In February 2024, Ronald Pagliai was facing three low-level theft charges for stealing from retail stores in Des Moines, Iowa, and another charge for resisting arrest. He was offered a deal to plead guilty to two of the charges in exchange for dismissal of the other two. As part of the agreement, the judge also ordered Pagliai to pay court costs, including for the dismissed cases. The amounts: $160 for filing fees and around $330 for the cost of a public defender assigned to him because he could not afford a lawyer.
Pagliai challenged the bill, arguing through attorneys that there’s no provision in Iowa law that allows for sticking defendants with court costs when a case is dismissed. Despite this, the kind of bill that Pagliai received is common in the state; Iowa has charged millions of dollars to people with dismissed cases — including hefty attorney fees to those who can’t afford a lawyer — for more than a decade.
In early January, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down the practice, ruling that judges and prosecutors can no longer charge defendants court costs in dismissed cases. Public defense advocates cheered it as a step toward fixing the state’s troubled indigent defense system, as poor Iowans would now be off the hook for debt that could haunt them for decades.
But some prosecutors and defense lawyers are denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision, saying that it takes away a bargaining chip they commonly use during plea negotiations. Prosecutors, who say they routinely offer to drop charges in exchange for defendants paying court costs, are now advocating for a bill to undo the court’s ruling, which was introduced in the legislature in late January. A subcommittee of lawmakers has already recommended passage of the bill.
Alex Kornya, an attorney who submitted a court brief on Pagliai’s behalf for the ACLU of Iowa, said that negotiations over which charges to prosecute shouldn’t be based on how much someone pays in court and attorney fees, especially when that defendant has already been deemed indigent. “It is a sad world if what we really believe is that the only consideration if you’re bargaining is ‘How much money can we stick your client with?’ at the end of the case […] in order to have the privilege of having a case dismissed,” Kornya said.
Iowa’s Supreme Court decision follows action in other states to curb fees for court-appointed defenders. In 2022, Delaware passed legislation to end the fees. Michigan in 2023 prohibited billing juveniles for court costs, including public defenders. New Jersey, in that same year, got rid of fees for state public defenders. And last year, legislators there tried but failed to pass another bill to end a $200 public defender fee at the local level.
Tim Curry, policy and research director at the Fines and Fees Justice Center, which opposes court debt and filed a brief in Pagliai’s case, said court fees don’t make sense. “They don't make fiscal public policy sense by imposing these large fees on people the court already knows cannot pay them.”
Kornya has battled Iowa’s indigent defense fees for years in lawsuits accusing the state of violating the U.S. Constitution. Under Iowa law, the state can recoup the cost of a public defender or court-appointed lawyer from indigent defendants, even if they have shown they are too poor to afford an attorney. These fees make up a large portion of court costs for people who are already financially struggling; most people in the state’s criminal legal system with charges that could result in a month or more of incarceration are indigent. Between 2012 and 2022, the state charged low-income Iowans $151.2 million for their lawyers, according to court data The Marshall Project obtained through state public records requests.
In 2020, Kornya represented another client who was billed nearly $3,000 for her appointed lawyer to win a dismissal. He argued that poor Iowans are on the hook for more money when their case is dismissed than when they are convicted of a crime. Those who are convicted have legal recourse to challenge their fees; people with dismissals do not.
Iowa courts charge poor people $73 to $83 per hour for their court-appointed lawyer. The law specifically allows for such charges in cases where a defendant is either found guilty or is acquitted, but a provision allowing for bills in dismissed cases was wiped from the books in 2012. The absence of such language in the law was the basis for the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling last month.
A 2024 investigation by The Marshall Project, which was cited in Pagliai’s case, found that people living in Iowa’s 86 rural counties pay more for legal defense than people in the state’s 13 other counties with public defender offices. In rural counties, which rely on the services of private lawyers contracted for indigent defense, people must reimburse the court for the full cost of their appointed attorney — unless they submit a lengthy affidavit to convince a judge otherwise. According to The Marshall Project’s analysis of court data between 2012 and 2022, those who lived in a county with a public defender’s office were billed an average of $312 per case, while people who used court-appointed lawyers paid an average of $506.
