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| Sass is looking for the money |
Whenever a defendant gets convicted of a crime in
Wisconsin,
the judge will soak the defendant with seemingly innumerable fines, costs, fees, and
surcharges. There’s the
DNA
surcharge (even if the defendant has already given a
DNA
sample and has already paid the fee in a previous case), a Domestic Violence surcharge in many
cases, “victim-witness” fees, of course fines, and a plethora of other financial
hits. These things will appear on the
judgment of conviction in acronym form—no one even knows what the acronyms
stand for, and few people care because there’s not much we can do about it
anyway. In addition to fines, examples include
the imposition of the CCFP, CLD, VW,
DNAAS, GT,
SFOTH, PEN, and
DOMAB costs, fees, and surcharges!
What?! What the hell
are those things? But, more importantly,
where does all of that money go?
Are our criminal courts actually profit centers? Does that create a conflict of interest? I don’t know. But I did just
learn where the money goes when Louisiana’s
criminal courts impose such financial hits.
