High bail keeps many in jail for low-level crimes. NC should change that in 2020.
Abe Jones spent 17 years as a Superior Court judge. He thought he knew all about bail. But when he left the bench after a loss in the 2012 election, he became a defense attorney and saw what he didn’t know — how unfair and counterproductive the bail system is.
“It was an eye opener,” says Jones, who practices in Wake County. “I think the law needs to change to give people a bond that is reasonable.”
Jones doesn’t just think that. He hopes to make it happen. At 67, he’s seeking the Democratic nomination to fill the state House District 38 seat being vacated by Democratic Rep. Yvonne Lewis Holley, who is running for lieutenant governor. If elected, the former judge plans to introduce legislation to reform North Carolina’s bail system. He says the current system causes many low-income defendants to be in jail even when they are not a flight risk or a danger to the community.
The problem, as Jones and many others see it, is that bail is being misused to give prosecutors leverage.
Defendants who cannot afford to pay bail or a bail bondsman sometimes plead guilty to lesser charges, not because they are guilty, but because being locked up for weeks will cause them more problems. They may lose a job, or there are children or other relatives who need care, or they may have a medical condition that will get worse in jail.
“Many prosecutors use high bail as a means to sweat a plea deal,” Jones says.
That’s an abuse of the system. Jones says, “You have to make it an amount that (defendants) can make and still have skin in the game.”
North Carolina law encourages judges not to put a price on pretrial freedom for lesser offenses and instead release defendants under supervision or on a promise to appear. But judges often abide by a prosecutor’s recommendation for bail set beyond the defendant’s reach out of fear that lowering it could result in a defendant committing a serious crime while free.
Putting the bail system into better balance is a focus of Jessica Smith’s work at the University of North Carolina School of Government. Smith, an attorney and head of the school’s Criminal Justice Innovation Lab, wrote on her blog that on a daily basis U.S. jails house nearly 500,000 pretrial detainees at a cost of about $14 billion a year. Her analysis of North Carolina data found that secured bonds were imposed in 68 percent of criminal cases in which the highest charge was a misdemeanor.
“The evidence shows that we are detaining surprisingly high numbers of defendants charged with low-level crimes,” she wrote.
For Jones, common sense and basic fairness should guide decisions about bail when the charge involved is a misdemeanor or a nonviolent crime.
“What bond can you make? That should be the question,” he says. “It should focus on financial ability.”
Legislation proposing bail reform would likely be opposed by prosecutors, but it would have strong support among defense lawyers and advocates for civil liberties. Judges also might welcome an emphasis on release rather than detention. Former Chief Justice Mark Martin’s North Carolina Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice included bail reform among its recommendations.
Jones no longer wears a black robe at work, but if he wins a House seat he hopes to once again deliver justice by pushing through bail reform.