The new bail laws in NY are so bad…
…that even the leftist-in-charge says they need reforming:
The Post reported Monday that de Blasio had convinced the state Office of Court Administration that revolving-door defendant Tiffany Harris — repeatedly arrested and released last month on misdemeanor assault and related offenses allegedly aimed at Jews — was too unstable to be on the streets unsupervised.
“We spoke with [OCA] after Ms. Harris’ assessment was left incomplete to determine next steps and discuss how to handle situations like this in the future,” said an administration press aide.
Rough translation: The lady threatened our political comfort zone and she isn’t the only one out there like that. So the mayor acted. And now he says he will act some more. Cuomo, too.
But even before the new laws were put in place, law enforcement was objecting to them and warning de Blasio et al that the consequences would be bad:
In April 2019, state lawmakers passed sweeping legislation restricting the use of cash bail and pretrial jailing. The laws were designed to stop the pattern of keeping poor people in jail before trial because they can’t afford bail.
While cash bail and jailing are still allowed under most violent felony cases, opponents have homed in on certain parts of the law that ban setting bail for second-degree burglary, robbery and major drug crimes outside of trafficking charges.
The laws also change rules around how prosecutors and accused criminals share evidence.
The lawmakers object to the reforms, saying they are unfair to crime victims; to law enforcement agencies and district attorneys that must turn over massive amounts of pre-trial materials in just 15 days; and to counties that must create at their expense an agency to monitor defendants released on the new no-bail provisions.
More on the details of the “reforms” can be found here [emphasis mine; also comments of mine are in brackets]:
For most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, cash bail is no longer permitted [note that misdemeanors of a violent nature such as misdemeanor assault and battery are included in the “no bail” requirement]. Judges must release individuals charged with those crimes with no cash bail, either on their own recognizance or with release conditions designed to ensure that the individual returns to court, such as pretrial supervision and text message reminders for court dates [oh, I’m sure text messages will do the trick].
For those charged with the most serious crimes — including almost all violent felonies and certain nonviolent felonies, such as sex offenses and witness tampering — very little has changed in New York. In those cases, judges will retain the option to set cash bail.
In addition, the law has not changed what judges are permitted to consider in setting bail. Unlike almost all other states, judges in New York are not permitted to detain people due to concerns that they will pose a danger to the community if released. This part of the legislation is consistent with longstanding law in New York, which has prohibited the consideration of dangerousness in setting bail since 1971 in order to ensure that those charged with crimes are afforded the presumption of innocence.[This is a fairly shocking fact.]
Despite the estimate that approximately 90 percent of arrests will result in release, the law did not provide funding for the implementation of bail reforms. This could prove problematic as many more people are expected to be under pretrial supervision, which will require training on the new rules as well as resources such as pretrial officers and technology to provide text reminders for court dates.
The article goes on to explain that comparisons with the New Jersey system are invalid because although New Jersey loosened its bail system it did so after a great deal of study and thought, and it gave judges a great deal of discretion to consider dangerousness:
The [NJ] state’s system is now based on an individualized evaluation of whether a defendant is a flight risk or presents a danger of committing a crime while on release. To determine which release conditions are appropriate for each individual, police and judges undertake a standardized public safety assessment, which seeks to provide an objective and uniform measure of those two factors in each case.
Back to the NY law which also contained this little item:
And as disturbing as the bail changes seem, worse is on the way: Revisions in discovery procedure mean that defendants now free on no-bail will be told where key witnesses against them live; it takes little imagination to see where that will lead: Look for witness shortages, one way or another.
I would say “unbelievable” – except these days, it’s only too believable.
DeBlasio and Cuomo: The Two Horses Asses of the Apocalypse.
This is all about the worthless idea, beloved by leftists, of “disparate impact”, the worst excesses of the “disparity fallacy” having been wrought by Duke v Griggs Power (1971), truly one of the worst decisions ever by SCOTUS. Any statistical disparity negatively concerning blacks (such as suspensions from school for unruly behavior) will ALWAYS be explained by leftists as resulting from the malevolence of whites.
