(a) Notwithstanding any other law, if a court, during the course of its routine process to collect fees, fines, forfeitures, or other penalties imposed by a court due to a citation issued for the violation of a state or local law, obtains information indicating that a person who has been issued a citation for loitering, curfew violations, or illegal lodging that is outstanding or unpaid served in the military within the last eight years and is homeless or has no permanent address, the court shall not garnish the wages or levy against bank accounts of that person for five years from the date that the court obtained that information.

(b) For purposes of this section, a person is considered to be “homeless” or as having “no permanent address” if that person does not have a fixed, regular, adequate nighttime residence, or has a primary nighttime residence that is one of the following:

(1) A supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designed to provide temporary living accommodations, including, but not limited to, welfare hotels, congregate shelters, and transitional housing for the mentally ill.

(2) An institution that provides a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized.

(3) A public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings.

(c) Nothing in this section shall be construed to prevent a court from engaging in any other lawful debt collection activities.

(d) Nothing in this section shall be construed to require a court to perform any further investigation or financial screening into any matter beyond the scope of its regular duties.

(e) Nothing in this section shall be construed to prevent the Judicial Council from altering any best practices or recommendations for collection programs pursuant to Section 1463.010.

(f) Nothing in this section shall be construed to prevent a court from garnishing a person’s wages or levying against a person’s bank accounts if the court, subsequent to its initial determination that the person was a homeless veteran exempt from wage garnishment or levy under this section, obtains evidence that the individual is no longer homeless, or that the court had, on a previous occasion, suspended garnishment of that person’s wages or levying against that person’s bank accounts pursuant to subdivision (a).

(Added by Stats. 2013, Ch. 234, Sec. 2. (AB 508) Effective January 1, 2014.)