The Bail Trap
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I was accused of doing something I did not. I was taken to jail and they held me on bail - and set my court date for about three weeks from the time I was booked, but an arraignment in about 5 days.
I had just accepted a new job - but still had a week on my current.
I HAD to post bail (and I didn't really have the money for it) so I had to get a bail bond. so I could get out and go to work!! This cost my $3,000 out of pocket.
So I did, and then went to my arraignment: Guess what "no charges filed and case rejected for lack of any evidence at all"
But now - I am out $3,000 and I have an arrest on my record for something that was simply a false accusation! Further, WHile I was in jail over night, the guards and police are absolute douchebags. They treat EVERYONE like crap.
I now hate all cops. ALL of them.
(especially in a legal sense, I guess in a de facto sense this is a relatively safe avenue for police to abuse their power)
In fact, if you are convinced that is IS a wrongful arrest, you may legally resist arrest, tell the officer, and he is supposed to let you present evidence of your innocence. However, it doesn't HAVE to be claimed at the time of arrest.
I was curious in OP's case because of the "no charges filed and case rejected for lack of any evidence at all" line. It seems to me, that would be enough reason to claim wrongful arrest and at least get compensation for the bail bond.
Very risky advice for the nonwhite.
Very risky advice for ANYONE. Doesn't matter your race, the police don't like people to stick up for themselves. Judges tend to frown on this behavior as well, even if it's morally right. The truth doesn't matter when the judge doesn't care.
EDIT: That's not to say that all judges will allow these kinds of questionable abuses, just that there are enough that you're kind of taking your fate in your hands in a more substantial way than say driving a car or taking an airline flight.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/01/29/382497080/...
As of 2001, it was illegal to resist unlawful arrests in 39 states.[1]
> and he is supposed to let you present evidence of your innocence.
Where is this the law?
[1] http://scholarworks.law.ubalt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
Even if I was 100% convinced of the illegality of the arrest, I would advise to keep your cool and let the police go ahead. I know it sucks to have your rights trampled and be out of 3000$ and everything, but I'm pretty sure it sucks even more to be dead.
this is crazy wrong (in the US) and profoundly dangerous.
http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/resisting-an-u...
That said, I definitely agree with most of the sentiment here, that it's best not to push it, especially given the abuses of power we've seen. Fighting it after-the-fact is probably the best choice.
Judges can even benefit from it. Elected judges can tout their "tough on crime" bona fides in their ads. Appointed judges become more attractive for higher seats by politicians who promised to be "tough on crime".
It's bad medicine.
What?
It would thus be in his financial best interest to sit out the time until the arraignment. The only one who benefits from him getting out would be his old company. I am assuming he had something important to do there, like documenting what he did or training his replacement. Thus, I feel like they should have paid for his bail.
Financially, you're right. But money isn't the only factor here. Would you pay $3000 - $WEEKS_SALARY to stay out of jail for the week? For some people, being in jail for a week is not a 'net win'
(IANAL) There are good news and bad news - you probably can "seal" your arrest, bad news is that it isn't automatic, takes effort, and you'll probably will need to pay for a lawyer.
After three weeks in Santa Rita jail, he was let out. The cop at the impound yard said, "Sorry--you were at the wrong place at the wrong time." He went bankrupt soon afterwards.
If you post the full bail yourself, yes, but he said he'd paid a bail bond. If you can't post the full bail yourself (say, it's $30k) then you go to a bail bondsman and they pay the full bail for you - in exchange for a fee, usually 10% of your bail. That fee is non-refundable.
Then if you skip out while you're on bail, they come find you and drag you back to court to get their money back.
How can bondsmen stay in business? I have no idea what the turn up rate of appearing in court is, but I doubt it's 100%. So how are they allowed to stay in business if just one person they bailed out fails to appear in court?
They can also sue any indemnitors or guarantors who were party to the bail arrangement to try to recover their loss.
Basically 90% of being a profitable bondsman is being good at skip tracing in order to keep your losses low
The OP article mentions a peculiarity of the economics of the business in that many bondsmen won't touch small bail amounts because there isn't enough profit in it for the risk. So, it has the effect that people sometimes sit in jail for very low level offenses while people charged with more serious crimes get bonded out.
>So how are they allowed to stay in business if just one person they bailed out fails to appear in court?
The bondsman has to go and get their client and turn them in, or reimburse the amount of the bail. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/bail-bond-companies-work-4645...
The 10% you paid ($3,000 in this case) is basically a vig for the service the bondsman provides in fronting the money.
Now how that's figured at the back end (escrow of a general fund, or 'proof of ability to pay' or just 'sure, why not') is indicative of this being just one part of the racket. Why is a bail bondsman allowed to just promise the court they'll pay if you fail to appear, but you are given no such leeway, despite, in theory, being innocent at that point?
The court assumes that the bail bondsman's incentive for you to skip town is non-existent, whereas your incentive to skip town is, statistically speaking, much higher.
Using a bail bondsman I pay some fee (could be negotiated) but in my case was 10%
Since I paid the bail bondsman to post a 33,000 bond on my behalf - I pay him 3,300 up front. I do not get this back - regardless of the outcome of the case... however if I resolve it at the arraignment they refund ~10% at some ambiguous future date.
I should be able to bill the city for this given they had no charges and no evidence.
the police are not there to help you, or seek truth. they are there to fuck you over swiftly and silently if the powers that be decide you need to be fucked over. simple as that.
