Too Poor to Make Bail? Theyll Cage You for That: Lawsuit Exposes Horrors of the US InJustice SystemBy Lily Dane Harris County Jail the largest in Texas and the third largest in the US is accused of keeping most of its incarcerated population locked up for misdemeanors because they cant afford bail or trial. Now, Harris County, Sheriff Ron Hickman, and five bail-hearing magistrates are being sued by the human rights group Equal Justice Under Law for discriminating against poor prisoners. From the Houston Press: In Harris County, 77 percent of the jail population are people who have yet to be convicted of crimes, who are in jail because they cannot afford to get out. A recent studyby Gerald Wheeler, retired director of Harris County Pretrial Services and a doctoral researcher,found that 81 percent of people charged with misdemeanors will spend time in jail, and of those, a quarter of them cant afford bail costing $500 or less. Only 7 percent were released on a personal bond. The lawsuit, filed on May 19,alleges that Harris Countys use of a strict bail schedule is unconstitutional, given that magistrates rarely ever stray from itand therefore almost always fail to consider someones ability to pay, as is required by law. Equal Justice Under Law attorney Elizabeth Rossi told the Houston Press that she and other lawyerssat in on bail hearings about 20 different times. Thehearings only lasted about one minute, and the magistrate never even gave defendants a chance to speak, she said. In the lawsuit, the attorneys note that one magistrate even told someone that a bail hearing was not the forum for discussing his ability to pay bail. When another asked, Can I say something? the magistrate responded:You can talk to me all you want, but its not going to change the outcome. Im setting it according to the schedule. Rossi said that after watching enough of them, the banality of the hearings struck her: Everybody whos involved in that process, from the judge to the deputies, just looked at it as another routine doldrum chore they have to do, and no one is thinking about the individual standing in that red square, maybe in an orange jumpsuit, whos about to be told whether hell be released to his family or not based on whether he can pay an arbitrary dollar figure. At this point, Id like to remind readers that the MAJORITY of these people have not been even charged with a crime, and many of them are accused of committing misdemeanors most of which are victimless crimes. Lets look at the cases of two of the people who are being represented in this lawsuit, for example. Maranda ODonnell, age 22, was drivingto her moms house to pick up her four-year-old daughter. She got pulled over andwas arrested for driving with an invalid license. She couldnt afford the $2,500 bail an amount set according to a pre-determined schedule that does not consider individual circumstances.ODonnell had been living with a friend because she could not afford her own place, and had just started a new job when she was hauled off to jail. Loetha McGruder was driving through Jacinto City on May 19 when she was pulled over by a police officer for driving about 10 miles an hour over the 40-mph speed limit.Instead of getting a ticket, the young pregnant mother of two found herself locked up in the Harris County jail for five days on a misdemeanor charge failing to present proper ID to the officer simply because she couldnt afford the bail. From the Houston Chronicle: Court records show that a Harris County hearing officer did not indicate on a form why he set her bond at $5,000 the maximum amount Harris County designates for misdemeanors. McGruder had no criminal history and two young children, the elder suffering from Down syndrome. And he never asked McGruder if she could afford to pay bail though under both federal and state laws magistrates are required to consider individual defendants cases individually including their ability to post bail. Robert Ryan Ford, a Houston man jailed after being charged with shoplifting about $100 in cosmetics, is another victim named in the lawsuit. Attorneys for Equal Justice Under Law called for ODonnells release, and she was let go from jail two days after her arrest. They also requested a constitutional bail hearing, during which a judge would consider her ability to pay the bail assigned to her. They are nowasking for the same right for more than 500 detainees in Harris County. An investigation by the Houston Chronicle found that 55 pretrial detainees died in Harris County custody from 2009-2015, including offenders jailed for misdemeanor crimes like trespassing. Last month, Patrick Joseph Brown was beaten to death by two inmates jailed on felony charges. Brownwas detained because he could not afford the $3,000 bail he was slammed with after allegedly stealing a guitar a misdemeanor.One of the inmates charged in the assault on Brown was allowed to post bond and leave the jail because investigators had not realized a crime had been committed and had not reviewed the surveillance video, the department confirmed. When Browns death was reported in April, Hickman said his jail staff was short by several hundred jailers and noted that operations are being continued by ordering jailers to report for mandatory overtime. Jose Fierros, 58, was also being held there on a misdemeanor charge unlawfully carrying a pocketknife (what does that even mean?). Magda Fuentes said Fierros, her uncle, was approached by Houston police officers on the morning of June17, 2015. She said hed been sitting in a park, reading a newspaper while waiting to be picked up by a friend for a construction job. Fierros was arrested and held on $1,000 bond.After only four days in custody, he died from blunt-force head trauma. In 2015, Patrick Green died of meningitis while caged in the Harris County Jail. A lawsuit filed in April says Green was sick in hiscell for at least two days, wracked with fever, chills, and a splitting headache before medical workers finally took him to the jails clinic. The suit says that despite desperate pleas from other inmates to help him, Green was ignored until it was too late. Hiswas one of 16 deaths in the jail in 2015, at least 10 which were due to medical issues, according to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. Green was a recovering heroin addict who had relapsed and was locked up for violating his probation. Last year, his parents told theChronicle that their son pleaded guilty to the charge and decided to serve out his sentence because he knew he needed to confront the situation head-on. Tragedies like these are not limited to Harris County, of