Cash bail is so totally counter to the concept of bail, which itself is intrinsic to the idea that we’re innocent until proven guilty.
If there are genuine concerns that someone is a flight risk, or that they’ll intimidate witnesses, then the police & prosecutors should have to furnish hard evidence of that to persuade the court, and the resulting bail conditions should be as minimal as possible to achieve the effect.
Here’s hoping the rest of the US comes to follow Illinois in undoing this abusive practice.
Republicans are frothing at the mouth for the first incident where someone is released and then commits a crime.
True, but they froth regardless. Where they lack the power to impede what needs to be done, they can be ignored.
Whole thing needs to be reframed. If someone has yet to be convicted, it should be a given that holding them is as grave as any other form of kidnap. Thus, they’re not being released, but rather the govt isn’t abducting them.
So though there has to be room for exceptions if we’re being realistic, those have to be under the most stringent, case-by-case scrutiny.
They froth at the mouth for any hypothetical incident where the laws do not permit something on behalf of an imagined crime they are afraid of.
Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
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Ross, who describes himself as Indigenous and a person of color, was arrested in Chicago in October 2019 on weapons charges and ultimately found not guilty.
Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr. described Illinois’ previous cash bail system as “a cousin to slavery.”
Typically in state courts, a judge decides if a defendant poses too much of a threat to the community to be released, or if they can be freed with conditions, according to the nonprofit Bail Project.
In 2017, New Jersey essentially replaced its cash bail system with a risk assessment process that gauged the potential danger a released defendant could pose to the community.
But New Jersey data showed that after the state moved away from cash bail, the number of defendants who were charged with a new crime or who failed to appear in court remained steady.
Race certainly seemed to play a role when Nikuya Brooks’ bond was set at $150,000 after her first-time arrest on drug charges in 2017, according to the Chicago mother of three.
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