As to "without video footage of (my) own", in many U. S. states you are obligated by law to call a cop if the damage is over $XXX. They come out, file a report with details of the circumstances. Does it do any good? Meh, probably not. The last time a person ran into me, I called the plods and he handed us both the paperwork to fill out, stating that if he (the cop) did it, he'd have to issue a ticket. Umm, yeah, issuing a ticket to the incompetent driver who ran into me might be a good idea.
I thought about buying Gopro, but figured for my needs the price was too high, and a potential thief might break a window to get to the expensive cam?
I have been pulled over for no reason so many times, I wish they had these cheap cams when I turned 16.
I have never understood bail. Why don't they make it coincide with a person's yearly income? While I'm at it, why aren't traffic infractions tied to income? I gringe when I hear about $500 traffic tickets, or $280 for jaywalking? A wealthy person gets a ticket--he tells his wife over diner. A poor person gets a ticket, it can ruin their living situation? Never seemed fair?
On the other hand, you don't want to make it free for the unemployed --like students, etc.
From the article:
"Finland’s system for calculating fines is relatively simple: It starts with an estimate of the amount of spending money a Finn has for one day, and then divides that by two—the resulting number is considered a reasonable amount of spending money to deprive the offender of. Then, based on the severity of the crime, the system has rules for how many days the offender must go without that money. "
That's so sensible it almost feels insane to read...
Completely agree with you that it's the right thing to do, for exactly the reasons you state.
I didn't get my first car until I was almost 19 but I agree. I wish there had been cheap cameras back then.
I know a lot of people who have the "If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear from the police" mindset. They stare at me in disbelief when I tell them some of the things I have been stopped for by police.
The most egregious example was the time I got pulled over because "your rear passenger tire looks kind of low". Two police cars, on the side of the road in a distant suburb of Pittsburgh because it LOOKS LIKE the air in one of my tires is low...
Bail is punitive, regressive and coercive.
I remember another occasion where I got a ~$100 ticket and the cop says he's doing me "a favor" by not writing me a ~$200 ticket. This was at a time when I was making $9.00/hr. After taxes, that was two days of work to pay that ticket.
There's also the part where people with money are less likely to be arrested or ticketed in the first place. The fact that you can afford to hire a good lawyer and fight the good fight discourages police officers from making nonsensical arrests and writing bogus tickets in the first place.
If you wouldn't mind, will you tell us that make and model of the dash cams you bough? I have been thinking about getting one and I prefer to hear from actual users than to read spec sheets.
Couple a newly returned squad of soldiers who are more than qualified for civilian law-enforcement with a new incoming supply of armored transport and military equipment, you can't avoid the militarization of the police force.
As anecdotal evidence; in my small area of the mid-west, our local county police force (I'm ignoring the state and city cops for now) is comprised of roughly 50 officers. Without the jail and office-dwellers, it's about 35 who are on the street daily.
After looking it up, of those 35, 32 have less than 10 years' experience. Of those 32, all were hired within 3 months of returning from Afghanistan or Iraq.
I never put two and two together. I just noticed that the attitude in the county has changed.
Whereas people used to talk to the police they met, and used to interact with them at community events, they don't anymore (and the cops don't come to church socials, community gatherings or celebrations anymore - they only stick with each other). In the past, I have actually invited officers to the house for lemonade, or even delivered it to them, when I saw them sitting at the nearest speed trap spot on hot days. I've jumped their cars when they die. I've even invited them to (illegal) fireworks displays - with no worries, because they understood that we weren't idiots.
I haven't done any of that for over five years.
Why?
Because all the police now treat their police work like an extension of their time in the military. All of them. Every one. Legitimately, they stick together like it's still the military, and always have their fingers on the trigger of whatever gun they're carrying when speaking to anyone who isn't in a county officer uniform.
They're driving around with multiple firearms in rural areas where the crime rate is non-existent. Honestly, I don't know where my house keys are because I have never locked the doors.
In 8 years.
But, they've become, essentially, a little military. They practice swat tactics, they practice distance shooting, they practice how to take down dangerous criminals that don't exist in our area.
Why? What does that help? They should be practicing how to talk to children without needing to touch a gun, and how to interact with adults without treating them like criminals.
tl;dr: returning vets who refuse to lose the military attitude, increased military supplies to civilian law enforcement agencies, and the shit-tons of money to be made in corrections have all contributed to this problem of hyper-vigilance.
That's a big part of the problem right there. Police are civilians [1], but they have been picturing themselves as some kind of messed-up "soldiers against crime" that they now believe their own nonsense; it's them against the civilians (not them against criminals - them against civilians).
Hiring ex-soldiers to be police officers is part of the problem; military training (of the killing people quickly through intense violence type [2]) teaches a mindset that is utterly unsuited to policing.
Living in the UK, I feel safer with routinely unarmed police.
[1] Sure, in some countries the police are actually military or paramilitary personnel, but those countries aren't being discussed here.
[2] Which is, of course, by no means all. I was reserve forces myself for fifteen years and never touched a loaded firearm.
It might be counterintuitive, but I find MPs (military police) generally much more friendly and calm that the average civilian cop.
Seems unlikely to me. Police departments always had vets. When we went to war in Kuwait in 1991, guys right around retirement age had been in Vietnam. Back when they joined the veteran cops were military veterans from WW II and Korea. Police departments have always preferred to hire combat veterans, because you don't know who's going to crack the first time they take incoming fire. So you hire someone who's already been shot at.
Anyway, the time frame is off. The first gulf war wasn't until 1991, but police departments had already traded in their .38 Specials for high capacity automatics and started dressing like ninjas by the mid '80s.
