RALEIGH - Wake County's two presiding judges want magistrates to justify misdemeanor bail above recommended amounts after research found the figure is often set high, especially for blacks.

As a result, people charged with offenses that don't always carry a jail sentences sit behind bars when they can't make bail, the county's public defender said.

The study by Johanna Foster, a former UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student who now works with the county as a grant administrator, found that misdemeanor suspects had average bail of $1,303 -- above the $100 to $1,000 range recommended in Wake County's Pretrial Release and Bail Bond Policy.

"I was surprised," said Donald Stephens, Wake's senior resident Superior Court judge.

Foster's study also indicated that race was one of the most significant factors in setting bail amounts, with whites getting bail averaging $963 while blacks received bail averaging $1,199.

Stephens and Chief District Court Judge Robert Rader said the findings weren't strong enough to indicate a larger problem of racial bias. Both judges emphasized that Foster's study looked at only 383 cases. Other unknown factors may explain those discrepancies, they said.

"Race is absolutely not supposed to be an issue or a factor that affects a bond," Rader said.

The idea that race plays a part in bail decisions is wrong, said Gary Wills, the county's chief magistrate. He said the study took a narrow view of the system and lacked an understanding of the circumstances magistrates face when setting bail.

"You've got to look at the whole picture, and that's not being done," he said.

Rader and Stephens ordered that Wake's magistrates write down their reasoning when they depart from the recommended amounts. Not documenting the disparity could lend credence to defense attorneys' arguments that bail is excessive, according to the order.

Wake's public defender, Bryan Collins, is concerned about the jailing of suspects for Class 2 misdemeanors, crimes such as resisting arrest, passing bad checks, defrauding an innkeeper and carrying concealed weapons. Convictions of that class of misdemeanors result in time behind bars only when a person has five or more other convictions. Even under that scenario, the maximum punishment is 60 days.

"They're forced to sit in jail for something that they are presumed to be innocent of," Collins said.

Some of his court-assigned clients, who can't afford defense attorneys, may spend weeks in jail after misdemeanor arrests when they fail to raise money to pay their bail. That's because heavy court dockets often make it difficult to have a defendant go before a judge in a timely manner to discuss bail reduction, Collins said.

That forces defendants to consider pleading guilty instead of fighting the charges at trial.

"They often make a pragmatic decision to plead guilty and get out of jail because of a bond they can't make," Collins said.

Study met skeptics

For her study for a master's degree in public administration, Foster examined a sample of 383 people arrested in 2005 and charged with Class 2 misdemeanor arrests in 2005. She factored in only people arrested once in the calendar year and also tried to determine whether their employment, residence and prior convictions had an effect on the bail amount. A preliminary copy was provided to judicial officials last spring, and it was received with much skepticism.

Foster updated her research and found the same results.

"In the end, race was still statistically significant," she said.

In half the cases looked at by Foster, the defendants had no criminal record and weren't subject to imprisonment if convicted.

Durham County has a different type of dispute over bail amounts: longstanding concerns about how quickly suspects leave jail while awaiting trial for violent crimes. Some suspects have been charged in homicides after they've been let out of jail pending their trials on other charges.

Durham gets tough

On March 1, Durham court officials made it more costly to get out from behind bars while awaiting trial on some offenses.

Judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers in Durham County set new recommended bail amounts for violent and nonviolent crimes. For some felonies, particularly those involving a gun, the cost of getting out of jail has been greatly increased.

In Wake County, the order by Rader and Stephens endorsed just one finding in the study, that bail for people of all races was above the recommended amounts. The April 10 order is on display in the Wake County Magistrate's Office, on the lower level of the jail where 19 judicial officers process defendants night and day, Wills said.

Rader, Stephens and Wills said they'd be open to looking at results of a larger study, but all said it was not their top priority.

"Setting bonds is one of the hardest things that we have to do," Rader said. "We don't have a crystal ball; we don't know what a person is going to do or not do."

(Staff writer Anne Blythe contributed to this report.)