When will the Southern Poverty Law Center finally be recognized as a hate group?

LOUISIANA (Press Release) - The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a complaint against district attorneys across Louisiana who they say are violating the state's ethics laws by hiring off-duty officers to write "diversion" traffic tickets, according to reports.

Those tickets generate millions of dollars a year for district attorneys, according to the complaint filed by the SPLC.

The complaint alleges that the off-duty officers operate a dragnet on local highways and roads, resulting in thousands of additional traffic tickets each year that threaten motorists with prosecution unless they pay hundreds of dollars to the district attorney’s offices to dismiss the tickets.

According to the news release issued by SPLC, the state’s ethics code prohibits district attorneys from leveraging the threat of prosecution in order to make money.

The SPLC asked the ethics board to investigate the traffic ticket diversion programs to reaffirm that district attorneys may not profit from the threat of prosecution, and to order the district attorneys to return the millions of dollars in profits they have extracted through their for-profit diversion scheme.

“The state deserves more from its elected district attorneys than this unethical scheme to generate profits through the threat of prosecution,” said Micah West, staff attorney for the SPLC. “Sometimes, prosecutors use their authority responsibly to divert low-level defendants out of the criminal justice system and into community-based treatment. But too often, district attorneys in Louisiana have been motivated by a desire to generate revenue rather than to seek justice. Traffic ticket diversion is nothing more than a money-making ploy that outrageously puts justice up for sale.”

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