When defendants are convicted in Florence County, a small fee that they and their attorneys have overlooked for years is being added to their criminal fines to support a courthouse law library that no longer exists. During the last five years the fees have generated more than $200,000.
Hardly anyone was aware of the county’s unique law library fee. Not the local private defense attorneys. Not the solicitor.
“Frankly, I have no idea how much is collected, and when it’s collected, and where it goes or what it’s used for,” said Jack Greenan, the county solicitor’s office administrator.
“Nobody knew about it,” said criminal defense lawyer Guy Ballenger of Barth, Ballenger & Lewis in Florence.
Even the man who created the law library at the county courthouse was taken aback when he heard that the fee was alive.
“I’m absolutely amazed that they’re still collecting the fee,” said retired Judge Ralph Anderson Jr., a former state representative who served as a circuit court judge in Florence before he was elected to the state Court of Appeals bench in 1996.
“The thing [law library] has been defunct for a while, so I don’t know who’s been collecting the money,” said Anderson. He added that he had a tough time convincing state lawmakers in 1998 to pass the legislation that enacted the library fee in Florence.
“It was one of those things where the fee was for a cause – paying for law books for lawyers – that was not very popular with the general public,” he said.
Under the law, defendants in the county’s general sessions court must pay a fee that is 5 percent of their total fine. Defendants who are fined $2,500 have to pay an extra $125 for the library, for instance. In magistrate’s court, a $3 fee is added to all criminal fines.
Staffers in the clerk’s office handwrite the law library fees on the sentencing sheets because the forms are used statewide and do not include a line for such fees since they’re not being collected anywhere else. All the money generated from the fees goes into a special reserve fund for the law library.
“All I know is he [Anderson] came up with it and we’ve been told to do it,” said an employee in the clerk’s office.
Library within a library
Anderson opened the law library for lawyers to use at a time when most law offices in the state did not have access to Westlaw, LexisNexis, and other online legal research services.
But nowadays lawyers have little need for the county’s law library. In fact, none of the Florence attorneys who spoke with Lawyers Weekly for this story had ever set foot in the latest incarnation of Anderson’s law library. Most had no idea it even existed.
After the courthouse library closed, its volumes were moved across town in 2010 to the county’s public library, where the law books, of which there are about 1,500 to 2,000, currently occupy two stacks.
The public library’s director, Alan Smith, said the move was necessary because the courthouse location had been difficult to access and was not being properly maintained.
“We keep the code of laws up to date and things like that. It’s not a quickly growing collection by any means,” Smith said of the law section, which he still refers to as the county’s law library.
‘Money well spent’
Criminal defendants in Florence paid $34,198 in law library fees last year. In 2013 their contributions totaled $42,893. The prior year brought in $54,236. And the totals in 2011 and 2010 were in the mid-30s.
The law stipulates that money generated through the fees be used for the law library and nothing else.
“It’s not being siphoned off or anything. It’s a completely separate fund in the county budget,” Smith said. “It’s totally separate from the [public] library budget.”
The bulk of the money pays for the library’s Westlaw subscription, which costs about $23,000 annually, according to a summary of the county’s revenues and expenditures for the latest fiscal year. The rest of the money from the fees pays for a reference librarian, Amy Fouse, who is assigned to the law section. Last year her salary and benefits totaled $22,437.
“We actually have quite a few people who come in here and use it,” Fouse said of the law section. “We have students looking up different things on the law. We have regular people coming in and looking up rules, regulations and sometimes court cases.”
After learning how the fees were being used, Anderson said he believed that “it may be worth it” to continue to make criminal defendants pay for the public to have access to law books and Westlaw.
“If they keep everything up to date, it’s money well spent,” he added.
But Democratic state Rep. Todd Rutherford, a Columbia attorney, has questioned the legitimacy of Florence’s law library fee. He said he asked the state Supreme Court to investigate a few years ago, but nothing happened.
Robert McCurdy, assistant director of court services for South Carolina Court Administration, which aids the Supreme Court in the administration of the state’s judicial system, called the fee “unusual.”
“I guess the legislature would probably need to address this, but it’s the law,” he said. “It’s an unusual one. But it’s still on the books.”
If legislators were to abolish the fee, Smith said the current collection of law books would remain in the county library but the Westlaw subscription would have to be cancelled and Fouse would either lose her job or her hours would be cut.
Follow Phillip Bantz on Twitter @SCLWBantz