Legal Limelight: Blake Strode, Executive Director of Arch City Defenders

Blake Strode first joined Arch City Defenders as a staff attorney and Skadden Fellow in 2015, around the same time the organization filed class-action lawsuits against seven St. Louis-area “debtors’ prisons.”

These debtors’ prisons use arrests and fines to disproportionately target Black and Brown community members and to generate revenue to fund their municipal court systems, according to ACD.

In the past year, Fant v. Ferguson and Baker v. Florissant have entered into preliminary settlements. In total, ACD’s seven debtors’ prison class action cases (filed between 2015 and 2018) have settled for a total of $20,201,000. Each case has impacted tens of thousands of people, according to the organization.

Strode, a Harvard graduate and St. Louis native, was instrumental in this litigation and was named executive director of the organization in 2018.

How do the five settled class action lawsuits impact the municipal court system in St. Louis and what should attorneys know about them?

It’s hard to look at the trajectory of municipal legal practices over the past decade and not see some pretty major impact at (that) level. And the things that we tend to focus on are municipal court revenues, municipal court tickets and warrants issued by local police departments. Across the board that we’ve seen in a 10 year period (…) just seismic drops in all of these places where we brought litigation and some municipalities that were nearby where we didn’t bring litigation but still were impacted by all of the reform efforts that were underway and by the cost benefit analysis that the litigation forced many municipal actors to take up. So, in some places, you see drops of 70, 80, 90 plus percent in terms of their municipal court revenues and the number of tickets issued every year. That’s a really meaningful difference for people on the ground, just going about their lives, driving to work, dropping their kids off, trying to trying to keep the lights on and keep a roof over their heads — that the kind of constant targeting of people and then fleecing people for money — that practice, which was really ubiquitous for years, we’ve seen at least diminish, I would say, not disappear, but diminish significantly in the past 11 or so years.

Where do the two pending class-action lawsuits stand now?

Both of those are just in the class administration process. We have reached settlements in both of those cases. But as you know, even once the settlement occurs, there’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of class notice and then either having people file claims or sending out rounds of checks. So, both of those are in various stages of that, in latter stages of that right now.

Arch City Defenders advocates for the consolidation of the city’s municipal courts, can you talk about what that might look like?

That was at the time in 2015 and still is now, for us a clear prescription for a structural change that would actually make a meaningful difference in how justice is administered in the St Louis region. We have still 84 or 85 municipal courts, we still have this patchwork of rules and procedures and different judges, and also this really sort of troubling overlap between private attorneys who are moonlighting as prosecutors in one place, city attorney in another place, municipal judge in another place and all of that makes for some really kind of warped incentives. And so our position has been and we restated it again in the white paper that we released this past summer, that that entire system really should be consolidated, restructured from the ground up into a single professional court that operates with one set of standards and procedures and doesn’t have the same revenue generation incentive that many of the municipal courts and tied to municipal police departments that they have as the courts can generate significant sums of money for those municipalities.

What do you believe is the most important takeaway from the debtors’ prison litigation?

One important takeaway is that those cases, for me, sort of symbolize what people are capable of when they fight back and when they sustain that fight over years. One of the cases you mentioned, Fant v. Ferguson, was one of the first two cases filed so we are more than 10 years past the time that that case was filed, and it took our clients, the plaintiffs in that case, sticking with those claims for all of that time and insisting on some measure of justice for themselves and other class members. And I find that really inspiring. And none of this is possible without people that suffered greatly stepping forward to take on that fight.

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