"And so this judge just now denied him bail — on what ground? This guy's not going to run anywhere. It's absurd."

"[Sean Combs] has one of the nicest houses. I pass it by all the time. It's right near, not far from my little tiny condo in in Miami, Florida. He lives on Star Island. His  property is probably worth 40 or 50 million. I think he has two properties on the most expensive island, one of the most expensive islands in in the world. He's one of the most recognizable people. This decision by this judge was just vindictive. He didn't like the verdict. He thought there should be a conviction. And so, he's going to probably sentence him to a little bit of time in prison. He can't sentence him to a lot of time, but he'll probably sentence him to a little bit of time in prison in excess of the year he's already spent for having had bail denied.... He's going to come up with some pretense...."

Said Alan Dershowitz, on his podcast last night. 

"[Combs] was acquitted of anything involving violence, anything involving racketeering, anything involving, you know, sexual trafficking, all of that. He was acquitted!...  People don't go to jail for transactional sex for voluntary consensual sex based on the hope of getting an advantage. There is no such law.... Adult women should not be treated like children.

"For prosecutors, bail is meant to be a strong disincentive to flee, not to make a statement about justice."

"In fact, the legal system would prefer defendants who aren’t a danger to others to stay out of prison, reducing costs. (The annual cost of detaining an inmate in New York City, for example, is over $500,000.) Mr. Bankman-Fried had another point of leverage: U.S. prosecutors had wanted to extradite him from the Bahamas quickly, to avoid both the perception of slow-moving justice and his getting hurt in a Bahamian jail before being moved to the U.S. If he had fought extradition, he would most likely have lost that fight, but it would have cost the U.S. time and money. In return, he wanted to stay out of prison before trial.... [W]hile prosecutors could herald a $250 million bail, one of the highest in history, he was ultimately released on something closer to his own recognizance... a standard arrangement. Prosecutors did demand that his parents post their home as collateral and co-sign the bail deal...."

From "How Sam Bankman-Fried Negotiated His Way Out of Jail/Intense legal wrangling led to the disgraced crypto mogul paying virtually nothing to live with his parents ahead of his upcoming trial" (NYT).

"A growing movement questions the practice of requiring defendants to post monetary bail to ensure that they appear at their court hearings...."

"Many of those jurisdictions now use risk assessments to decide whether to detain defendants or release them without a monetary requirement. Those tools, which consider previous offenses and the defendant’s likelihood of being a flight risk, are themselves controversial: Some advocates have expressed concern that racial and socioeconomic biases are baked into them. Bail-change advocates argue that court systems should err on the side of releasing defendants, who are presumed innocent. [Alexa Van Brunt, director of the MacArthur Justice Center Clinic at Northwestern University] said pretrial detention increases a person’s likelihood of committing another crime by stripping them of jobs, educational opportunities or custody of their children. Defendants who are held are more likely to plead guilty, even if they did not commit the offense, Van Brunt said, because they want to get out of jail."

From "The Wisconsin parade suspect was accused of a car attack weeks ago. Here’s why he was out on bail" (WaPo).

ADDED: I'm reading the comments over there. There's this — which begins with a quote from the article — from Gibbering:

He was also convicted of a sex crime in Nevada after impregnating a minor, officials say.

That’s called rape, WaPo. Thanks for demonstrating this whole problem. Crimes against women don’t count. Rape them, hit them with cars, neglect support payments, strangle them, abuse them, rob them, whatever. Doesn’t matter. It almost never matters.

AND: Here's the NYT approach to the same material: "Waukesha Suspect’s Previous Release Agitates Efforts to Overhaul Bail/Darrell Brooks, accused of plowing his S.U.V. through a Wisconsin parade, had been freed on $1,000 bail for a different charge in Milwaukee County, where there is a backlog of cases":

"You get to post bail after driving your SUV over your child's mother??? What about the deterrent of keeping a crazy man in jail pending trial? It couldn't have made the woman he ran over feel safer knowing this crazy man was out o[n] bail. A thousand dollars? Life is cheap in Wisconsin."

That's the top-rated comment at "Suspect’s bail draws questions as investigations begin into Wisconsin parade tragedy" (WaPo). 

From the article: 

Michele LaVigne, a former director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told The Post that setting Brooks’s cash bail at $1,000 is not necessarily unusual and that bail amounts can vary between jurisdictions and courtrooms. 

When Brooks was arrested earlier this month, she said, officials weighing what bail to request probably considered the seriousness of the charges and the fact that he was already out on bail in the earlier case and had continued showing up for court appearances. 

Deterring further crime is “not the purpose of cash bail,” LaVigne said. “Cash bail is really, ‘Are you going to show up [to court], or are you not?’ ”

ADDED: I'm just noticing that bail is a subject Kamala Harris went out of her way to bring up during the Vice Presidential debate last fall: "We need reform of our policing in America and our criminal justice system... We will require a national registry for police officers who break the law, we will – on the issue of criminal justice reform – get rid of private prisons and cash bail and we will decriminalize marijuana...."