From what I can tell police forces in the US stopped acting like police and more like an invading army as a response to well armed drug dealers and a few well-publicized shootouts in which the home team didn't do well, most notably this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout
Which might be the most studied shootout in US history. The FBI changed its contact policies as a result, and police departments normally pay close attention to FBI recommendations.
It's a kind of positive feedback loop, where fearful cops subject people to humiliating procedures in an effort to keep themselves safe, and people responding like people always respond to humiliation.
A colleague of mine spent fifteen minutes spread-eagled face down on a hot street because he kind of looked like someone who committed a nonviolent crime. Do that to a thousand people and one of them is going to start shooting the next time he's pulled over.
I lived in Thailand for 8 years, and I can confirm that "Farang" (white tourists) are treated better than Thai citizens. With good reason though, as tourism is the lifeblood for many communities.
Kidnap someone and put them in a cage for a month so they lose their salary, job, apartment etc? That adds up to an awful lot of easily demonstrable financial damage that the justice system is directly responsible for. Only when false arrests and prosecution start directly impacting these organizations' budgets will they possibly care about the harm they do.
Heroin straw > arrest > detention under bail.
If not, prosecute him for assault, kidnapping, false imprisonment, etc.
I know it's never going to happen but one can dream...
Can one do that? Why doesn't it seem to happen more often?
Sure it will. If the cost of arresting someone was potentially a few hundred thousand dollars each time, the police would have to be a lot more careful about whom they arrest. Cities and counties would literally be unable to afford to arrest everyone.
As far as the rest of your comment is concerned, full agreement here, even regarding the pipe-shapedness of the dream :(
Let's just hope it won't result in a spike in number of people shot to death in self-defense.
Never forget that.
Currently, the damages caused by law enforcement are effectively funded by an obscure reverse-lottery. This makes them seem free for the majority of people who don't "win" the lottery, yet they can be life-crushing if you do.
Quantifying the damage would allow to those taxpayers to see exactly how their money is being spent, and making the damage legible to the justice system is the only way they can possibly optimize it away.
Which is how it causes the mistakes to go away. Politicians want to get reelected. They want tax dollars to go to things that help get them reelected by generating votes or campaign contributions.
The problem right now is that the defendant gets screwed but there is no cost for that to the police, politicians or voters. Make the voters pay for it and they will immediately want it to stop.
IMHO the civil approach is just a lot easier to adjudicate - when the victim is found innocent, they should be immediately compensated for any and all damages resulting from arrest, imprisonment, and trial. If the department wants to recoup losses from specific individuals who went against policy, they can settle that much thornier argument on their own time.
Proving that a specific individual acted criminally outside their mandate is an even higher burden to meet. When this is warranted, it would be fantastic. But we can envision many cases where an individual cop is following a reasonable policy, yet it still results in an innocent being held in jail for a day and losing their job as a result.
The standard of proof in a criminal trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt". The standard of proof in a civil trial is "by a preponderance of the evidence". It's roughly the difference between "overwhelmingly likely to be guilty" vs "more likely than not to be the case".
I don't think you can turn every finding of "not guilty" into a successful civil standard of loss for the defendant. Suppose it's 95% likely that I was guilty of a crime. That's likely to not meet the standard to convict, but turn that around into a civil suit for false arrest or malicious prosecution and I'm going to lose the case against the civil standards.
The civil standard would not be applied to the facts of the original case, but to the result of the criminal trial. The "preponderance of the evidence" you refer to is that the defendant was found not guilty in the criminal case, which is the sole indication of whether the criminal prosecution was correct or not.
Yes, there will be close cases where the defendant seems awfully guilty, yet is acquitted of the criminal charges. But arrest and imprisonment while awaiting trial is not supposed to be extrajudicial punishment! It would be perfectly reasonable for a defendant to lose the civil trial and have to make the original victim whole, yet be reimbursed for his criminal defense attorney fees etc.
Two questions:
1. In your personal opinion.
2. Under your proposed system change.
I don't "require" that a system change be perfect, just that it be an improvement, but you can imagine that the idea of paying OJ Simpson for his arrest, imprisonment, lost lifetime earning potential, etc, would be extremely problematic to getting this change through.
I also worry that juries would feel pressure to shade the standard of guilt. "I have what might be a reasonable doubt, but he's probably guilty and I can't stand the idea of my taxes going to reimburse this scumbag, so I'll just round it up to guilty..."
But I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with reimbursing OJ Simpson for the time of his criminal arrest and imprisonment, especially because that money would have just been used to settle the civil suit. Remember, he was found innocent (no double jeopardy + innocent until proven guilty). We both can say the system got the wrong answer for this case, but insinuations or references to a lower standard of proof don't actually change the verdict.
Step back to a much simpler case of actual innocence. While walking down the street you are randomly arrested and held for a few days before you can post bail. What is the justification for the salary loss from your missed work being your responsibility, rather than the thugs' who caused it?
As far as encouraging judges/juries to find guilty for financial reasons. Do we want to hold back reforms on the fear that our system is so corrupt it will only worsen things? I can certainly see your scenario happening, but the proper course is to then fix those problems rather than give up and keep denying justice to victims of the "justice" system itself.
The court is not charged with determining the difference and issuing a finding of "innocent". They are only concerned with guilty vs not.
Contrast with NFL replay referees, which are for some reason (I assume entertainment/excitement) charged with choosing one of three outcomes: ruling on the field is overturned, ruling on the field stands, and ruling on the field is confirmed. The distinction between the last two is without a difference as to the outcome of the game.
