Kevin is a resident of a rural Alabama town. He and his fiancée are both disabled and rely on public benefits to survive. Kevin’s monthly disability check is about $700. The nearest business to them is a gas station that is about three miles away, so driving is a necessity to do almost anything. For the past seven years, Kevin’s license has been suspended because of unpaid tickets for not having car insurance. The only reason he wasn’t insured is because he couldn’t afford the monthly premium. After he was ticketed, he was forced into an even worse financial situation than before. Since his license was suspended, he is forced to rely on his partner, who has been experiencing some health issues, to drive him around.
Prior to getting the tickets, Kevin was already struggling to keep up with his payment plans related to prior criminal cases. One was concerning bad checks that he wrote years ago to buy food. He once wrote a check for 75 cents that bounced and he incurred $300 of court costs as a result. All the bad checks Kevin wrote were for less than $1000 worth of goods, but he owes more than $10,000 for court fines and fees. About 20 years ago, a public defender represented Kevin in court and in early 2019 when he renewed his state ID, Kevin found out that he owed about $2000 for the public defender services. Kevin pays $100 in total each month to the courts in Morgan, Lawrence, and Lauderdale counties. He tried to get his monthly payments lowered because it is a huge burden on him and his partner, but he did not succeed.