I work in the New York State court system, which has been screaming about this, unheard, for months now. One of the weirdest things about the bail reform law is that it was rammed through by Democrats in secret, as part of last spring’s state budget negotiations (yes, New York routinely keeps its budget process secret from the taxpayers whose money it intends to spend — just one of many indefensible aspects of government in the Empire State), with no public debate or consultation with prosecutors, police, judges etc. Then when the news got out, municipalities and law enforcement begged for more time to put infrastructure into place to manage it all — but NO, the law had to go into effect untouched on New Year’s Day, ready or not, here we go.
The bail reform law is bad enough (and more on that in a minute), but the state is rising up in such outrage over that aspect of the new law that we can assume some kind of change will be made fairly quickly. The really destructive and alarming aspect of the law is the new discovery and trial-readiness provisions that require prosecutors and police to turn all of their proof over to the defense no later than 15 days after arraignment (with an additional 30 days in some exceptional cases). In addition to revealing the identities of witnesses to all defendants — including, say, those with gang or organized crime connections — and other frightening public-safety consequences, here’s one effect that time limit has already had in my community. Around New Year’s Day, a carload of people from elsewhere were picked up riding around the county seat with drugs packaged for sale in their out-of-state rental car. The police let them go uncharged — not just because of the bail reform law, but because under the new discovery laws, the drugs will have to be tested and proven to be what everyone knows they are, and the test results turned over to the defense, within that 15-day time limit. Our state lab already takes three or four months to do that testing, and that was before the new law. Police will have to wait until they get the results back even to CHARGE the defendants. When they’re received, the police can go out and arrest and arraign the defendants — if they can still find them, which, of course, there’s no reason to think they will. In effect, the law creates an open ticket for drug sellers in rural communities like ours, almost none of whom live here or have the kind of lives where they are likely to be find-able in some other city months after an arrest. Nobody’s talking about changing this part of the law — this is how law enforcement is going to work in New York for the foreseeable future, no matter what happens with the bail laws.
As for the bail laws, Neo’s linked article does not paint a fully accurate picture. It comes from the Brennan Center for Justice, which is not a neutral organization — go to the link and you’ll notice that one of the organization’s stated goals is to end “mass incarceration,” which is one of the stated purposes of bail reform. The article’s statement that “almost all violent felonies and certain nonviolent felonies, such as sex offenses and witness tampering” will still be subject to bail is only technically true. New York’s definition of “Nonviolent felonies” is eccentric and includes many crimes that you and I would likely consider to be quite violent indeed. Here are a few of the “nonviolent felonies” for which bail now cannot be imposed:
Vehicular Assault (multiple counts)
Aggravated Vehicular Assault
Aggravated Assault on a child under 11 years-old
Aggravated Assault on a child under 11 years-old as a Hate Crime
Criminal Obstruction of Breathing
Aggravated Vehicular Manslaughter
2nd degree Manslaughter
3rd, 4th and 5th degree arson, including arson as a hate crime
Aggravated harassment as a hate crime
Assisting in female genital mutilation
various violent crimes against animals, such as killing a police dog or police horse
And many more!
Bail reform was trumpeted as respecting the presumption of innocence — which is, of course, a laudable goal. But in the old days, courts did not assume that people had committed the crimes for which they were held — as Neo pointed out, New York courts were already not allowed to consider public safety as a reason to grant bail. Instead, courts examined criteria that had little or nothing to do with the charged crime but were pertinent to the likelihood that this particular defendant would appear for trial, such as ties to the community, local relatives, jobs, past history of showing up in court on time, and such. Now, none of that matters. The ONLY relevant criterion (for misdemeanors and “nonviolent” felonies) is the seriousness of the crime the person allegedly committed. I am mystified as to how this single-minded focus on the seriousness of the charged crime is more respectful of the presumption of innocence than the old focus on matters that were the same whether or not the person was guilty.
At the same time that these laws took effect, New York media filled up with articles about how NY is one of the only states in the union that is steadily losing population. Gee, wonder why?
I work in the New York State court system,
We have a biographical doo-dad in common.
