A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge issued a stinging rebuke of cash bail as a way for local officials to jail people accused of crimes before they’ve actually been charged in a wide-ranging preliminary injunction handed down Tuesday, May 16.
In the 64-page ruling, Judge Lawrence Riff said he was granting the preliminary injunction halting the county’s cash bail system to six plaintiffs suing after they were all arrested and held in jail for five days because they could not afford their bail amounts.
Among the plaintiffs are three men arrested in the San Fernando Valley and held both at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire and Foothill stations and the Van Nuys jail. They’re suing L.A. County, the Sheriff’s Department, LAPD and other agencies over their detention, arguing their constitutional rights were violated.
Both sides told the judge they would be ready to go to trial in about a year — until then, Riff said, he could not allow the county’s cash bail system to continue.
“Between now and then, tens of thousands of persons will be arrested by the LASD and LAPD and jailed under the extant bail schedules solely because they are too poor to pay the scheduled money bail,” Riff wrote.
“Others, arrested for the identical offense and otherwise indistinguishable from the arrestees in the putative plaintiffs’ class, will be promptly released because they can raise the funds to pay the secured money bail.”
Because of this, Riff said, “it would be an abuse of the court’s discretion not to enter” a preliminary injunction. He called the county’s cash bail system “a clear, pervasive, and serious constitutional violation.”
Both the county and the group of civil rights attorneys who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the six plaintiffs will get 60 days to come up with a new system to keep track of defendants before they’re arraigned, which could include options like releasing defendants on their own recognizance or electronically monitoring them.
Cash bail will still be required for people accused of serious or violent crimes.
The ruling is a major win for opponents of cash bail who have sought to eliminate what they have called an unequal system benefiting the wealthy, who can easily afford to bail themselves out of jail while poorer defendants accused of the same crimes cannot.
Riff’s ruling, according to court records, was based on testimony from several experts during a series of hearings in the judge’s courtroom earlier this month.
The judge noted that six plaintiffs were just a few of the tens of thousands of people who are arrested annually and then held in jail until a bench officer determines under what conditions they may be released while awaiting further court hearings.
“Every time a court has heard actual evidence in my decade of litigating the cash bail issue across U.S., Republican and Democratic judges alike have found there is no basis in evidence for cash bail,” wrote Alec Karakatsanis, one of the civil rights attorneys on the lawsuit, on Twitter, where he frequently posts lengthy criticisms of the system.
“It makes us less safe and destroys lives.”
L.A. County has eliminated cash bail before — the Superior Court in 2020 set most cash bail amounts for minor crimes to zero in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, thousands of people jailed at the time were released early out of fear confining them in cramped conditions would spur even more spread of the virus and lead to deaths.
The court system renewed cash bail in 2022 after the threat of the virus slackened.
Riff wrote that the experts who testified showed there was neither an increase in crime in L.A. County nor a decrease in defendants failing to appear at their court hearings as a result of ending cash bail.
In fact, the judge wrote that the experts proved cash bail increased the prevalence of crime.
Among those experts was Dr. Paul Heaton, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who studied bail reform in Harris County in Texas, which operates one of the nation’s largest jail systems serving Houston and other cities.
Heaton testified that impoverished defendants detained before their trials were much more likely to commit more crimes in the future.
He said his study showed that defendants held in jail due to their lack of funds were much more likely to plead guilty whether or not they really were, and therefore were much more likely to receive jail sentences. He said those convictions and time spent in jail “causally increases” the defendants’ “likelihood of future arrest for new crimes.”
The judge wrote that numerous local elected officials who might have testified in favor of maintaining the cash bail system, including representatives of the city of L.A. and county government, refused to do so.
L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón, a critic of cash bail, did not return a request for comment on the preliminary injunction Wednesday.
Eric Siddall is the vice president of the Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys, the union representing the county’s thousands of line prosecutors in the D.A.’s office. In a statement, he said the association supported neither “zero bail” nor “oppressive bail.”
Siddall said the solution to the county’s bail system is establishing “reasonable bail or release conditions, narrowly tailored to the defendant and the offense and aimed at ensuring that arrestees return to court if their cases get filed.”
City News Service contributed to this story.
