An Alabama judge on Wednesday dismissed the case against a 49-year-old woman charged with not paying her $85 trash bill.

Nortasha Johnson is among a number of current or former Valley residents either arrested or prosecuted for failing to pay their trash bills.

In Johnson’s case, failing to pay solid waste fees charges were filed against the 49-year-old Valley resident after she didn’t pay three months’ worth of trash bills.

Chambers County Circuit Court Judge M. Calvin Milford Jr., dismissed the case against Johnson on Wednesday, a week after Johnson’s lawyers with the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a motion to throw out the case, court records showed.

SPLC attorneys Ellen Degnan and Micah West argued that the complaint filed against Johnson on Nov. 30 did not charge a criminal offense.

Additionally, Johnson is indigent and did not “willfully neglect” or refuse to comply with the notice to pay the trash bill. “Willfulness” is needed in Alabama to charge residents with a crime for nonpayment of bills, the motion argued.

“Ms. Jackson lives well below the federal poverty line during normal times. She was under even greater financial strain during the summer of 2022, when the City initiated this case, because she was acting as the primary caregiver for her two grandchildren, her cousin, and her cousin’s two children,” the motion stated. “Because she could not afford to pay her trash bill, prosecuting her for nonpayment violates her constitutional rights…”

Johnson was relieved the case against her was dismissed.

“Thank God this part is over,” she said, according to the SPLC.

While Johnson will no longer be prosecuted, West lamented that the city of Valley continues to pursue charges against other former and current residents who haven’t paid their trash bills.

The city had come under fire in November, when police arrested and jailed Martha Menefield, an 82-year-old woman, for not paying her $77 trash bill — an incident that stirred national outrage.

“The Alabama and federal constitutions prohibit prosecuting people simply because they cannot pay a garbage bill,” West said in a statement. “Although we are pleased that Ms. Jackson’s ordeal is over, the city of Valley is currently prosecuting other people for violating a statute that does not make nonpayment a crime. We ask officials to dismiss those charges, too, and to take proactive steps to ensure that people who fall behind on their trash bills are not unfairly punished for their poverty.”

A federal class action lawsuit was filed last month against Valley and its trash provider, Amwaste, accusing the entities of violating the residents’ constitutional rights.

Valley “knew, or should have known, that it cannot imprison people, or threaten to imprison people, for the failure to pay garbage collection fees,” according to the lawsuit on behalf of Santini Little, a former Valley resident who claimed she was arrested for not paying her less than $150 trash bill in 2011 and then jailed on $2,500 bond for the offense in 2013.

Valley violated the Eighth Amendment against excessive bail and Little’s Fourteenth Amendment right to due process by being “imprisoned for failing to pay a garbage collection fee, and by continuing to be threatened with imprisonment for failure to pay the fee,” the suit contended.

Meanwhile, Amwaste, which provides trash collection for the city, “knew that the City used criminal prosecutions, and jail time, or the threat thereof, to collect fees that eventually benefited Amwaste,” the suit alleged.

“Amwaste was a direct beneficiary of the jail threats because its was paid from revenues derived from a system enforced, ultimately, by the imposition of jail time for failure to pay garbage fees,” the suit claimed. “Amwaste knew of this process. Without Amwaste’s services, the fees would never have been collected.”

The suit also accused the city and Amwaste of engaging in “a pattern of racketeering activity” by using “the threat and intimidation of jail time to extort money from” Little and others.