Very little of that money is ever collected: As Kornya noted in his legal filing on behalf of Pagliai, the state recouped an average of just 2.3% of indigent defense costs between 2015 and 2021. People saddled with this debt can lose their driver’s licenses or have their wages or tax returns garnished if they do not pay. If they are on probation, a violation for nonpayment could land them in prison.
Aditi Goel, executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center, an organization that advocates for the right to counsel, said it’s common across the U.S. for deals for dismissals to hinge on the payment of court costs.
“The problem is you don't want to create a system where only people who have access to money get access to dismissed cases,” she said.
Indigent defendants may also be charged a slew of other fees when their case is dismissed, such as administrative costs, sheriff’s fees, or filing fees. Iowa law requires judges to determine whether someone has the ability to pay these court costs, but this mandate is often unevenly applied across each courtroom, The Marshall Project found. Goel stressed the importance of ending such inequities.
“It's completely valid and understandable that you want as many tools in the toolbox to try to find fair and just resolutions for criminal cases,” said Goel. “That's a reasonable thing for the court to want, for the prosecution to want, and for the defense attorney to want. Making sure that there is a robust ability-to-pay hearing in a statute can really help with meeting all those goals.”
Eric Tindal, an Iowa City defense lawyer who does contract work representing people who cannot afford a lawyer, called the state Supreme Court ruling “a win” for tackling court debt against poor people, but said he is concerned that it will lead to more convictions.
“It removes a bargaining tool that we most frequently use, almost daily use, to have cases dismissed,” he said.
Tindal explained that he commonly makes deals with prosecutors to dismiss traffic cases if his client agrees to pay court costs, usually around $55.
Without that option, “it’s going to be more difficult because the prosecutor won't feel that’s a sufficient penalty,” Tindal said.
In cases involving indigent defense fees, Tindal said that judges in the counties where he works usually waive or reduce those costs based on his client’s ability to pay.
He said that he would support legislation to allow for court costs to be billed as part of dismissal deals if the proposal also addressed how his low-income clients are disproportionately impacted by court debt.
Shane McChurch, assistant county attorney for Washington County, in the eastern part of the state, said the ruling banning court fees for dismissed cases is “among the more impactful decisions we’ve had in my career.”
McChurch said that he regularly strikes deals that stipulate defendants must pay court costs in exchange for dismissals for cases ranging in severity from traffic tickets to domestic violence. He said prohibiting these bargains will mean that people facing charges could end up paying more, and fewer charges will be dismissed.
“There’s pros and cons to this style of plea bargaining,” McChurch said. “I think just about anyone you talk to will say that it can be to the defendant’s benefit to have cases resolved this way rather than pushing cases through to final conviction and judgement, where fines and jail time are imposed.”
McChurch said that it’s up to the legislature to solve problems with high fees for court-appointed lawyers, noting that judges are supposed to determine whether someone has the ability to pay before billing for a lawyer.
Ian McConeghey, executive director of the Iowa County Attorneys Association, which has lobbied for the pending legislation to undo the Supreme Court ruling, called the practice of making defendants pay court costs for dismissals “a staple of the practice of criminal law in this state.”
He continued, “While we are disappointed with the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling…we respect the ruling and will do our best to see that it is strictly followed. We would support a legislative change that restores the traditional practice of allowing the state and defendants to use court costs to reach fair results in plea bargains.”
But Curry, of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, challenged the idea that lawyers only have court costs at their disposal to strike the best deal for their clients during plea negotiations.
“I just question whether it’s a balance here because plea bargaining is a very complicated process,” he said. “It is rarely about whether or not this person can pay this one fee.”
This article was produced in collaboration with Bolts, a nonprofit publication that covers criminal justice and voting rights in local governments; sign up for their newsletter.