Not 24 hours after the Waukesha Christmas Parade Massacre, which police allege was the work of a career criminal out of jail on a $1,000 bond, three tone-deaf congressmen released a letter to five district attorneys in New York that says bail in the city is “excessive.”
The confederacy of congressional dunces, who wrote from their perch on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, are Jamie Raskin of Maryland, and two leftists from New York, Carolyn Maloney and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The letter says too many people are in custody at the notoriously overcrowded Rikers Island because too many prosecutors demand cash bail.
It’s safe to say Waukeshans might differ.
The Letter
The three leftists are quite exercised about “money bail” and “and its impact on the health, safety, and civil rights of New Yorkers.”
Most New Yorkers aren’t in jail and so “money bail” has no “impact” on them, but in any event the three have “grave concerns that excessive bail amounts are leading to unnecessary pretrial detention and contributing to a humanitarian crisis in New York City’s jail system, particularly on Rikers Island.”
So far this year, 14 inmates have died while imprisoned.
If the late and lamented inmates hadn’t committed a crime they wouldn’t have been at Rikers Island, an obvious observation that seems not to have occurred to the three.
The three also complained that the city’s jails house more than 5,400 people, a 42-percent increase over last year’s 3,809 inmates, “largely due to the increase in the number of pretrial detainees.”
More than three-quarters of individuals in custody have not been convicted of any crime and are confined in unsafe conditions simply because they cannot afford cash bail. According to DOC, nearly 1,000 detainees have been in custody awaiting trial for over 600 days. Faced with long periods of incarceration before their cases are resolved, many of these individuals reportedly accept plea deals, even if they are innocent.
Maybe, but again, it appears not to have occurred to the three that everyone in pretrial custody hasn’t been convicted of the crime or crimes with which they are charged. Nor is it possible to believe that the “individuals in custody have not been convicted of any crime.”
Of course they have. The letter goes on with more data, but the point is clear: Cash bail is unjust:
The overcrowding in New York City’s jails is due, in part, to prosecutors who continue to seek excessive cash bail, resulting in increased rates of incarceration, particularly for low income defendants.
The three apparently have forgotten about Charles Barry, the career criminal who was repeatedly arrested and released almost 150 times because of the state’s bail-reform law. Nor must they remember the story of Scott Nolan, arrested and released three times in one day.
Ocasio-Cortez’s “Squad” pals, by the way, want to shut down federal prison and immigration detention centers.
Bail and the Massacre
If the three representatives want to know what happens when prosecutors set low bail, they can look west to Waukesha, Wisconsin, where Darrell Brooks, Jr., a black supremacist, is accused of plowing into the city’s annual Christmas parade.
He killed five people, authorities allege, and sent 48 to the hospital. Jackson Sparks, eight, died yesterday, which will invite another charge of intentional homicide on top of the first five.
The leftist district attorney’s office released Brooks on $1,000 bail. He had tried to run over his girlfriend in a parking lot in early November. Brooks is a violent felon and convicted strangler.
Leftist DA John Chisholm, a “bail reform” advocate, was forced to confess that the bail “was inappropriately low in light of the nature of the recent charges and the pending charges against Mr. Brooks.”
Court commissioner Kevin M. Costello set Brooks’s bail at $5 million. Costello said two detectives tried to stop the rampage and “rendered an opinion that this was an intentional act.”
H/T: The Post Millennial
