A class action lawsuit has been filed against the city and county of San Francisco, and the State of California, to scrap the cash bail system for folks who are accused of crimes. If successful it could reverberate not simply across the state but the rest of the country.
You’re presumed innocent of committing a crime until you are proven guilty of committing a crime. In the interim however, you’re not trusted to show up and go through the process. That’s where bail comes in. Yeah … you’re innocent until proven guilty, but since we don’t trust you to show up we require $100K from you. You don’t have $100K so you go to a bail bondsperson who takes a fee of $10K from you and “collateral”—real property that can be tapped in case you actually don’t show up. In exchange for that, the bail bondsperson issues a bond: a promise that you will show up. WAIT. STOP RIGHT THERE. Why doesn’t the court just take my $10K and my promise to show up?! Because, that’s why … stay focused, one thing at a time … the charges against you are dropped and you are a free person; you don’t get that $10K back from the bail person, and you have to now figure out how to live life with $10K less than you had before. Oh, and by the way, the time you spent in jail gathering up that $10K cost you your job, your rent was late so you got an eviction notice, your kids were truant from school and now child protective services is poking into your life, your car got towed from the last place you parked it and there are fees attached to getting it back, you apply for a new job and a) take a chance and tell them why you lost the old one or b) don’t tell them and hope they don’t find out from your former employer who they will be calling for a reference … you get the idea.
Which is why the lawsuit is asking for cash bail to be done away with. For those who cannot simply write a check to cover the bail amount, or don’t have property or access to property and bank accounts to cover the bail amount, the choices are limited: the scenario nightmare described in the previous paragraph; stay in jail until you go to court; plead guilty, even though you are innocent just so you can get out of jail and tend to your life. I’m sorry but for me, horrific choices just really ain’t choices.
According to The Economist:
“ … 1,800 San Franciscans every year are detained before their trials because they are poor. This violates the 14th Amendment, the lawsuit reads: the due-process and equal-protection guarantees “have long prohibited imprisoning a person because of the person’s inability to make a monetary payment”. Yet that is just what San Francisco’s bail schedule does. Even the city’s former sheriff, Ross Mirkarimi, laments the injustice and inefficiency of its bail policy. Most inmates in its jails have been charged with minor crimes or misdemeanors like public urination or petty larceny and are at scant risk of ducking their trials and compounding their legal woes. Jailing these people before their trials costs the city. It would be cheaper and more humane, he suggests, to use pre-trial services like electronic monitoring to usher defendants back to court. To take the accused out of their homes and away from their jobs, Mr Mirkarimi notes, “furthers the destruction and ruination of people and families in San Francisco.”
It makes sense that San Francisco would be part of this “experiment.” No jail should be considered pleasant or “home away from home,” but at least SF tries to put a humanitarian face on its county jail system. Condoms have been freely distributed since the 1980s, and recently, a plan was announced to integrate transgender female inmates into the general female population, recognizing their identity and not their biology. Previously, transgender women had been held in a special unit away from other inmates.
In Texas, after Sandra Bland was viciously assaulted and wrongfully arrested by a Texas state trooper in July of 2015, she was charged with assaulting the officer. She made contact with friends and family members in an attempt to get bailed out of jail. One of Bland’s sisters was working on getting her out however Bland may have been unaware of that and felt despondent, thinking that her family abandoned her. That despondency led to her suicide in the Waller County Jail on July 13, 2015. So saith Waller County officials in their rebuttal to a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Bland’s family. While it remains to be seen whether that is what truly happened or not, one thing is definite: the system of cash bail required for people who have been arrested is problematic, causes unnecessary hardships and needs to be confronted head on.
The class-action lawsuit here in California has been filed by a group called Equal Justice Under Law.