The civil rights lawsuit claims the court has authorized illegal arrest warrants leading to jail time for failing to come up with the money, with no "notice of how or when they would be released or when a hearing would be held." It claims that the six named plaintiffs, and others like them, are deprived of a constitutionally mandated hearing on their ability to pay. The complaint describes an "illegal scheme" in which convicts are jailed until they pay their fines and fees or a preset $20,000 bond. The suit claims the judges have a conflict of interest in doing so, because that money goes into the court’s Judicial Expense Fund.

About 45 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in two separate cases that debtors' prisons were unconstitutional as a violation of the 14th Amendment. However, a new federal class-action lawsuit filed in Louisiana by a group of people convicted of crimes is claiming that dozens of judges in Orleans Parish have essentially created an "illegal, unconstitutional and unjust modern debtors’ prison." According to The New Orleans Advocate Remarkably, claims like this one have surfaced in many places across the country over the past few years. In March, the U.S. Department of Justice released a report on Ferguson, Missouri, and found that "the court primarily uses its judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the City’s financial interests. This has led to court practices that violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection requirements." Other jurisdictions have been accused of similar actions.

A attorney representing clients in the lawsuit claims that arrest warrants for nonpayment, even when due to poverty, have "been issued to thousands of people who were convicted of crimes in Orleans Parish over about a five-year period." The Orleans Parrish complaint also states that, shockingly, collections officials are often the ones signing judges' names on these warrants.

A report last month by the ACLU of Louisiana found that arrest warrants are common across the state, even in cases of inability to pay, and identified 44 of these arrests over a 46-day period in New Orleans alone.