Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

>Kramer signed a $500,000 unsecured bond, while Paepcke signed the same type of bond for $250,000.

Sigh ... to echo my earlier comment[1], this (further) makes the bail/bond process feel like something of a farce. It's "bail is set at -- zomg! -- $250 million!!" ... and then the accused walks out because his parents accepted a lien on a property worth 1-2% of that, and two people said "trust me bro" for another 0.3%.

Sure, they will "come after" the parents for the full $250 million if SBF flees. But everyone involved knows they're not getting anywhere close to that, even at the most optimistic.

Stop it. Just friggin stop it. Lower the bail, or require meaningful assurance of it, keeping in mind just how slippery of a defendant you're dealing with.

Wittgenstein: "A wheel that turns, though nothing turns with it, is not part of the mechanism."

A bail that is set, but will never be collected, is not part of the assurance to appear at trial.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34599868

Get rid of cash bail entirely.

You're either a flight risk / threat to the community, or you're not. The ability to part with a couple grand doesn't change those facts. No one presumed innocent should sit in jail for months/years awaiting trial just because of their bank balance or lack thereof.

This is a confusing solution to the above problem because without bail he would still just walk.

Unless I am missing something, the original commenter seems mad that the bail is easily met and he walks. How would letting him walk anyway fix it?

It does have a point though. I believe what they where trying to say is presumed innocence and ability to walk, or sufficent evidence to hold.

So really the issue is that it should be easier to hold people.

It should be harder to hold people as a thoughtless default, and easier to revoke (non-cash) bail when they breach that trust.

When the bail is revoked you have to send resources to detain the person. Putting not only the person wanted, but the resources and everyone around the wanted person in danger.

When cash bail is imposed on someone who can't afford it, we spend substantially more resources keeping them in jail pending trial. Rikers Island costs half a million a year per detainee.

https://queenseagle.com/all/detained-until-proven-guilty

> Bryson’s son, whose name is being withheld for fear of reprisal, is one of 306 people incarcerated on Rikers Island whose pre-trial detention has lasted three years or longer. There are an additional 441 detainees who have been held for two to three years and nearly 1,000 who have been held for one to two years, according to the New York City Department of Correction.

Pretrial detention also puts the presumed-innocent person at near-certain risk of job loss and other negative consequences.

I'm not arguing against you.

I'm sure the location of the jail and the Cost of Living of the surrounding area has an affect on the cost.

> Rikers Island costs half a million a year per detainee.

Which averages down to $1,369 a day or $57/hr per prisoner. Which is about the same cost as 2 average NYcops[0] (Maybe NYC is higher?) per hour.

So I guess the cost to house and the cost to retrieve are about the same minus the admin/paperwork? Although that assumes the 2 cops show up and the person is exactly where they say they are and go into custody without issue.

[0] https://www.indeed.com/career/police-officer/salaries/New-Yo...

Two cops can hopefully capture more than one bail jumper in a year, so no, not the same cost.

Those are state cases not federal cases. The system of bail is different.

Nevertheless, the real issue there is refusing to set trial dates and dragging out the proceedings, typically done in the hope of getting the accused to plea guilty so an up and coming DA can brag about their prosecution rate when they run for Governor.

This is another set of parallel rules for the rich and poor. SBF can walk for less than 1% of his bail amount, but someone stuck in jail on a $1000 bail can't make a similar deal for $5.

Find me a bail bondsman who is willing to track down a fugitive for $5. That’s what this money pays for: bounty hunters. And they have a minimum wage.

I feel like the existence of bounty hunters is a problem in and of itself.

Ahh okay, I actually missed this detail. That is a big problem.

> SBF can walk for less than 1% of his bail amount,

Because the main purpose of the bail amount in his case is because bail secomes a virtually automatic default judgement, and its not as easy to keep a person out of reach of criminal process and all their assets out of reach of a default judgement in favor of the US government as to do just the former, so him and his parents being on the hook for the full value is a significant additional cost to attempting flight.

Most people should get released pending trial.

Those who are flight risks or ongoing threats to the community should not.

Their bank balance is irrelevant to the decision, and making it part of the decision winds up with precisely these sorts of goofy scenarios.

Is SBF a flight risk? Yes. Handle that via monitoring (as they're doing, clearly) and if he keeps wriggling around his release conditions, revoke his bail.

Jailing people costs money. If they can be trusted to take care of themselves with some added motivation in the form of bail, then you can save the city/state money that can be used in more important ways.

Getting rid of cash bail doesn't get rid of bail.

People show up in court at roughly the same rate whether there's cash bail or just plain bail; there's little evidence it moves the needle.

Wouldn't the argument on the other side be that there are in fact gray areas when it comes to flight risk?

That no one is 100% a flight risk or not a flight risk but rather there is a spectrum and the question is to what a degree they are a flight risk.

In that world knowing that your parents will lose their home and you'll be directly responsible for powerful people losing significant sums of money if you run decreases (though can never totally eliminate) the odds of someone fleeing.

Alternatively you could argue that discerning if someone is a flight risk or not is prohibitively difficult so their willingness to have their parents / acquaintances indebt themselves on their behalf is a good enough proxy for their intent?

If someone's enough of a flight risk to earn $250M bail, their position on said spectrum seems pretty clear.

There's little evidence cash bail changes the calculus.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/cash-bail-reform-is... (motivated, but well cited)

> In places that have implemented cash bail reform, rates of pretrial re-arrest remain unchanged.

> At the same time, numerous studies show pretrial incarceration has a “criminogenic effect,” meaning that it increases rather than decreases crime. One study found that cash bail assignment was associated with a 6 percent to 9 percent increase in recidivism. After 23 hours in pretrial incarceration, any additional time in detention has been “associated with a consistent and statistically significant increase in the likelihood of rearrest.”

https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/2/21/22944871/new-york-bail-ref...

> Garden State voters enacted their own bail reform laws in 2014 after a special committee studied the issue for nine months with a group of prosecutors, lawmakers and reformers. The law took full effect in 2017 and after 5 years of implementation, it has apparently achieved its purpose. The number of people imprisoned pre-trial on bail of $2,500 or less fell from more than 1,500 before the bail reform laws to just 14 people last year, according to the New Jersey court system. At the same time, the rate of people awaiting trial who commit additional “indictable offenses” has remained flat at 13.8%. And the appearance rate — how often people awaiting trial come back to court — increased slightly last year, from 90% in 2019 to 90.9% in 2020.

I don't think I'm informed enough to have a strong opinion on this topic, if anything I'd probably lean generally in the direction of reducing bail requirements but I do think it's important to point out:

> If someone's enough of a flight risk to earn $250M bail, their position on said spectrum seems pretty clear.

My understanding is that money was only one of many conditions of SBF's bail. Others included 24/7 onsite monitoring conducted by a third party at his expense.

So at least in this specific case there's more to the story than just other guaranteeing the money for the cash portion of his bail.

If the alternative is life in prison, why would you care about the house of someone else? Why would you surrender and accept life in prison?

I guess the burden of proof for being a flight risk is reasonbly high? Which makes sense? As long as the bail amount is reasonable for the individual (its not too much that they cannot afford, but its enough of an incentive for them to reappear in court), it seems fine? I think at the level of wealth of SBF/the level of wealth of his network, declaring him a flight risk kinda makes more sense and denying bail. I dunno law though.

> this (further) makes the bail/bond process feel like something of a farce.

This is exactly how the federal bail system has always worked, being released while on trial is literally a constitutional right.

That wasn’t the part that I was calling a farce — see the next three paragraphs. Literally.

So the court doesn't collect the entire amount? What's the point?

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