Overview:
The County and City of Los Angeles cannot require cash bail from defendants who are arrested for non-violent and non-serious offenses while awaiting an arraignment following a ruling from a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge this week
The County and City of Los Angeles cannot require cash bail from defendants who are arrested for non-violent and non-serious offenses while awaiting an arraignment following a ruling from a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge this week.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday precluding cash bail and providing 60 days for everyone involved to come up with new options for pretrial detention that could include the use of electronic monitoring or releasing individuals under a personal promise to appear in court.
The bail prohibition applies to the period of time between an individual’s arrest and an arraignment before a judge. During that time, typically between one and five days, the only qualification for bail is a monetary amount determined by a preset schedule. Once individuals get to court, a judge can utilize several factors in determining ongoing bail including determinations of the defendants character, location and past behavior and those considerations are not impacted by the ruling. Suspects accused of violent felonies or other serious misdemeanors are excluded from the injunction.
The plaintiffs in the case said those with money are able to leave jail immediately while those without the required cash may lose their jobs or incur other penalties for charges that may be ultimately dismissed. They also argue the poor conditions in Los Angeles County jails and the threat of physical violence amount to inhumane conditions for those who can’t pay.
In his ruling, Judge Riff said he “implored” the parties to answer if an injunction would increase crime or increase the number of individuals failing to appear for their court cases but only one side of the debate responded to his request.
“The plaintiffs have produced a vast amount of evidence, via four well-qualified expert witnesses and more than a dozen academic studies, that decisively show the answer to these questions is ‘no.’ Their evidence has demonstrated that it is highly likely that the opposite is true: secured money bail regimes are associated with increased crime and increased (Failure To Appear) as compared with unsecured bail or release on non-financial conditions. What’s more, the evidence demonstrates that secured money bail, as now utilized in Los Angeles County, is itself ‘criminogenic’ — that is, secured money bail causes more crime than would be the case were the money bail schedules no longer enforced,” he wrote.
He said the plaintiffs made a strong showing that the established system wasn’t designed to achieve the goal of reducing criminal activity.
“The defendants have offered no evidence, via departmental or third-party witnesses, departmental data, expert testimony, academic studies, or otherwise, to controvert any of plaintiffs’ evidence,” he said.
Said the defendants did make an argument, that the Sheriff and Chief of Police are required to utilize the cash bail system as it was established by the Courts themselves and that they are just enforcers of someone else’s rules. However, the court said lawsuits targeting enforcers and not creators of a potentially unconstitutional law are not unusual.
The judge said both sides can point to sensational anecdotes to support their individual claims: namely that bail is either an unconstitutional injustice targeting the impoverished or that it is a bulwark against turning loose dangers individuals with a propensity to commit more crime. However, the court had to make a decision based on evidence, or a lack thereof.
Los Angeles County had previously had a zero bail schedule prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic that expired last year.
That system was not conceived as a part of larger efforts at zero cash bail reform. Local courts said the larger efforts at zero-dollar bail initiatives seek, as a matter of public policy, to permanently eliminate cash bail as part of bail reform but the temporary system was a response to the ability of disease to spread among inmates during pretrial incarceration. While that system was temporary, it also excluded serious crimes.