I'd much rather 100 guilty persons go free than to wrongly convict a single innocent as a critically important ideal. Any "reform" that has an obvious mechanism that would bias the system to erode that in favor of a lesser benefit is cause for concern for me.
Yes, because innocence is presumed. When a court finds "not guilty", it is logically equivalent to "innocent". It's not a free pass to say "he was only found not guilty; he's not innocent".
> I'd much rather 100 guilty persons go free than to wrongly convict a single innocent as a critically important ideal. Any "reform" that has an obvious mechanism that would bias the system to erode that in favor of a lesser benefit is cause for concern for me.
That biased mechanism already exists, although not to the same extent. A judge/jury who can't logically infer guilt would still rather lock up a scumbag, especially if they're likely to repeat offend. A large part of this principle has to be embodied in the judge/jury itself.
Not that it should be made worse. I suppose juries could be given leeway over the decision to reimburse, but it would be a larger change to our current system (nothing I've advocated for here is an actual change to the law, just an enforcement of proper civil liability). And you could still end up with the same problem where juries acquit yet routinely don't reimburse because "taxpayers shouldn't pay for someone being at the wrong place". It's less bad than that same person being in prison, but it's still wrong. Cops see "you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride" as a feature, but everybody who believes in the rule of law should see it as a bug.
Of course nothing proposed here would change the fact that the sheer majority of cases plea out due to draconian punishments for nonviolent crimes, and so even long-held legal principles don't end up applying. But the present situation is tough precisely because there are multiple pathologies that all corrupt the justice system away from the fundamental ideals it purports.
You haven't been in many court cases or you wouldn't be saying this. The vast majority of crimes is committed by people who won't ever pay restitution. Because they can't, or because they simply won't (they'd rather do jail time). So if someone commits a crime against you, your car, your house, you best assume it's going to be you yourself or your insurance carrying the cost.
> when the victim is found innocent, they should be immediately compensated for any and all damages resulting from arrest, imprisonment, and trial
Thus giving everyone, including judges, a financial incentive to never find people not guilty. (It's already the case that "guilty party pays legal costs" principle sometimes results in the judge finding whoever's got the most expensive lawyer guilty and assigning 1$ restitution to avoid having the poor person pay legal costs. This would be 1000x worse).
If you do this, everyone will be immediately convicted for "resisting arrest" or some such.
There are decisions about which reasonable people can disagree. If every such decision risked going to jail for assault, kidnapping, or false imprisonment then no police would be willing perform arrests. We use (or should use) criminal prosecution for extreme cases (a police officer who shoots an unarmed suspect for no good reason) but use the normal processes of workplace discipline (for which the worst that can happen is that you lose your job) for questionable arrests (like arresting someone for "drug paraphernalia" for having a straw).
We're already seeing a taste of it lately in NYC and Baltimore. The cops think they're being unfairly scapegoated so they're hunkering down. Somehow people are surprised crime rates are going up.
United States v. Salerno: "the government's proposed conditions of release or detention not be 'excessive' in light of the perceived evil."
Stack v. Boyle: "excessive" is "a figure higher than is reasonably calculated" to ensure appearance
I guess it's easy to beat up people who don't have the means to defend themselves. Someone should start an Occupy Justice movement and have everyone request jury trials to cause a system crash.
Being in the criminal justice system is incredibly expensive and high risk, and as an individual, allowing your case to go to the supreme court requires continually losing it.
If they find bails unconstitutional, then the bail laws are void.
If they only find certain practices wrong, then you need to prove to a court, possibly on appeal, that the conditions from the supreme court judgement hold in your case. So you need a lawyer and some time, post-arraignment... You'll have the joy of having your bail found illegal after 2+ weeks in jail.
The phone system is a good example. Inmates have some scheduled time where they can make phone calls, provided someone on the outside has funded an account.
You, of course, expect it to be a little more expensive than normal phone service.
However, here's the reality.
You deposit $25, then: - $7 service fee for the credit card processing - $4.50 for the first minute of every call - then $2.50 a minute for any subsequent minute
So, yes, a 2 minute phone call, within the same state, costs the family $14.
These are real numbers, from one of the big vendors in the space...Global Tel Link. Source: Have relative that was in jail...this is what I had to pay.
Here's an older article on the subject: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/phones/pleasedeposit.html
Also things like reducing to 2 meals a day to save money. Or worse. Search google for Sheriff Joe Arpaio's outdoor tents, in Phoenix, where the average high temp in July is 41C/106F.
It's really shameful.
The Planet Money podcast about it is great. A former inmate who wanted to solve the phone call problem, and expanded to other prison-specific issues.
This isn't even the main point of the article but I think it speaks volumes on its own.
Arrest quotas have become the standard for judging police officer performance in many cities, and fines for trivial offenses have become a key revenue generator for many local governments (see the DoJ review of Ferguson for a particularly awful example). "Justice" for petty crime has become a self-sustaining industry - and a profitable one, as we can see with the rise of private for-profit prisons.
If it's not drug paraphernalia, it's some other charge - jaywalking, loitering, and the ever popular "resisting arrest". A recent video interview with a former Baltimore cop summed it up well. He pointed out that it's pretty much impossible to drive a car or walk down the street without breaking some law or another. So cops can easily arrest anyone, at any time, for largely fabricated reasons.
Throw in arrest quotas and fine revenue as municipal funding, and you have a formula for mass arrests and incarceration for trivial offenses. The trick then is to find people who can be arrested who won't rock the boat politically... the poor, and the non-white. Now, you wind up with a racist justice system, not out of racist intent, but out of its very architecture.
