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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Bail is, btw, almost certainly unconstitutional and should be abolished

Had the framers wanted to prohibit bail, the 8th Amendment would be one word shorter; as it is, only excessive bail is unconstitutional.

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Yes, the Constitution implicitly permits bail by prohibiting excessive bail. (That's at least one way to read it.) The courts have also asserted that bail is somehow "fundamental" to the system of law (it's not to be questioned). Still what's not clear is (1) whether the power to deny bail is constitutional (some might think refusal of bail, in effect a bail that cannot payed at all for any amount of money is rather excessive) and (2) whether excessive should be understood as relative of the client's ability to pay. In fact Stack makes it somewhat clear that the defendant's ability to pay partially determines excessive... and yet here we are: every year millions of people go to jail because they are denied bail or they cannot pay. It should be clear that the current system where the government locks up millions of defendants because they cannot pay bail (or are refused jail) is not what was intended by the framers. Abolishing bail or ensuring that bail is always and everywhere affordable and reasonable is the way to go. A startup like Promise offers a perhaps much-needed band-aid but the entire system is broken and should be revisited.

> Promise offers a perhaps much-needed band-aid but the entire system is broken and should be revisited.

That's actually my biggest fear with private services like Promise — a new for-profit bandaid both reduces the pressure to reform the underlying system just as it is gathering real steam, and creates a new set of parties with a profit interest in preserving the underlying system.

Thank you for your thoughts. I wanted to share a couple recent reference points on the topic of bail/pretrial detention. Here is a cite to a recent CA case that came out of SF and discusses what judges must consider to set bail: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-appeal/1886990.html. In CA, we also have Senate Bill 10 that is pending and deals with changes to the pretrial release system: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

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