Clemmons case proves bail bond system broken

Forget what you think you know about the way judges set
bail and suspects post bond to get out of jail.
Prosecutors claim the system is broken and others say it’s
time to end the cash bail system altogether.

County jails are full of people who have not been
convicted of a crime.

“Two-thirds of the individuals who are in jail are
not there being punished for a crime they’ve committed.
Two-thirds are there awaiting their trial and they can’t
pay their bond and that comes to a cost of $9 billion
annually,” said Tim Murray, executive director of the Pre-
Trial Justice Institute, a non-profit agency created by
the U.S. Justice Department.

Murray says some of the prisoners are low-risk who
can be safely released, adding “many of them, when their
case does come to court and they plead guilty, we send
them home.”

When people are arrested, within a day they
generally face a judge who sets bail or releases them.
Murray thinks bail amounts are often set based simply on
the crime, not the defendant, their threat to the
community or their risk to flee.

Murray favors a new system of evaluating risk, a model
code for pre-trial justice that would include more
scientific, individual assessments of each suspect, before
they face a judge for the first time.

King County’s chief criminal deputy prosecutor
Mark Larson agrees there’s probably a better way to decide
who gets bail rather than a judge’s “gut.”

“Whether we can replace that with something else I
think is something that is intriguing,” said Larson. “I
don’t think the bail bond system is a great proxy for this
issue of who is really willing, ready and able to comply
with our system and to show up (for trial).”

Murray argues that information, not money, is the
best way for judges to protect the community.

“[We] know all too well from the tragic events a
couple of years ago with an individual who was out on
hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bail bonds and
murdered four sheriff’s deputies […] money does not
protect anyone,” said Murray.

Snohomish County Prosecutor Mark Roe agrees. “When
a judge sets a certain amount of bail, it’s essentially
meaningless because it is up to the bonding companies to
decide how much or how little they will actually accept to
post the bond.”

Roe says the real problem is not prisoner
assessments, it’s the bail bond system.

“It isn’t judges setting bail, it’s for-profit
bail bondsmen.”

You might think that a suspect must post ten
percent of a bail amount to win his freedom. Roe says
that’s not necessarily true.

“There are places that advertise: ‘You sign, you
walk, every client every time, no exceptions, no excuses.’
“The public, the victim, the prosecutor, the court has a
right to know exactly what that guy’s going to have to pay
up front before he gets out and they don’t know,” said
Roe.

King County’s chief criminal deputy prosecutor
Mark Larson agrees the bail system is too secretive.

“Maurice Clemmons really shined a light on the
fact that even when a judge sets a bail, the amount of
money actually put up in support of that is highly
variable and can be incredibly small percentages of what
the court believes should or can be put up, so our current
system really suffers in a variety of ways, including the
lack of transparency,” said Larson.

The Clemmons case is a dramatic example of the
shortcomings of the bail bond system in Washington. But
Roe says more common threats happen every day because of
the way courts grant bail. Roe gives the example of a
domestic violence case where a judge set bail at $50,000.
The man’s wife knew her husband could not post ten
percent, said Roe, so she agreed to meet a detective the
next day at her home to discuss the case.

“The detective showed up at the house to interview
the wife and lo and behold, there’s the defendant and he
paid $750 or $1,200 or something like that, but nowhere
near ten percent. That could have been a deadly situation
and those are the type of situations we need to avoid by
everybody having a right to know what it’s going to take
before the guy gets out,” said Roe.

Prosecutor Roe claims the state Bail Agents
Association support some reform of the system, but he says
efforts to reform the bail bond system have been stymied
in Olympia by what he calls “WallBail,” big out-of-state
bail bond companies that can undercut local firms.

In a recent Op-Ed piece in The Seattle Times,
Rob Hayes
CEO of Aladdin Bail Bonds, the largest retail bail
provider in Washington state, called setting standard
minimum amounts that suspects have to pay to secure a bail
bond unfair, unnecessary, and possibly unconstitutional.

“Trying to create a one-size-fits-all system that requires
all defendants to pay the same percentage of their bail up
front will mean that well-off defendants go home, while
the poor stay in jail. That’s not fair, and it is probably
not constitutional,” said Hayes in the Op-Ed.

Kentucky is among the states that have recently
approved sweeping pre-trial reforms. Among them,
specifying that people charged with crimes that don’t
carry jail penalties not be held in jail pre-trial.