The Executive Office of the Massachusetts Trial Courts denied a request for warrant information showing offenses and biographic information, making it impossible to break down the more than 390,000 outstanding warrants in Massachusetts by geography.
(Editor's Note: This is the second of a two-part series)
Brian Vincent woke up one morning to a police officer knocking on his door.
“They said, ‘We have a warrant for your arrest,’” said Vincent, who owns Vincent’s Country Store in Westminster.
The warrant was issued because Vincent failed to renew his dog license, a $25 fee.
He subsequently spent two days in court, first explaining he never checked the mailbox where the renewal notice was sent. The second day was spent showing a judge he’d renewed the license.
His dog, a boxer, died two weeks later.
“The last month of his life I was fighting for a license renewal,” Vincent said. “I understand I was in the wrong, but I didn’t think that if you don’t renew a dog license you could be heading to jail to await a judge like you robbed the 7-Eleven.”
Hundreds of thousands of Americans such as Vincent are a traffic stop away from being jailed for crimes as minor as not paying a traffic ticket or jaywalking, according to an investigation of arrest warrants by Wicked Local and The Columbus Dispatch.
Vincent, a business owner, had the means to pay for his dog’s license renewal plus a late fee. And he was lucky enough to stay out of jail because he was able to sort the issue out quickly. But the same can’t be said for many Americans.
Data collected by The Columbus Dispatch shows warrants in Ohio are thickest in the poorest neighborhoods and disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities.
The Executive Office of the Massachusetts Trial Courts denied a request for warrant information showing offenses and biographic information, making it impossible to break down the more than 390,000 outstanding warrants in Massachusetts by geography.
Nonetheless, through interviews with local and regional law enforcement, along with lawyers, judges and court officials, anecdotal evidence suggests the dynamic is also playing out in Massachusetts.
For people too poor to pay a ticket in the first place, an arrest and even a short jail stay can mean lost wages, a lost job, family turmoil and, in many places, cascading fines and fees.
In warrant data supplied by 27 states, and reports provided by others, including New Jersey, The Dispatch identified well over 1.2 million open arrest warrants for minor offenses. And there likely are many more, because some states did not include in their data the records of bench warrants issued by judges.
The Dispatch and GateHouse Media contacted officials in all 50 states but did not receive arrest-warrant data from the other 23 because they don't collect centralized warrant data or said it wasn't public information.
Issuing arrest warrants and jailing people for minor infractions is a practice that troubles advocates of justice-system reform and many who work in the system.
“It’s a very serious problem, and it’s happening more or less in every state in the country, every county and every city,” said Matt Menendez, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan public policy and law institute at New York University’s School of Law. “If this were impacting white, middle-class suburbs, you would see quicker results and reforms. The way warrants are issued in these cases has little or nothing to do with the risks they may pose.”
Clearing the decks
There have been prior efforts in Massachusetts to erase old, minor warrants from the books.
The attempts, however, have made little difference as thousands of new warrants pile up each year.
Massachusetts in 1996 switched from a disjointed, 350-year-old paper-based warrant system to an electronic-based system known as the Warrant Management System, or WMS. The state became the first in the nation to create a statewide, 24-hour real-time warrant database.
In the years after the WMS launched, however, the number of open warrants rapidly increased – arguably because the system of keeping track of them improved.
By 1999, the backlog of open warrants was growing by more than 5,000 per month. Today, there are still 23,224 unserved warrants from 1999 alone, according to data released on Aug. 20, 2018 by the Trial Court.
In response to the mounting problem, the Massachusetts Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight released a report in 1999 called, “Warranting Improvement: Reforming the Arrest Warrant Management System.”
The report’s authors, led by then-Sen. Cheryl A. Jacques, a Democrat, slammed the efficacy of the MWS, writing, “A database is only as good as the information in it and the way that the information is used.”
The following year, the number of open warrants accumulating each year started to lessen, decreasing to 9,117 in 2011.
Since then, however, not much attention has been given to the issue and the trend has reversed. The number of open warrants from 2014 totaled 11,469. In 2017, it totaled 19,315.
Police departments periodically put together warrant sweeps, dedicating a weekend to rounding up known offenders suspected of living in an area. But it’s challenging to keep up, especially considering how many new warrants are issued each day.
