City fines grandmother $5,600 for a few chickens; she is fighting back

Ramona Morales, 79, had no idea a few chickens could be so expensive. She also didn’t know that prosecutions could be so profitable. Three years ago, on a neighborhood street in central Indio, a city code enforcement officer spotted a few clucking birds inside a coop in the backyard of a small house. The chickens were a violation of a city ordinance, so the officer sent a written warning to Morales, who owned the house and rented it out. At the time, Morales thought the warning was just a slap on the wrist for a small problem. This kind of minor headache is commonplace in the unpredictable life of a landlord. She told her tenant to get rid of the chickens. She thought that was the end of it. It wasn’t. “She didn’t know this little dispute about a couple of chickens would turn into nearly a $6,000 bill,” said Jeffrey Redfern, Morales attorney. “But it’s because these guys are making money off of her and everybody else.” On Tuesday, Morales filed a class-action lawsuit against Indio and Coachella, two cities that have made a practice of taking residents to criminal court for exceptionally minor crimes, then charging them thousands to pay for the cost of their own prosecution. The lawsuit is a direct response to a Desert Sun investigation, published in November, which revealed that the cities had billed residents like Morales more than $122,000 in “prosecution fees" and threatened to take their homes if they didn't pay. If successful, the class-action lawsuit will reverse convictions of anyone who was prosecuted by Indio and Coachella's privatized prosecutors, the law firm Silver & Wright, and lead to the return of prosecution fees paid by those residents...more