Instead of the duly appointed Judge making the decision, the power is delegated to a "Risk Assessment" board. (i.e., a bunch of unaccountable social workers).<p>So, instead of an individual Judge getting flack for excessive bail, he can sleep at night having had his authority delegated to an anonymous 'committee' that can refuse to set bail altogether.<p>It seems the general public -- at least in California -- has little idea of the enormous role in the judicial system played by bail bondsmen. I know dozens. They are all a bit sketchy. But, they are the front-line dealing with the lowest rungs of society. They do a lot of good, ensure their charges stay out of trouble, and show up to court. They do it for a profit. But, that doesn't diminish their role.<p>I'm interested in seeing how it will turn out. I wish them well, but I've found abuses are more likely when the responsibility for a person is diffused amongst many.
I'm not sure if I agree with this change (there are positives and negatives to the bail system), but I love that in a federal system individual states are free to experiment like this. Maybe it will work, and then other states can adopt it.
If I had to speculate, I'd say this is primarily a reaction to improved ability to track people, such that it is next to impossible for a person to jump bail. You can't get on a plane, or otherwise try and cross the border, because your passport will be checked. If you drive across the country, then your credit cards/bank accounts will be tracked, and security cameras can pick up and recognize your face. I imagine that there is today fewer people not showing up to court and getting away with it.<p>If so, then it seems like a good trade-off - those facing trial have more freedom, and threats to there freedom can't be used in a coercive manner, but those who aren't facing trial have less privacy.
I see nobody has mentioned the "Freedom Funds," so, I will do so now. One of the better known ones: <a href="http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/</a><p>What these are revolving, non-profit bail funds. They screen those who require bail as to maximize the recovery of the money, choosing those that are thought to have good prospects in showing up to court. They seem to be quite effective at this, so I think there is a reasonable chance the law's "commissions" can also enjoy some accuracy. It also lends some ideas as to how such commissions can be held accountable, benchmarked, or enjoy some internal competition.
Bail seems like an outdated concept that has ballooned into a mechanism to extort money with little public benifit. When a deposit was enough to keep someone charged with a crime from running off to the next town and never being heard from again it was probably effective.
Now, if bail is a major factor in whether a defendant returns to court or turns wanted outlaw, the charges are either too minor to warrent bail, or so serious that paying for release probably should not have ever been an option. Bail is just an initial deposit, a checksum to make sure no one gets out free: either cash or tax dollars for the administration and encarceration of poor defendants. Hope this doesn't turn into a system of simply optimizing bail payment per offer by setting custom amounts.
This is terrible. Pretrial detention in rough California county jails is often used as a bargaining chip by prosecutors to get quick convictions in exchange for probationary sentences. <i>"Don't like the constant threat of being raped or assaulted every day? Sign the deal, take a felony conviction, and you'll get out on probation tonight".</i><p>This won't result in more poor people being released. It will simply result in a higher percentage of middle and upper class people being extorted into guilty pleas that they would not otherwise take, under the threat of losing their careers and families as a result of many months, and in a large number of cases, years, of pretrial detention.
I'd remind people that when dealing with a bad system, a less bad system that still has bad points is still an improvement.<p>What you really want is a system that allows further changes based on assessment of it's faults.
Other countries do just fine without a bail system, so I'm not sure why the US needs one. Is it because of slowness in the legal system and you don't want to have people in jail while they wait to their trial? Because then maybe one would need to look at reducing the amount of time between being jailed and put on trial.
For communities already pushing the extremes of what Prop 47 and Prop 57 allow, this will be one more blow to the common citizenry. Places like Santa Cruz have a very high recidivism rates where serial bike thieves, petty theft, even violence towards common citizens are maybe ticketed and at best brought in and released in a couple of hours will use this as further excuse to do nothing.<p>Examples - woman assaulted in front of her child at a city park with a ranger near by, perp didn't even get a ticket. Known bike thieves carrying a bike while riding another - nothing done.<p>This happens in a number of CA cities (Berkeley, SF, Santa Cruz). It's always interesting to see how ideals of one party left unchecked drive a city/state in to the ground.
I can't find it now, but I was reading a Reddit post on this from someone who works in the California court system.<p>His/her opinion was that this wasn't going to really change much. People arrested for minor crimes are often released on their own recognizance and major crime they aren't offer bail terms they can meet. Under this new system, the same people will likely be released without bail and the same people will be kept behind bars.<p>Interestingly, if you skip out on a court date, an arrest warrant is issued, but they expire after 3 years. Apparently getting people to show up for their court date is a huge problem as the consequences are pretty minor unless you encounter law enforcement.
> work with lawmakers and the state’s top Supreme Court justice [...] Under last-minute changes, judges would have greater power to decide [...] Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, who helped craft the legislation<p>It's an improvement, sure, but no surprise consulting a branch or two of government to draft it would end up with more power to a branch. What are the objective criteria for the "risk analysis" that divides the accused into the three risk levels? And how often do extenuating circumstances really occur that require judicial override sans approval from an additional independent council?
Both judges and "risk-assessment tools" have biases. Judges have unconscious biases and risk-assessment tools are fed biased data. So I'm not confident this will actually help matters.
A relatively new podcast has a really enlightening episode on the bail system [1]. Episode two. Highly recommended.<p>The big takeaways for me:
- the process for setting bail prices is very opaque, with little accountability. Many districts have extraordinary or unmanageably high bail for common crimes.
- if you are poor, and can't afford bail, you either have to stay in jail, meaning you are apart from your family, unable to work, or more often than not, pay a bail bondsman a non-refundable amount of money to get you out of jail, meaning, before you are charged, before you are guilty (or innocent), you end up paying a fine.<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/justice_podcast?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/justice_podcast?lang=en</a>
To add another data point to the discussion -- I recently discovered that the bail system is sometimes used as a tool to force women into prostitution; see <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jun/29/revealed-how-us-sex-traffickers-recruit-jailed-women-for-prostitution-the-trap" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jun/29/r...</a>.<p>TLDR is that pimps find women who are up for bail, offer to bail them out, and then threaten to rescind the bail if they don't start working for them.<p>It seems like the easier fix would be to forbid a bail payment from being rescinded once it's made, but removing bail entirely also solves the problem.
I haven't seen numbers... does anybody know, or have sources, for the rate of skipping trial (with and without bail)?<p>I wonder if, like excessively long prison sentences, that increasing bail has limited returns (in terms of getting people to show up for their trials). IE, most people will come to trial anyways. Those that are likely to skip will skip regardless of bail amount.