The solution is for comfortable, safe, middle class white Americans to stop ignoring and start caring.
This is pretty laughable. Not only will the wider class of people benefiting from racial and class privilege never actually care, but they'll be shocked out of caring as soon as it impacts their bottom line.
Remember also that the FBI and other police organizations explicitly rely on entrapment to make examples as to why people shouldn't be involved in activism, so people from privileged backgrounds will be afraid to even get involved in social change.
Likewise, I think the rise of easy cell phone recording and viral stories has the potential to change the situation very quickly. We got our first taste of this with Rodney King two decades ago, but it's really coming to the fore now. We're seeing police getting charged with murder now in cases where they would have gotten a commendation before, because the violence is recorded. I think we're only a few years out from body cameras being standard equipment.
I've already noticed a significant change in tone in discussions online, with a lot less reflexive defense of the police, and a lot less crypto-racist "thug" stuff. Progress is being made.
One can debate about the war-on-drugs (I think it's failed) but even if society thinks drugs are a bad thing and worth fighting against it, it's the dealers that should go to jail, not the people who use drugs. 30 days for holding a straw that might contain some heroin, really? Something is obviously very very broken here.
Sending casual users to jail is the only way to cut demand. If the casual users -- the most lucrative market -- get off scott-free then there's never any limit to demand and consumption.
Based on what I know about the place, I'd feel uneasy the whole time I was there, as though I could be arrested at any moment just for crossing the road the wrong way.
One time I took my Irish passport instead of my NZ one by mistake when entering Australia, and I was subjected to dog sniffs and minor harrassment by the border control staff, which made me very uncomfortable. From what I understand that's nothing compared to what you can expect as a foreigner entering the US.
Do other non-Americans feel this way or is it just me? I can't imagine this situation does wonders for American tourism or business.
FWIW my experience of police (in both NZ and in Germany) has been that they're always very pleasant to deal with.
Look it up.
The US appears to be the second most common tourist destination in the world, with about 75 million arrivals in 2014 alone[0][1], so I guess it's doing just fine, and is not actually a nightmarish police state, and most people come and go without incident. Feel free to jaywalk with impunity.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings
[1]http://travel.trade.gov/outreachpages/download_data_table/Fa...
^Yes, it's a PDF.
IMO there are two real problems with the story about the "main character". First, the DA comes to the judge with a case against a guy charged with possessing a straw. The judge should have thrown it out and said "come back when you have evidence of a crime".
Second, we have the means to protect inmates from each other. There's no reason for a three week stay to mean a busted up face. Jail should be boring, but safe, and the state should be liable for every rape or assault that happens inside.
Restructure the law so that bail cannot be easily set over $100 for non-violent misdemeanors, and that 100% of the bail is returned to the person posting it for amounts under $1000, and NYC (of which I am not a resident) will be well on it's way to solving the current problems of the bail system, and then have a whole new host of problems with the new system to solve in 50 years once all of its weaknesses are exploited.
[edit] corrected improper use of bailbond to bail
Either the defendant is a threat to society or unlikely to show up at court (because he's a transient or likely to be issued a long sentence), then you lock up the fellow, or he isn't any of that, in which case one can trust him to show up on time. Also, isn't a person innocent until the judge pronounces the verdict?
What is sit that makes American society so different?
Yes, but resorting to arrest to bring you to trial after you've wasted the court's--and everyone else involved--time by not showing up has costs a risk of failure. Pretrial detention exists to eliminate that risk, and bail is in theory what you pay to get society to instead accept the risk and forego pretrial detention.
So the sixth amendment to he US constitution guarantees everyone the right to a speedy trial. Unfortunately, evidence takes a long time to prepare, and the trials themselves need to be scheduled based on available resources.
Technically when you post bail you're waiving your right to a speedy trial, and in exchange you can go about your business until the trial starts. The money is an extra incentive to show up - you lose it if you don't show. If you've done something particularly heinous, where the judge thinks you'll run no matter how much you have at stake, you won't be offered bail at all, and you'll sit in jail until the trial. I suspect in that case there's maximum amount of time they can keep you before trial, but I don't know what it is.
Since most people don't have a lot of cash handy they borrow the money from a business that specializes in such things, the bail bondsman. The bail bondsman gets his money back when you show up for trial, and if you run away he'll generally track you down and forcibly bring you back.
If the bail bond company can't make money on the deal, they won't offer their services...
Which would end up making it harder for the relatively poor to make bail...
How about this: Just get rid of bail entirely for low level offenses. When a minor crime is expected to be charged, bring the suspect in, fingerprint and identify them, give a court date, then... let them go home.
The bail bond company wouldn't be involved at all if the accused has the money for bail. The bail bond company is bonding the accused for the whole amount, that's the (typically) 10% the accused is paying. (EDIT: and if you don't show up for court, the bond company is authorized to go get you and drag your ass in. 'cause they're out their money otherwise. And thus you get such quality TV as Bounty Hunters.) However, if you can muster the whole amount, you don't need a bail bond company. Ergo, if bail amounts were reasonable, we would have less of a need for bail bond companies.
Your last paragraph is covered by "OR" or "own recognizance". IOW, you go home with no money out of pocket. However, one must wait until arraignment before a judge before OR is an option. Waiting for arraignment is the part we could get rid of with your proposal.
Of course, if the arrested person runs off, they're out the money they paid the court.
That's called a PR bond "Personal Recognizance" Ken Paxton the AG of Texas was recently released on a PR bond after being charged with a felony in Colin County, Tx.
