A 75-year-old woman in Riesel, Texas was issued a warrant for her arrest after she was accused of not responding to a letter to appear in court for her failing to mow her lawn. In Pagedale, Missouri, where IJ has filed a class action lawsuit, there has been a similar abuse of municipal code enforcement. In Pagedale residents can be fined for things like chipped paint, mismatched curtains, and walking on the left side of a crosswalk. Valarie has received generic tickets for “house not up to code” without further explanation. She was not even issued a ticket prior to the arrest, and the only explanation she was offered was a complaint from the Village of Cahokia. Earlier this year, a 70-year-old woman in Prichard, Alabama was also arrested for not mowing lawn, except the citation she received was for a property she no longer owned.
– An Illinois woman with five kids was arrested July 7 and briefly thrown in jail for an offense that the town of Cahokia obviously feels strongly about: not mowing her lawn, the Week reports. Single mom Ebony Conner tells KMOV she was verbally warned by a municipal code-enforcement officer back in June and also told to get rid of garbage and broken-down cars from her driveway—but she thought she had more time to fix things, and she definitely didn't think she'd be hauled off to jail. "I understand I violated a code, but … give me a ticket first, make me appear in court," she says. "I know there's gotta be channels other than, 'If you don't cut your grass, we're arresting you right now.'" Conner says she hails from Wisconsin and has spent time in St. Louis, Mo., and she'd never heard of such a thing in either place. While she was detained (cops say she was held for about a half-hour in jail), her five children remained at home, with just a code enforcement officer patrolling the outside of her house, Conner says, adding, "I said 'I don't trust him. I don't know him at all.' … And they still hauled me off." She says she would've cut her grass by hand if she had known her long grass was an arrestable offense. The Institute for Justice lists similar cases that some consider to be an abuse of municipal code enforcement, including those in the town of Pagedale, Mo., where residents can be slammed with fines and tickets for such offenses as barbecuing in front of one's house, having mismatched curtains, and walking on the left-hand side of a crosswalk. (Postal workers mow residents' lawns in Finland.)