EVELYN PINER is stuck in a Catch-22.
Last year, she got a letter from the First Judicial District, Philadelphia's court system, saying she owed $900 in forfeited bail for skipping a court hearing in early 1990.
It was the first she'd heard of the debt, she says. Plus, it didn't make sense: She couldn't have owed money, she says, because she was in prison at the time of the hearing.
The feisty Piner, 53, looked for prison records to prove it - but found that all the prison system's documents prior to 1991 had been destroyed by water damage.
A court administrator told Piner that her fines couldn't be completely waived unless she could document that she was incarcerated, her lawyer says. But there is no way for her to do that. So she's stuck with hundreds of dollars in debt - a lot of money for someone on public assistance.
"They telling us to come to court, prove it," she says. "How can you prove it when you ain't got no records?"
Legal advocates say Piner is just one of many people being unjustly saddled with large debts by the court. The court's records are deeply flawed, they argue, but the court is proceeding with aggressive collections anyway.
Last year, court officials announced that they would go hard after debtors. This was a big shift: In 2009, the Inquirer revealed that the First Judicial District had failed to pursue $1 billion in forfeited bail for several years. More was owed in restitution and other court costs.
The debtors "owe it to the taxpayers," says Pamela Dembe, president judge of the Court of Common Pleas.
The debts had piled up, in part, because of shoddy records maintained by the Clerk of Quarter Sessions, which was charged with collecting the money back then. That office later was abolished amid controversy.
Now, the court is trying to chase down about 400,000 people who owe money from as far back as the 1970s.
Sharon Dietrich, a lawyer with Community Legal Services, says the court can't substantiate that many of those people actually owe money - because of the same poor bookkeeping that contributed to the uncollected debts in the first place. And although people with rap sheets might not seem deserving of sympathy, it's no excuse to hit them with large fines they don't owe.
"People are being charged with debt without there being adequate investigation that there really is a debt," she says.
American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Mary Catherine Roper adds that some court records are "simply wrong."