PR bonds are an option in most states (I think), but rarely used for, reasons. After the Sandra Bland death, there are noises being made here about making PR bonds the mandated default in Texas for most petty (petit?) crimes & misdemeanors.
> Without bail — and the quick guilty pleas
> that it produces — courts would come under
> significant strain. "The system would shut
> down," Goldberg says.
It's no longer about a straw, it's about a guard who says you punched them when in face five people were holding you and you had a spasm or something.
What the quote means is that bails allows courts to process much more arrests than reasonably possible, and that also that guilty pleas mask the fact that the grounds for most of those fast forward arrest occurred under shaky grounds at best.
What you want to do is to pay poor people to sit in jail for as long as it takes to exercise their right for a fair trail. Once judges and other court personnel is forced to hear 18 hrs of bullshit accusations for every hour of real cases, they will begin to look their cozy cuff-happy bedfellows in a new light.
If someone were to post bail for them they could still go to trial without sitting in jail in the meantime.
I should probably read a couple of books on US legal system and how things work there but the need for doing so would usually arise from having to travel to some totalitarian developing country. In certain countries, you should expect to have some money as it might be customary to bribe the police officer or other officials but once that's settled things generally unfold fine from there. It seems that in the US, you should expect to have lots of money as it might be customary to bribe the court yet things can generally get quite uncertain from there, based on what I've read. It's hard to evaluate the risk, though: the probability is rather low but the impact can be devastating.
I get the feeling that if only you're a "regular Joe", ideally white (or fit in the "good" ethnicity of your city), you don't stand out of others, and you have money, you're likely to be fine. The further you deviate from that the more unpredictable things can get.
I got called to serve jury duty several years ago, and being somewhat familiar with jury nullification, sought advice from a lawyer friend.
I don't remember the exact details of his advice, but it was generally this:
1) Don't even hint that you're aware of jury nullification during jury selection and examination.
Obviously don't lie if asked a direct question about it, but that doesn't really happen. Instead, you might be asked something like, "If the evidence proves the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, can you enforce the law regardless of your personal beliefs about whether the law is correct?" Just answer "yes" and be quiet – unless you honestly don't think so. (Remember, you won't know much, if anything, about the case at this point. So, abstractly, you probably can set aside personal beliefs if the facts of the case warrant it.)
2) Don't ever use the words "jury nullification" when deliberating with the other jurors.
Judges can and will remove jurors who are openly engaging in jury nullification. There have even been instances of judges holding jurors in contempt for it, but according to my lawyer friend, those cases were overturned. Regardless, you will likely be removed from the jury and possibly have further hassles.
3) In jury deliberation, remember that you don't have to convince the other jurors of your position. If you don't feel right convicting the defendant, you don't have to. Just stick to your guns and let the jury be hung.
I was glad I sought advice, because I ended up engaging in jury nullification.
In my case, the defendant was charged with a DUI for essentially being obnoxiously drunk in his driveway on private property. He was playing music through his truck speakers, with the windows down. The engine was not on, but his keys were in the ignition – to enable the electrical system. He was having a party, with friends over, a grill going, etc. He had not signaled any intent to leave the party at his own home, and the prosecution didn't argue that he was planning to drive anywhere. But in my state, being intoxicated and having your keys in the ignition (or even initiating a sequence of events that will result in driving) is grounds for a DUI.
I understand the reasons for the law being worded that way. If somebody is obviously drunk and walking towards their car to leave a bar, cops need to be able to stop him before he actually starts driving. However, in my case, what actually happened is the defendant mouthed off to the cops, and my interpretation is they were punishing him for being disrespectful. They could have just told him to turn down his music or issued him a noise violation and moved on. He was not planning to drive his car anywhere or endanger anyone. Instead, they unnecessarily escalated the situation.
A DUI can be a felony and can result in losing your job or being excluded from future jobs. It's serious. I didn't think this guy deserved that – despite coming across as a total asshole during his testimony. I tried my best to convince the other jurors, but they all ultimately felt they had to enforce the law as it exists. According to the law, he did commit acts that technically constitute a DUI. So, they all voted guilty – even though many thought it "wasn't fair."
After 8 hours of deliberation, we ended up with a hung jury and me being the sole dissenter. I will admit it was exhausting to keep arguing for the guy, when everybody is tired and just wants to go home. I was also very relieved when I went home that night, searched public convictions, and found none for the defendant.
Anyway, if you get called to serve on a jury, please don't try to get out of it. It's a great honor and responsibility, and we need more intelligent, free-thinking people in our juries. But do educate yourself on jury nullification beforehand.
You can't exactly say "I don't want to apply the law in this particular case."
1) We heard a conversation between the senior officer and the arresting officer. (Actually a reading of a transcript of the conversation, because the original recordings were "lost".) I don't remember all of it, but the gist was the trainee asked if she should charge the defendant with a DUI and the senior office replied something like "It's your call. We could go either way."
2) The jury was never actually told the defendant's BAC. I don't know exactly why, but my impression is there was some technicality that made the test inadmissible.
3) We heard testimony from the arresting officer about the field sobriety test. However, she was a new officer still being trained, and this was only like the 5th real field sobriety test she had conducted. And the senior office had her restart it about halfway through, for reasons that we weren't allowed to hear.
4) We heard testimony that the guy had drunk ~5 beers in the 2 hours before the cops arrived.
I'm sharing those now, because they're the crux of the arguments I made.
I tentatively started out trying a line of reasoning that if the senior officer thought they could have not charged him, that means the cops have discretion about when it's appropriate to enforce a law fully. And don't we as jurors have a similar right. Isn't that our role in this? If it's just a matter of enforcing laws, a judge is better qualified. Our humanity and discretion is the point of having a jury of peers.
