Law Commons^™

Injustice Under Law: Perpetuating And Criminalizing Poverty Through The Courts, Judge Lisa Foster

Georgia State University Law Review

Money matters in the justice system. If you can afford to purchase your freedom pretrial, if you can afford to immediately pay fines and fees for minor traffic offenses and municipal code violations, if you can afford to hire an attorney, your experience of the justice system both procedurally and substantively will be qualitatively different than the experience of someone who is poor. More disturbingly, through a variety of policies and practices—some of them blatantly unconstitutional—our courts are perpetuating and criminalizing poverty. And when we talk about poverty in the United States, we are still talking about race, ethnicity, and …

The Bail Book: A Comprehensive Look At Bail In America's Criminal Justice System - Introduction, Shima Baughman

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Mass incarceration is one of the greatest social problems facing the United States today. America incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than any other country and is one of only two countries that requires arrested individuals to pay bail to be released from jail while awaiting trial. After arrest, the bail decision is the single most important cause of mass incarceration, yet this decision is often neglected since it is made in less than two minutes. Shima Baradaran Baughman draws on constitutional rights and new empirical research to show how we can reform bail in America. Tracing the history …

Statewide Rules Of Criminal Procedure: A 50 State Review, Emily Dyer, Chelsea Stacey, Adrian Viesca

Nevada Law Journal Forum

Nevada is amongst the minority of states without statewide criminal procedure rules. Statewide rules are important because they promote fairness, regularity, and transparency regardless of where in the state a criminal case is being adjudicated and who it is being adjudicated in front of. This report intends to compare the varying states’ criminal procedure rules, to provide Nevada’s legal community with an awareness of how rules can be structured, what rules are included, and how rules interact with statutes and other court rules. If Nevada chooses to follow in the path of the forty-seven states and develop statewide criminal procedure …

Pretrial Detention And Bail, Megan Stevenson, Sandra G. Mayson

All Faculty Scholarship

Our current pretrial system imposes high costs on both the people who are detained pretrial and the taxpayers who foot the bill. These costs have prompted a surge of bail reform around the country. Reformers seek to reduce pretrial detention rates, as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities in the pretrial system, while simultaneously improving appearance rates and reducing pretrial crime. The current state of pretrial practice suggests that there is ample room for improvement. Bail hearings are often cursory, with no defense counsel present. Money-bail practices lead to high rates of detention even among misdemeanor defendants and those who …

Written Testimony For Briefing On Targeted Fines And Fees Against Low-Income Minorities: Civil Rights And Constitutional Implications, Neil L. Sobol

Neil L Sobol

Bail Nullification, Jocelyn Simonson

Michigan Law Review

This Article explores the possibility of community nullification beyond the jury by analyzing the growing and unstudied phenomenon of community bail funds, which post bail for strangers based on broader beliefs regarding the overuse of pretrial detention. When a community bail fund posts bail, it can serve the function of nullifying a judge’s determination that a certain amount of the defendant’s personal or family money was necessary to ensure public safety and prevent flight. This growing practice—what this Article calls “bail nullification”—is powerful because it exposes publicly what many within the system already know to be true: that although bail …

The Downstream Consequences Of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention, Paul Heaton, Sandra G. Mayson, Megan Stevenson

Scholarly Works

In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas—the thirdlargest county in the United States—to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are 25% more likely than similarly …

The Downstream Consequences Of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention, Paul Heaton, Sandra G. Mayson, Megan Stevenson

All Faculty Scholarship

In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce otherwise innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas — the third largest county in the U.S. — to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are …