New York City’s Plan To Eliminate Cash Bail For Low-Level Defendants Begins

The NYCLU believes that the City should go a step further and abolish cash bail for all those accused of misdemeanors and non-violent felonies; their statement notes that “at any given time, nearly 40% of the Rikers population is there exclusively because they can not afford to pay their bail”.

The $18 million city plan, detailed to The Associated Press ahead of the announcement on Wednesday, allows judges beginning next year to replace money-bail for about 3,000 low-risk defendants with supervision options including regular check-ins, text-message reminders and connecting them with drug or behavioral therapy.

Although Browder would not have benefited from the changes to pretrial detention, they would have applied to James Murdough, a mentally ill and homeless man who died in a hot cell in Rikers previous year.

But in New York, unlike most states, efforts to fully do away with bail are complicated by state law, which requires judges to consider defendants’ risk of flight, not their risk of reoffending, when determining bail conditions.

The mayor’s office appears to be targeting the 14 percent of yearly defendants who can not afford to post bail.

Goldberg noted that the city already has pilot programs of supervised release in Manhattan and Queens, but they are under-utilized, he said.

The supervised release program is one way for the city to address issues surrounding bail without a change in state law-which Judge Lippman has been calling for since 2013 but is unlikely to come any time soon in a gridlocked and dysfunctional State Legislature.

The Associated Press reported there are about 45,000 defendants held on bail throughout the New York City courts. “We applaud Mayor de Blasio for leading the charge to make risk, and not money, the deciding factor in who stays in jail before trial”.

On Wednesday, New York City officials announced a plan to eliminate bail for thousands of low-level or non-violent offenders.

Releasing defendants to community supervision based on so-called risk-assessment tools that gauge a person’s threat to public safety is increasingly done in cities and states throughout the country. Browder, 22, had been arrested when he was 16 and unable to make $3,000 bail on charges that he stole a backpack.

And criminal justice advocates add that there is little, if any, difference in the rate of return for defendants who are released without bail pending their next court date versus those who are released on a low bail. Participants will also have access to social services, officials said.

“Despite being the barometer for the criminal justice system throughout the nation, the risk here is very simply that somebody may fall into the system that will end up committing another crime”, said ex- federal prosecutor Michael Wildes.

“The expansion of supervised release programs should work hand in hand with the Council’s Citywide bail fund to significantly reduce both the financial and human costs of needless incarceration”, Ms. Mark-Viverito said.