I tried reminding people of times when they probably broke this law, e.g., tailgating, at the beach, at a campground. There are lots of instances where somebody might have their key in the ignition, while consuming alcohol, but they shouldn't be charged with a DUI. There's the letter of a law and the spirit of the law. Yadda yadda.
I actually thought I was getting to some folks, until the foreman reread the judge's instructions to the jury, which were basically, "Your duty is to apply the law as it is given to you, whether you agree with the law or not." That type of wording is common in jury instructions, but I think it should be disallowed. It immediately shut down that whole semi-jury-nullification argument I was making. The rest of the jury felt they had to enforce the law – even though I tried to make the case that cops are also duty bound to enforce the law and they use discretion about when to charge people, likewise with district attorneys. They wouldn't buy it. The judge's instructions were too authoritative – or I wasn't a good salesman.
So, I figured I'd pushed the jury nullification envelope as far as I could safely. I changed my tactic to argue that I didn't think the guy was drunk – at least not beyond a reasonable doubt.
We didn't find out his BAC. His sobriety test was inconclusive, for me. And while 5 beers in 120 minutes is a lot, this was a pretty big guy, probably 6'1", 230 lbs. That's my general weight class, and I've used the BAC calculators before and played with a friend's breathalyzer. I know I can have 3 (12oz, regular bav) beers per hour and stay right around 0.08%. (I wouldn't drive after drinking 3 beers in an hour, but it's good to be aware.)
So I just kept arguing that I wasn't convinced that he was drunk. One of the other jurors actually got pretty belligerent, a few exchanges like this (almost verbatim): Them: "COME ON! You really don't think he was intoxicated after chugging 5 beers? Is that how you party? Drink a sixer and hop in the car?" Me (ignoring the ad hominem bullshit): "He probably was intoxicated. But likely is not the same thing as 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. And I'm not giving this guy a DUI for possibly, maybe being intoxicated and playing music from his truck!"
He kept pushing me, and finally I just turned to him and said, "Look, I don't have to convince you. I don't have to even talk to you. I'm voting my conscience. You vote yours." That finally shut him up, mostly. In his defense, this was like hour 7 of deliberations.
I'm really glad I had this experience, but it was somewhat frightening to watch what the other jurors would do just because the judge gave them instructions. :(
My understanding is that it's common to retry cases like this, but I don't really know.
Guy had been charged with having a concealed weapon. He and a couple of friends had been out shooting at some remote location where it was perfectly legal to shoot. They had a bunch of different guns with them... rifles, pistols, revolvers, etc which were in a couple places in this guy's truck, mostly on the tailgate and a few they were done with in the cab.
Well, a fish and game officer came along, and decided to check these guys out. She got permission to search and found a revolver in the cab that was under a shirt that one of the guys had taken off and tossed on the seat. Based off this, he got charged with having a concealed weapon. The way the law was written, he was actually guilty.
Took us 5 minutes to vote not guilty and send this poor guy home. I was very proud of my fellow jurors that day.
They need to stop him, explain it is his lucky day and call him a cab.
However, that a person who isn't driving ("D") cannot possibly be driving under the influence ("DUI") isn't a personal belief. It is a belief which is rational with an arguably objective basis.
If I were asked, "can you enforce the law regardless of your personal beliefs", I would assume that it refers to things like being soft/strict on someone because of religion, race, politics or whatever. So that I could answer "yes" with confidence.
If asked "can you enforce the law regardless of rational convictions based on objective reasoning", I would say, of course, no fucking way.
Because then, what is the point of the jury, if not to apply reason? An expert system could be programmed to understand the law and just spit out a sentence based on matching the apparent facts to the rules.
Also in NYC: http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org
It sounds like a big part of the problem are too many arrests for things without enough evidence.
Wouldn't everyone benefit for better logs & statistical analysis? If a certain police officer had a 15% conviction rate, and he actually liked his job, then he'd be sure next time to be more sure about his arrests. Such a tool could track recent trends as well.
Also, it sounds like there needs to be a system (email??) to contact employers. All employers required to have an official address and courts are required to contact it with current case status.
Anyone else have ideas about how tech could help the situation?
There are several steps towards conviction and many variables, but I think there are statistical methods that can tease out the conversion rates at each step along the way.
People are in the system for some good reasons...
The algorithm could be as simple as:
first time offender, non violent case, 0 bond second time offender, non violent case, 100 bond etc.
Another idea that may benefit all would be to force people who have gone through the system to create a bond "deposit account". Like a health savings account. This amount could be collected slowly over time -- forced deductions from pay.
People without jobs or money -- must be released without bond then, in the case of non-violent crimes.
If such a system could be fed with information like.. did the defendant run, then it could also figure out what bond levels work.
Another part of this article mentions that below a certain level, bail bonds won't handle it. Is that because a human is required to make a decision?
...or get better at pretending to be more sure so that the innocent defendants he arrests don't screw up his numbers by getting acquitted.
You get what you measure. If you measure the conviction rate then the conviction rate will go up, but that isn't the same thing as the percentage of convicted defendants who were actually guilty.
But then we'd lose what we came here for in the first place.
There are other places for these kinds of articles.
Sites that are not specifically about other topics? How about places that are primarally focused on the US, because as discussed, it really is a US only problem.
Should every site everywhere only be posting about social problems? Can no other topic ever be discussed until every socail problem is solved?