What gets me is the Sonny Cuomo made a point of his time as a prosecutor when he ran for state attorney-general in 2006. On a televised joint panel discussion, a member of the media wheedled out of him an admission that he’d only held the job for 18 months. We can see the effect on his thinking at that time.
Wouldn’t it be something to see NY State go for Trump on November 3?
Once again, we see that the liberal assumption that all or most change is good is a recipe for perpetual snafu. Conservatives believe that changes should be done carefully.
If all change is good, then what about the changes that Hitler brought forth in Germany, or the Commies in many countries?
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. WHO was complaining about the bail system in NY state? I suspect the complainers were the SJWs who didn’t like the “disproportionate” effect of laws applied to lawbreakers.
Thanks Neo and Mrs. Whatsit.
Several years ago I downloaded a free copy of “Democracy in America” and got 20 or 30 pages into it before I wearied of the complete lack of formatting. (You get what you pay for?)
Anyway, de Tocqueville discusses the American justice system as of 1840 (approx.) and admires its originality in some ways and is dubious or surprised by some of its classist aspects imported, he presumes, from the U.K. His example of the latter is the cash bail system. He, being an aristocrat, is also skeptical of America’s egalitarian notions, but thinks that if we really meant it we would not have cash bail.
I remember thinking at the time, “Thank God the Dems haven’t taken this concept to heart.” Ha! The joke is on me.
I don’t know precisely how the old system works, but normally accused folks who lack a big bank or investment account go to bail bondsmen, who require fractional(?) cash or collateral deposits. This is often provided by parents or middle class aunts or uncles etc. Then when the accused fails to appear, those deposits are used to pay bounty hunters. Plus relatives who supplied the deposit are motivated to maybe provide what relevant information they have.
So all this gets eliminated for most crimes?
In NY judges are not allowed to consider public safety in controlling the release of suspects? Public safety was the whole flipping point of the system, wasn’t it?
Gringo, what started the flap was a genuinely terrible situation in NYC where people — generally very young and very poor, and predominantly black — were spending months and years at Riker’s Island because they couldn’t come up with the bail for relatively minor misdemeanors. Riker’s Island was a hugely overcrowded, vicious place and the NYC criminal justice system was so overloaded that people were waiting years to stand trial. The situation came to public attention when a young man committed suicide after being released after spending three years on bail at Riker’s for allegedly stealing a backpack that had some valuables in it. (After holding him for three years, the prosecution dropped the charges for lack of evidence. It’s completely unclear whether he actually stole the backpack or not.) So, yes, most people do agree that some kind of reform was absolutely needed. But what they came up with, by eliminating cash bail altogether for most crimes, was a statewide response to a NYC problem that threw out the baby with the bathwater.
I would like to know, myself, who benefited from pushing the thing through so quickly, in secret, without the usual legislatiive compromises and debate. It was Democrats, of course — but that’s not enough of an answer, especially given the political shrapnel that people like Cuomo who backed it are now taking. I don’t get it.
Mrs. Whatsit, thanks for the information.
Mrs Whatsit – ditto thanks.
What you explained demonstates again the reasons why the Democrat solutions to actual problems invariably fail: they substitute some kind of fantasy world for reality.
They misidentify the problem: prosecutorial corruption and incompetence magically becomes racism and white-supremacist oppression; so, maybe there is some overlap among the actors, but the problems aren’t the same thing, and require different solutions (Affirmative Action, differential impact statutes, Title IX letters, etc).
They misidentify the solution: reforming the DA and police is too hard for the cowards in the legislature, so they put the monkey on the back of the judges and courts (abortion, same-sex marriage, etc).
They know that debate will both lengthen the reform process and maybe yield some credit to the Republicans if they compromise on common-sense policies, so they push their bill through by stealth (PPACA, anyone?)
They apply a fix state-wide to a problem that was endemic to one city. (cf: Federal laws that micromanage city affairs.)
They try to fix glaring holes that would have been obvious under the skipped debate, and make things worse (everything).
Then they blame it all on the GOP, which hasn’t seriously been in power in NY or NYC for decades.
Art Deco, I forgot to respond to your remark about our shared “biographical doo-dad.” That’s rather cool! Are you upstate or down?