“You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”

You might recognize these words from police TV dramas and movies. They’re oddly comforting. They conjure up a sense of fairness. They remind us that money — or lack of it — should never be linked to justice.

Yet, for decades, Nevada has routinely charged people who cannot afford a lawyer hundreds of dollars for using a court-appointed attorney, which most of us know as a public defender.

In Nevada there are more than 120,000 criminal cases filed a year, with the vast majority of defendants qualifying for public defenders. Before the implementation of SB120 on Oct. 1, there was nothing stopping courts from charging those defendants for this indigent defense.

This new law, sponsored by Sen. Melanie Scheible (D-Las Vegas), prohibits courts from charging public defender fees and bars them from charging fees to establish payment plans. This law will protect Nevada’s most vulnerable citizens from becoming trapped in the cycle of debt and poverty that is a major driver of crime in the first place. 

Nevada’s policies covering what courts charged for a public defender were unfair and wildly inconsistent. At the Fines and Fees Justice Center, we found that nearly half of the state’s courts reported charging public defender fees in 2023, and fewer than half offered free payment plans. 

Worse, whether a judge charged a fee was pretty much left to chance. In Clark County District Court, for example, some judges charged more than 75 percent of defendants public defender fees, while others imposed those same fees less than 5 percent of the time. In Sparks Municipal Court, one judge was found to be 23 times more likely to levy a fee than a colleague.

In 2022 the most comprehensive national study on public defender fees was conducted by the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, which found that Nevada did not publish data on these fees. To bring that information to light, the Fines and Fees Justice Center filed public records requests with each court and the Nevada Department of Indigent Defense Services and determined that the amount of money collected in public defender fees was often minimal and collection rates were low. 

Seven of the 11 counties that reported charging public defender fees collected less than $10,000 in 2023. The Clark County District Court collected less than $30,000 at a collection rate of 8.17 percent, while Washoe County District Court collected 42.16 percent of what it assessed the same year, hauling in about $170,000. 

With such low collection rates, it’s safe to assume that the administrative costs to collections outweigh any financial benefits. In fact, a recent study by the University of California, Berkeley School of Law suggests that in Washington, state and local governments lose money attempting to collect court fees. 

While these fees do little to fill budget gaps, they can be devastating for the indigent defendants forced to pay them. Since these fees are only charged to people who can’t afford them, most cases result in nonpayment, and Nevadans often end up with their debts sent to collections — ruining their credit and causing a host of harmful consequences for them and their families.

The impact of court debt on people moving through the justice system has been devastating. Our Fines and Fees Justice Center study in conjunction with the Wilson Center for Sciences and Justice at Duke Law found 1 in 3 Americans have been directly affected by fines and fees over the last decade, and that of those with court debt, 61 percent experienced at least one essential hardship in housing, food, employment, health, child care or transportation. 

The impact of these fines and fees on Nevada families is just as troubling. For people who can’t afford to immediately pay in full, simple traffic tickets or minor code violations can balloon in costs, often forcing lower-income residents onto payment plans. Worse yet, in many of our state courts, these payment plans often come at an additional charge.

Fortunately, SB120 eliminates fees for these payment plans, a major step in bringing some uniformity and fairness to Nevada’s disjointed judicial system. Our state’s reform joins a growing national movement to dismantle predatory fines and fees. Earlier this year, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed HB1460, a sweeping fee elimination package, while in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine signed HB29, a bill that eliminates certain debt-related driver’s license suspensions and waives the reinstatement fees. In August, New York became the sixth state to offer free phone calls for incarcerated people.

More work remains. For instance, Nevada still imposes supervision fees on people leaving prison, charging parolees at least $30 a month. While these fees do little to balance the budget of the Department of Public Safety, they can be devastating for a population 10 times more likely to face homelessness than the average person. 

The Fines and Fees Justice Center held an Aug. 9 listening session in Las Vegas, where many attendees told stories of being forced to choose between paying their rent or paying their parole supervision fees.

The same people are facing the loss of driving privileges. Nevada suspends driver’s licenses for failure to appear in court or for missing a payment on a traffic ticket. According to the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, from June through September, 1,956 people had licenses suspended for failure to appear and an additional 1,002 people had their licenses suspended for delinquent fines. 

That means nearly 3,000 drivers have lost their licenses — not for public safety reasons, but for lack of funds and lack of compliance with the courts. The remedy to getting a license back is often to pay the court what was previously owed plus a penalty and reinstatement fee — forcing people with suspended licenses to choose between driving to work illegally or allowing their debt to balloon. 

As Nevada heads into an uncertain economic future, it is more important than ever that we continue to prioritize criminal justice legislation that focuses on rehabilitation and public safety instead of revenue.

Funding our justice system on the backs of those who can least afford it isn’t working. The implementation of SB120 will move us in the right direction.  

Nick Shepack is the Nevada director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center.