HN is actually pretty broad given its topic of things that are of interest to 'hackers' which is why articles like this will be posted and discussed but there are other things that are also of interest to 'hackers.' Those will also be posted and discussed.
This isn't to say that most alternative politicians are better, of course, but the only voice you truly have in a democracy is to vote the bastards out. And keep voting them out year after year until the survivors finally get the idea.
To me, the police, prosecutors, and judges in the OP are, really, just out to attack the poor people, just attack them like wild, mad, rabid dogs, attack them for no good reason, just declare war on them, out of hate, arrogance, self-exalted ego, like thugs that just like to beat up on people.
Let's see:
"Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
Amendment VII
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
So, the OP violated:
"Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, ..."
The trials are not "speedy". Any judge who has any respect for the Constitution and is not out just to act like a wild, mad, rabid dog out to declare war on the poor people should immediately dismiss any case without a "speedy trial".
So, the OP violated:
"Amendment VII
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, ..."
The "right of trial by jury" was not "preserved". Instead, the delays in the system and the excessive bail canceled that right.
So, the OP violated:
"Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
The bail was deliberately excessive and the jail situation "inflicted" "cruel and unusual punishments" as a means to coerce a guilty plea without a trial.
In addition, from
"The rest of the file contained Tomlin’s criminal history, which included 41 convictions, ..."
the system clearly convicts and punishes the defendants based not on the crime they are accused of but often just on the record of crimes of the past, crimes for which they have "paid their debt to society", that is, multiple jeopardy.
In addition, it is now essentially illegal to carry more than, say, a few hundred dollars in cash. Seeing such cash, it is common for the police just to confiscate it, in wild violation of
"Amendment V
... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
So, from the OP:
"The documentation submitted by the arresting officer explained that his training and experience told him that plastic straws are 'a commonly used method of packaging heroin residue.'"
That's essentially the same as saying that "his training and experience told him that" commonly criminals breathe and that he observed the defendant breathing so arrested him.
The judge should have laughed the police officer out of the court room and asked the public defender to file charges of false arrest against the officer and bringing a nonsense legal case against the prosecutor. Instead, the judge just went along with wild, mad, rabid dog attack on the citizen.
No, clearly, actually his training and experience told him that the defendant was poor so should be viciously attacked with the intention of ruining his life -- the excuse was that he had in one hand a bottle of soft drink and in the other hand a soda straw.
Here the police, prosecutors, and judges are just declaring war on a large fraction of US citizens -- just war, no cause, no reason, wildly illegal and unconstitutional, very dirty business.
The whole system is wildly in conflict with the Constitution. If the US legal system had any honest functionality at all, then any lawyer should be able to make a motion that would shut down the whole situation coast to coast in an hour.
That left him unable to renew his driver's license, drastically impacting his ability to get work and pay child support.
He now, for unrelated reasons, has full custody of his kids. But he still can't get a driver's license to get a job to support his kids because he's still behind on that child support. For the kids he has in his house.
He deserves some responsibility for this, but it's like the system wants him to fail and fail hard.
If "understanding the poor" is your goal, you'd do well to dispense with the condescending generalizations.
But, mostly this was just me refuting your claim that I don't understand what it's like to be poor (and desperate). I could go on, in ways that don't have anything to do with organized crime, but I have to go now. It's really infuriating being told by someone that doesn't understand your experience that you don't understand your own experience.
Although now she owes him child support every month. But any payment she makes goes right back to her, to be deducted against what he owes her.[1]
Friends and family have given him a place to live where he acts as a stay-at-home dad, since for now working is useless (and the child require 24/7 monitoring by adults). If friends and family were to give him the money to pay off the debt, it would just give the money to his ex, and there is no guarantee that she would then start paying her side of the debt.[1] I guess she would then be the one unable to get a driver's license and go to work and pay child support, which is "justice" only in a weird warped sense of the word in that they each have suffered the same kind of injustice, and doesn't really help the kids.
[1] The ideal situation is to just have both debts neutralize each other and disappear, but it's not clear that this would be binding even if you could get the two angry ex'es to agree to it -- parents have signed off on child support in the past only to have the courts put it in place anyway, since the kids couldn't sign it away.
If a woman is not prepared to care for her children, she doesn't need to have any. Equality under the law means that if she can't pay, she can give up custody of her children to the father or a relative or adoption.
He has no claim upon her (he can't force her to have children) and she has no claim upon him.
Obviously, the child support should be formed in such a way that as long as the children lives with both parents (either because they are together or because the child lives 50/50 in separate locations), there is no need for transfer of funds. If one parent wants to (or is forced to, e.g. after abuse) give up caring for the children (so the child lives e.g. 100% with the mother and 0% with the father) only then should that parent have to pay for child support.
I'm not sure whether that is the way child support works in the US but it's pretty much the only reasonable way I can imagine.
Gotta love Kansas. /s
I recall an article about a case where a mother was filing for government assistance and was required to list the child's father's name on the application. She didn't know the name so she made one up, which happened to be the name of a real person. So the government started garnishing his wages.
He went to court because he was not the father and had never even met the mother, but the standard was "the best interest of the child" without exception. Since the child's real father was unknown, receiving child support from an unrelated person is better for the child than not receiving it from anyone, so the court said he had to pay anyway.
By that logic, your colleague shouldn't have to pay now that he has full custody of the children, because it isn't in the best interest of the children for the parent with custody to be paying "child support" to the parent without custody. But that would require these things to be decided based on logic and precedent rather than politics and random chance. (And I'm only remembering an article I read some years ago; I have no idea what the law is today in your jurisdiction.)