A lawsuit challenging Black Hawk County Jail fees it alleges were collected illegally and spent on questionable, non-jail items is back on track after a federal appeals court ruled the plaintiffs have legal standing to challenge the policy.
Black Hawk County charges detainees fees for booking and room and board, collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. In a 2024 lawsuit, two former inmates, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa and nonprofit advocacy group Public Justice, sued the county, claiming its debt collection practices did not comply with state law.
They said the county used the fees for expenses ranging from a wellness app to cotton candy and ice cream machines available to county employees and their families.
A judge in Iowa federal court, where the suit was filed, dismissed it in December 2024 after finding the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. The plaintiffs appealed, and in a Wednesday, May 20, ruling, the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals found the case should continue.
Iowa law permits jails to charge fees for room and board, although many counties, including Polk and Johnson, do not. The lawsuit alleged that Black Hawk County, rather than using the civil reimbursement process defined by law, used legal documents known as confessions of judgment to enforce fee payment.
Upon leaving the jail, detainees were allegedly required to sign the documents, which state that they are giving up any right to contest collection efforts for fees that in some cases amounted to thousands of dollars.
In dismissing the lawsuit, Chief U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams wrote that, because the plaintiffs did not contest the fees and the county worked with them to set up payment plans, they could not show they’d been improperly deprived of their property. Williams wrote that Black Hawk County never filed the confessions of judgment signed by the two plaintiffs, instead letting them set up payment plans, and thus that they were not legally injured by the process.
But Judge Raymond Gruender, writing the decision for the appellate court, said even requiring detainees to sign confessions of judgment, and to know the county could file them at any time, was sufficiently coercive to support a lawsuit.
“(The plaintiffs) identify several challenges they could possibly raise under Iowa law, including that the jail fees are inaccurately calculated or excessive,” Gruender wrote. “(The plaintiffs) plausibly allege that the confession ofjudgment procedure gives them no adequate opportunity to assert those challenges.”
Jail fees called poor public policy
In a call with reporters after Wednesday’s ruling, ACLU attorney Rita Bettis Austen said many people coming out of the jail are indigent and would probably be “judgment-proof” if allowed to challenge the amount of their fees in civil court.
“The Black Hawk County sheriff has been getting people to sign away money that they simply do not have, and give up rights that they shouldn’t give up by asking them to sign these confessions of judgment,” she said.
While the plaintiffs also objected to many of the expenses for which Black Hawk County used the fees, Bettis Austen said that the same due process concerns would remain even if every penny was turned directly back into jail operations.
Charles Moore, an attorney with Public Justice, said charging such onerous fees and using such coercive debt-collection methods isn’t just legally suspect, but poor public policy.
“Charging this money in the first place is just a bad idea,” he said. “All data that we have and all the studies indicate that going to jail, going to prison, is an incredibly disruptive life event. People can lose their housing, lose their jobs, lose their family connections. It doesn’t set people up for success by demanding they make these payments with money they don’t have after they leave jail.”
Black Hawk County did not comment on the ruling.
William Morris covers courts for the Des Moines Register. He can be contacted at wrmorris2@registermedia.com or 715-573-8166.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Lawsuit over inmate fees at Black Hawk County Jail revived on appeal
Reporting by William Morris, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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