Federal Judge Denies and Rebukes Harris County in Its Plea to Block Bail Ruling

[TexasTowelie]

A federal judge issued a blistering ruling Thursday evening calling into question the legal reasoning powers of Harris County judges and their attorneys, as she denied the county’s plea to block her order against its bail system from going into effect Monday.

Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal reminded the county exactly why she ruled on April 28 that its treatment of poor people charged with low-level, nonviolent crimes is unconstitutional, and why the county has no basis for making those people pay an arbitrary amount of money before they can be released from jail pending trial. Granting a preliminary injunction, Rosenthal ordered that Harris County begin following the law by releasing all eligible indigent misdemeanor defendants on personal bonds within 24 hours of arrest, and attaching an affordable bail amount to those bonds in the event that the defendants don’t show up for court and have to pay the price.

Harris County said this would cause “irreparable harm” to the government and to the public, and asked her to either block this order while county attorneys appeal to a higher federal court or at least delay it for 30 days.

That request, Rosenthal said, amounts to violating the constitutional rights of thousands more people. And so her answer was absolutely not. As she wrote:

“Ample credible, reliable evidence shows that Harris County detains well over 100 misdemeanor defendants a day only because they are too indigent to pay secured money bail. These defendants are otherwise eligible for release and would be released if they could pay a bondsman the nonrefundable premium of around ten percent of the bond amount. That cannot continue. Time is of the essence. Every day brings about the incarceration of another hundred indigent misdemeanor defendants, in violation of the Constitution. This factor weighs heavily against a stay.”

Read more: http://www.houstonpress.com/news/federal-judge-rejects-harris-countys-plea-to-block-her-bail-ruling-9434343

[Shrike47]

1. Good for the judge. Keeping poor people in jail for poverty is unconscionable.

A lot of these counties seem to use incarceration as a fundraising device rather than a way to maintain safety.