course. In March, the US Department of Justice, noting the many jail systems around the US that follow similar pay-or-stay bail schedules, sent guidelines to local courts denouncing debtors prisons. The DOJ letter said that funding municipal operations on revenue gleaned from fines is unconstitutional, and that courts should not jail people without proving the detaineewillfully refuses to pay a fine. The guidance urged courts to seek alternatives to locking up those unable to pay. Prisons and jails in the US are overcrowded, understaffed, unsanitary, and are filled with people who have been charged with victimless crimes. Here are the (terrifying) facts: Lest you believe that as long as you dont commit a crime, youll be just fine, consider these points from Bonnie Kristians recent articleHow Mass Incarceration Makes The Land of the Free the Home of the Caged: Did you know you probably should be in jail? By one legal experts estimate, as many as70 percent of Americans have committed a crime thatcould land them in prison. In fact, according toJohn Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor, There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. Its impossible to keep track of the absurd complexity of our federal criminal law alone, which now lists more than 4,500 crimesplus tens of thousands of additional agency rules whose violation can be punished as a criminal offense. At any given point, you could be doing something that logic and conscience suggest is perfectly harmless, only to discover thatUncle Sam disagreesand we havent even gotten to state and local laws! Over-criminalization means ordinary Americans are tangling with the legal system more often than they ought, and once that contact has been made, draconian sentencing laws mean theres a real chance theyll be in prison way too long for the offense in question. Mandatory minimum sentencing is the main culprit here, as it requires judges to hand down lengthy sentences regardless of the context of the crime in question. As conservative writer George Will has argued, this policy has empowered the government to effectively nullify the constitutional right to a trial. In the article Law Puts Us All in the Same Danger as Eric Garner, Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter opens with a painful truth: On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you. I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isnt. Carter goes on to discuss the work of legal scholar Douglas Husak and his 2009 book Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law. A citizen who wants to abide by the law has no quick and easy way to find out what the law actually is a violation of the traditional principle that the state cannot punish without fair notice. In addition to these statutes, he writes, an astonishing 300,000 or more federal regulations may be enforceable through criminal punishment in the discretion of an administrative agency. Nobody knows the number for sure. Every day, there are about 500,000 people in America being caged solely for being too poor to pay the extortion fee for their release. The legal system in the US is supposed to guarantee that everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. As Equal Justice Under Law explains: Those who can afford their freedom pay for it, while others sit in jail pending trial simply due to their inability to pay. Such wealth-based detention has disastrous consequences: overcrowding of local jails, lost jobs, lost housing, shockingly poor sanitation and medical care, broken families, and drained local budgets. In many cases, an arrestee may be held longer in jail while awaiting trial than any sentence she or he would likely receive if convicted, causing even innocent people accused of crimes to plead guilty to offenses that they did not commit in order to cut short lengthy pretrial detention. Individuals who are detained are not able to assist their attorneys in the investigation of the charges against them, resulting in wrongful convictions and longer sentences. The toxic blend of too many laws, corrupt enforcers, out-of-control cops, exorbitant fees and fines, and the War on Drugs has proven to be a recipe for disaster for US citizens. As terrible as this news is, Ill leave you with what may be a glimmer of hope from the Houston Press: Since the start of 2015, Equal Justice Under Law has filed 17 lawsuits across the country, including this one, seeking to end the cash bail system. Where it has won, local jurisdictions mostly midsize cities such as Montgomery, Alabama, or Velda, Missouri have been forced to upend their bail systems and entirely ditch their existing bail schedules, which were found to be unconstitutional. The group has won eight cases so far, and hasnt yet lost a single one. Thats a good start, but the US sure has a long, long way to go. Image Credit: TheFreeThoughtProject.com Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple. Her goal is to help people to Wake the Flock Up! I am happy to live in Europe Yugoslavia was smashed because Milosevic wouldnt hand over all water and mineral rights to the UN like the rest of the western world at the time, America was just the tool used by the elites to do the smashing, also to set the stage for the next world war between the Muslims and the west. Sorry for the destruction of your country, but the average American had no control then or now how our military gets used. I love and respect all the average Americans who have no idea what is really happening around the world because of media manipulations and I do believe that an average American would act to STOP own elite that is going mad right now True, but not our elite, the elite have no loyalty to any country, only themselves. They are not American or any other nationality except as cover. The 8th Amendment says, Excessive bail shall not be required The fact that a person cannot make bail demonstrates that it is excessive. So the evil rulers are either morons, or corrupt to the core. The constitution doesnt apply to us in a court of Admiralty Law (U.C.C.) The BAR started to replace the constitution in the courts in 1909, FDR mandated it in 1933 for all states, no right to do so, but all the uniformed guys with guns obey them, not the people, kinda of highlights where the government truly gets their power, from the tip of a gun barrel. well if we fight back and start demanding that any misdemeanor that is not tried within 10 days is excused, this will get those judges moving. and any judge that is found in corruption of the laws of that state is facing a mandatory 50 year sentence, Good piece. 33 