Monday, July 16, 2018

Innocent Until Proven Guilty, But Only If You Can Pay

Peyser ended up stuck in jail for six months while awaiting his trial not because he was a threat to society-he was a septuagenarian with no criminal record who hadn't actually injured anyone-but because he didn't have enough money to pay for bail.

If Peyser wanted to fight these charges from outside of a jail cell, he needed to either cough up cash or pay a bail bondsman a portion of the cost to front the money for him.

"If you tell the judge you can't pay the bail, the judge drops any pretense whatsoever of impartiality," he says.

"If you pay the bail, you're a regular citizen. If you don't pay the bail, you're treated as guilty until you're proven innocent."

"Everybody who works in the system knows that the assembly-line cash bail system coerces guilty pleas," says Civil Rights Corps founder and executive director Alec Karakatsanis.

In Maryland last year, judges were told to consider money bail as a final resort rather than as the default and to not hold defendants in detention solely because they couldn't afford the bail amounts.

Will the judges who previously refused to look at risk factors when setting bail for defendants like Bill Peyser simply resort to "Widespread preventative detention" if cash bail ceases to be an option? He also worries about changes that might permit for-profit companies to take control of pretrial monitoring services and then shift costs over to defendants, by making them pay for their own monitoring even though they haven't been convicted of a crime.

http://reason.com/archives/2018/07/14/innocent-until-proven-guilty-b 

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