they will physically escort you out.”

One by one, organizers read off the names of the 70 people, ranging in age from 21 to 78, often with a quick note about their lives. A doting father to two daughters. An animal lover who rescued baby possums. A New Orleans native about to celebrate his birthday.

When eviction poses such dire consequences, and is carried out in such a biased venue, Louisiana tenants live with a constant sense of insecurity.

”A system like this can only contribute to our existing eviction crisis,” said Adams, “Because tenants who end up in these courts basically have already lost.”