There are some special units, including the Massachusetts State Police Violent Fugitive Apprehension Section, which focus specifically on tracking down fugitives. But it’s unclear how much the state unit is contributing to the effort because state police did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
On two separate occasions, a state police spokeswoman requested by phone for a media inquiry to be emailed. The emails were ignored.
In addition to more recent cases, the backlog of open warrants in Massachusetts stretches back to the 1970s. More than 1,100 open warrants remain unserved from 1983 alone.
“It’s an incredible backlog in the courts. You wonder how many of these people have passed on,” said Robert W. Harnais, former Norfolk Special Sheriff. “Any system that has old cases that linger for years and years, all they do is clog things up.”
Harnais, former president of the Massachusetts Bar Association, says the backlog signals to him that defendants are not taking the court system seriously, echoing a concern raised two decades ago by state lawmakers.
“This high percentage of default warrants indicates widespread disrespect for the court system,” wrote authors of the 1999 report. “When somebody does not show up for a court date, the default warrant is issued, but the wanted person is not notified and often the warrant is never executed. The message sent to scofflaws is that there are no real consequences for disregarding the Commonwealth’s courts.”
Other ways
In the past, courts have worked with District Attorney Offices to clear old warrants, according to an Aug. 20, 2018 letter sent to Wicked Local by Court Administrator Jonathan S. Williams.
Otherwise, Williams wrote, there’s not much the court does.
“It’s not the court’s purview to reduce the number of outstanding warrants on its own,” he wrote. “When the court issues a warrant, it mails a notice to the defendant, in the hope that the defendant will come to court to address it.”
Wicked Local interviewed prosecutors, judges and law enforcement from across the state and nearly everyone echoed the same idea that the ever-mounting backlog of open warrants isn’t entirely the responsibility of their arm of justice.
Nearly everyone agreed it would take defendants, cops, courts and lawmakers -- along with an influx of capital -- to turn the trend around.
“If you want government to do something, you have to fund it,” said retired Boston Judge Raymond G. Dougan. “One can rail about poor public transportation, bad schools, or not enough drug rehabilitation centers. But if the public wants these matters to be addressed, it has to be willing to fund the action. That includes eliminating outstanding warrants.”
Prior to an interview with Wicked Local, Norfolk District Attorney Michael W. Morrissey floated the idea of some type of warrant-amnesty program to some of his colleagues.
The program, which he’s also entertained with some community members of his district, could theoretically look like a tax-amnesty program, which provides an incentive for offenders to come in and deal with outstanding issues.
The idea has been met with some interest, Morrissey said, although he underscored it could only work if it focused on minor offenses.
“There are some people out there with serious warrants, and they’re not getting amnesty,” he said.
The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles has also played a part in trying to address outstanding warrants, although that is changing.
Until 2018, an arrest or default warrant would automatically trigger a license suspension in Massachusetts. But the Criminal Justice Reform Act passed by the state Legislature last year, and signed into law by Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, removed that part of the law. Residents still cannot renew a license until the warrant is resolved.
Other states are also working toward solutions, especially for minor offenses.
New York City and Philadelphia made certain minor offenses off limits for arrest by designating misdeeds such as having an open container of alcohol, littering or creating loud noise from criminal to civil infractions that carry only a fine.
New York City made the switch in 2016, when it had 1.5 million open arrest warrants for minor crimes, about one for every six New Yorkers, according to the New York City Council’s website. Defendants can now challenge the ticket over the phone without having to go to court, do not end up with a criminal record, and an arrest warrant is never issued.
San Francisco also took on a punitive warrant system in 2016, launching its Financial Justice Project that year. Based in the city treasurer’s office, the project has worked with judges and other officials to adjust fines based on a person’s income and to eliminate the suspension of driver’s licenses.
“We try to adjust those fines on the front end so people have the ability to pay and it doesn’t rise to the level of a warrant," said Anne Stuhldreher, the program’s director.
“We heard the same thing from the community and courts: People can’t afford to pay, so they don’t show up for court because they are terrified they will lose their license or be jailed," Stuhldreher said. "We are all safer because of these efforts, and people appreciate it.”
In Westminster, Vincent’s experience makes him question the entire system.
“It makes you wonder: How much time and resources are wasted on this? Don’t police have bigger fish to fry than a guy like me?” he said.
Eli Sherman is an investigative and in-depth reporter at Wicked Local and GateHouse Media. Email him at esherman@wickedlocal.com, or follow him on Twitter @Eli_Sherman.