The youngest of eight children, Jaime was born in California to Mexican immigrants. Throughout his childhood, Jaime and his family migrated from field to field throughout the southwest, picking lemons, oranges, tangerines, grapefruit, grapes, plums, pears, walnuts, apples, cherries, strawberries, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and potatoes.

In different towns, Jaime attended different schools: three or four schools per year. He was frequently disciplined for speaking his native Spanish. He soon began to consider himself – and behave – as the “other.”

By age 13, he was earning money to feed the family. He eventually dropped out of school, because he felt his choice was to either stay in school, making no money, or see his mother starve, because she would be the last to eat. Jaime remembers, “Family first. I’ll take the hit on education.”

That same frame of mind led to several arrests and convictions, including imposition of over $12,000 in LFOs. A court clerk’s error led to several mistaken arrests for supposedly not paying on his LFOs.

Jaime served a 17-year prison sentence for one of those convictions and, at the time of sentencing, received LFOs in the am­­ount of $2,966. And yet today, Jaime owes only $1,761 on that conviction. The court failed to include the 12% interest in his sentence, as required by law, so Jaime has not been hindered by enormous debt that would have accrued over 15 years at 12% interest.

The remaining $10,000 in LFOs was wiped away when, two years ago, he learned that the court’s jurisdiction over those old convictions had expired, so the court no longer had authority to collect.

Jaime’s experience shows the high degree of inconsistency in court practice across counties in Washington State.