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Faulkner v. Mayfield3/25/1988
h Hamilton and Lawrence Counties, which provides that:
"(B) The board of county commissioners of Lawrence county shall pay all of the costs of operation of the Lawrence county municipal court. * * *"
This provision should be read in conjunction with R.C. 2947.14 and 2947.15. R.C. 2947.14(A) and (B) state that no indigent person may be imprisoned for failure to pay a fine. Part (D) states that if a person is incarcerated for failure to pay a fine, he receives credit at the rate of thirty dollars a day for each day of incarceration. R.C. 2947.15 states the proceeds of the labor of county prisoners are to be paid into the county treasury. R.C. 2947.19 states the county must provide for the maintenance of its prisoners. Under these statutes, an indigent defendant cannot be incarcerated for failure to pay a fine, but if he goes to jail and sits around, the county must keep him at its expense, and his fine is reduced at the rate of thirty dollars per day. The county loses money all around. Viewed from this perspective, the program of the Lawrence County Municipal Court, whereby defendants are not incarcerated and work to pay off their fines, makes good sense. The county reduces its costs and it increases income, while the defendant avoids the indignity of jail and is provided with remunerative employment.
But accidents happen to people in this kind of employment just as in others. Should these programs be exempted from the ordinary rules of employment? We think not. R.C. 4101.11 states that an employee shall be furnished with a safe place to work and ordinary safety equipment. A welder should not work without a face shield or gloves. A person should not operate a grinding wheel without safety glasses. A program which provided safety equipment to regular employees but denied it to people working off their fines would be regarded as intolerably discriminatory. Yet, if an accident happens in spite of the safety equipment, it is just as discriminatory to allow regular employees workers' compensation coverage but to deny it to the others.
We must also consider the question of equal protection of the law. In State, ex rel. Nyitray, v. Indus. Comm. (1983), 2 Ohio St.3d 173, 2 OBR 715, 443 N.E.2d 962, the Supreme Court stated at 175, 2 OBR at 717, 443 N.E.2d at 964:
"The limitations placed upon governmental action by the Equal Protection Clauses are essentially the same. See Porter v. Oberlin (1965), 1 Ohio St.2d 143 [30 O.O. 2d 491]; State, ex rel. Struble, v. Davis (1937), 132 Ohio St. 555 [8 O.O. 552]. Equal protection of the laws requires the existence of reasonable grounds for making a distinction between those within and those outside a designated class. State v. Buckley (1968), 16 Ohio St.2d 128 [45 O.O. 2d 469], paragraph three of the syllabus; Porter v. Oberlin, supra, paragraph two of the syllabus. The 'reasonableness, of a statutory classification is dependent upon the purpose of the Act. Carrington v. Rash (1965), 380 U.S. 89, 93; McLaughlin v. Florida (1964), 379 U.S. 184, 191."
We can find no legitimate or reasonable state purpose in making a distinction between workers who work for regular wages, and workers who are working off a fine according to a set pay scale. Accidents will happen to both kinds of workers, and no reason can be advanced as to why one class of accident victims is covered by workers' compensation while the other is not.
There is another equal protection consideration, one that makes denial of participation especially pernicious. The option of working off the fine is most likely to be used by persons on the lower end of the socio-economic scale, i.e., people who are poor or unemployed. These people are least
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