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California First State to End Bail.

Ranb

Penultimate Amazing
Ranb
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https://apnews.com/02cd9e0b507244d6bb773e285057a7fb

California will become the first state to eliminate bail for suspects awaiting trial and replace it with a still murky risk-assessment system under a bill signed Tuesday by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Based on the council’s framework, each county’s superior court will set its own procedures for deciding who to release before trial, potentially creating a patchwork system based on where a suspect lives.

Most suspects accused of nonviolent felonies will be released within 12 hours of booking, while those charged with serious, violent felonies will stay in jail before trial.

The new law gives judges wide latitude to decide what to do with other suspects based on their likelihood of returning to court and the danger they pose to the public.
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I'm certain there will be people to disagree with how judges decides who stays in jail and who goes home.

Other states including New Jersey, Alaska and New Mexico have overhauled their bail systems, although no other state has completely eliminated bail.
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People are in an uproar seeing as how several people accused of child abuse were allowed low bail (still in jail though) in NM.

The ACLU also has it's doubts.
The ACLU has been in talks with more than 30 other states about bail overhaul and is now advising them to avoid using California as a model because its system won’t ensure due process and won’t prevent racial bias, ....
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The law text; https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB10
Based on the vague words in the new law, CA has lots of work to do to get this new process going by next year.

Ranb
 
Sounds like it. Seems to me that there'd be a need for some explicit and detailed guidelines on this. Otherwise the potential for abuse is astronomical.
 
The replacement "process" looks just like the messy bail process so common in many places. So it sounds like they have removed the word "bail" from the lexicon, but kept the process itself. Why?
 
California is leading the way - maybe a little too fast. But the bail system is racist in application, so I'm excited to see how the experiment works.
 
arthwollipot said:
Sounds like it. Seems to me that there'd be a need for some explicit and detailed guidelines on this. Otherwise the potential for abuse is astronomical.
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Replacing bail with bribing whomever is doing the risk assessment seems like a terrible deal.
 
Why can't a judge make the risk assessment? That would make the system no more corruptable than today.

Swedish justice system: A person is detained by police. After no more than 6 hours, a prosecutor must decide wether or not to arrest the person. No more than 72 hours after the person was first detained, a judge hears the prosecutor and the defense and decides whether or not the detainee should be kept locked up. This is then done every 14 days until trial. Reasons to keep the detainee locked up could include risk of recidivism, risk of flight or risk of tampering or destruction of evidence.
 
Seems like mostly a "wait and see" for the majority of us, since I assume we mostly don't live in California. Tossing out cash bail for, say, low level drug offenses is likely best done at the state (or federal, when applicable) level, rather than at anything more local, if only because we've repeatedly seen that local control tends to reinforce race and class issues, rather than alleviating them.
 
Ranb said:
I'm certain there will be people to disagree with how judges decides who stays in jail and who goes home.
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That's how it works in NZ, UK and other more-enlightened countries.

I fail to see how putting a price on freedom is smart. It gives a lot of money to sleazy scum at the bottom of the gene pool who do bail bonds.

The change might still be racist, but probably better than the insane system where someone spends months in jail because they couldn't pay a $200 bond.

cullennz said:
Kind of a backward step on the old stopping corruption front, I think
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A backwards step to catch up to us?

How much corruption is there in NZ's system?

There have been a few mistakes, but zero cases of corruption. All tightening bail did here is cost us another $200,000,000 a year to keep the extra 3-4000 inmates locked up.

But it's ok - most of it's going to private prison contractors.
 
Ranb said:
I'm certain there will be people to disagree with how judges decides who stays in jail and who goes home.
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I'm certain that there will be people that disagree with any judgement a judge makes even if they don't have a choice.

People are in an uproar seeing as how several people accused of child abuse were allowed low bail (still in jail though) in NM.
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I can only speak for myself but I'd prefer if legislators didn't pander towards outraged and irrational mobs.

Honestly i think it's tragic: Americas extremely high incarceration rate and unfair justice system that penalizes poor people is a recognized problem, but what happens when someone tries to actually improve the situation? People quickly start to bitch and moan about how awful it is when criminals, or even just accused criminals, are treated even slightly more leniently.

Take California: despite its pretense of being a bastion of enlightened liberalism it still hasn't abolished the death penalty. Likewise its prison system is still something out of a poor third world country. That's freaking ridiculous.
 
Arcade22 said:
Take California: despite its pretense of being a bastion of enlightened liberalism it still hasn't abolished the death penalty. Likewise its prison system is still something out of a poor third world country. That's freaking ridiculous.
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Well, CA may have one of the largest death rows in the nation, but it's one of the least effective. They've executed 13 people in 40 years. Meanwhile, 100 death row inmates have died of natural causes in the same time.

So, I'm happy CA is trying something - anything - to reform its system.

Meanwhile, federal prison reform efforts just died (despite being Jared's big legislative agenda item).
 
THis going to be an interesting court fight. It can be argued that basically ending Bail flys right in the face of the COnstitutional clause about a right to bail.
ANd, anyway, I am skeptical about letting the politicians take over any part of the justice system.
 
There are other places that have more or less bail-less systems that actual work extremely well. This...doesn't seem like it's a well thought out as it easily could have been.
 
Local bail systems all over the country are simply rackets. Setting $15,000 bail for a charge that is dropped at the first court appearance is criminal, something I have dealt with personally when bailing out a relative who was simply visiting someone in a small town jail and had a cell phone in her purse. I wonder what the percentage of people arrested is who can reach out and raise $1500.00 cash or credit card for a bail bondsman from friends and relatives, but could never dream of raising the whole $15,000 themselves?
 
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