The government — in failing to maintain order in Kenosha — deserves blame for the Kyle Rittenhouse incident.

Here's something you may have missed. I missed it until today, when I was listening to the new episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily": "The Acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse/How a jury came to find the teenager, who shot and killed two people in Kenosha, Wis., not guilty on the five charges he faced."

The episode covered the entire trial. What jumped out at me wasn't the show's focus, but it mattered to me because I care about what government can do to protect citizens from each other.

None of the shootings by Kyle Rittenhouse would have occurred if Joseph Rosenbaum hadn't behaved in a deranged manner. Presumably, Rosenbaum would have done better if he had taken his medication, but he couldn't get his prescriptions filled because the pharmacy was boarded up — closed, because of the riots.

I'm reading more about his condition — here, in The Washington Post — and I see that the plastic bag he threw at Rittenhouse was a small collection of items — deodorant, underwear, socks — that the hospital had given him when he was discharged after a suicide attempt. That's what he had (and lamely threw at Rittenhouse). What he lacked was his drugs: "Hours after he was released from the hospital, Rosenbaum stopped by a pharmacy in Kenosha to pick up medication for his bipolar disorder, only to discover that it had closed early because of the unrest." 

They released a mentally ill man into a chaotic city with a prescription for medication that he could not fill. A suicidal man proceeded to get himself killed at the hands of Rittenhouse and to unleash the ill-fated rush to stop Rittenhouse. There are immense and unknowable costs to letting a city decline into chaos. 

Rittenhouse and every other individual — except a truly deranged person, such as, perhaps, Rosenbaum — are responsible for his own actions. We tend to focus on the actions of other human beings, and the trial was a spectacle commanding us to focus on Rittenhouse. The government puts on that show, and that show distracts us from the failings of government. 

"Why Didn’t [Wisconsin Governor] Tony Evers Prevent the Carnage in Kenosha?" John McCormack asked (in National Review, while the jury was deliberating):

On the afternoon of Sunday, August 23 — three months after the murder of George Floyd and the riots it sparked — a Kenosha police officer shot African American Jacob Blake. The shooting was far more complicated than initial reports indicated: Blake had a knife, resisted arrest after being tasered, and was reaching into his car when he was shot.... But the video of the incident almost guaranteed that riots would occur without decisive action....

That evening, instead of deploying the National Guard to Kenosha, Evers sent out an inflammatory tweet suggesting that police may have behaved “mercilessly” in their encounter with Blake. “Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin... While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.” 

A few hours later, 100 cars were torched in Kenosha.

It wasn’t until the next morning, August 24, that Evers called out the National Guard — and even then he sent only 125 guardsmen to Kenosha, which has a population of just under 100,000. That night, arsonists set fire to dozens of buildings in the city. On Tuesday, August 25, Evers sent another 125 members of the National Guard. But that evening, the Washington Post reported, law-enforcement agents were “overwhelmed” by rioters and “the only visible law enforcement presence was around the Kenosha County Courthouse, where an 8-foot-high fence was erected around the building, with about 1,000 protesters gathered outside the barrier.” 

Evers had turned down an offer of federal support earlier that day. “I have no regrets because the only thing I said no to was Homeland Security and I knew that would not work out because of what I saw in Portland,” Evers said after the fact. Evers has defended his minimal deployment of guardsmen by saying, “We have fulfilled every request that the leadership in Kenosha have asked for.”....

Evers is at fault and so is the leadership of Kenosha. 

ALSO: More government responsibility for chaos in Wisconsin: "Milwaukee County DA admits it was a mistake to grant $1,000 bail to SUV-driving felon days before he smashed into Xmas parade: Darrell Brooks was freed after running over mother of his child and is now charged with homicide after killing five" (Daily Mail).

"Of 70 people bailed out of jail since last May by six social-justice activists, 25 have been charged with 108 felonies and 49 misdemeanors or municipal code violations alleged to have occurred after they were freed..."

"... a far higher re-arrest rate than typically seen among people released on bail nationally," The Wisconsin State Journal reports. 

“I don’t know of any research that examines the issue of who posts a defendant’s bail on the likelihood of committing new crimes,” said Danielle M. Romain Dagenhardt, an assistant professor of criminal justice at UW-Milwaukee. “I would imagine that it could be the case that an individual who posts bail from an outside source’s money would have less-vested stake in continuing to appear or comply with release conditions, however, I’m not sure how often that actually occurs.”

[Pilar Weiss, director of the Community Justice Exchange, which administers the National Bail Fund Network] rejected the notion that the source of bail money has any relation to the likelihood of re-arrest. “People aren’t like, ‘Oh, great, somebody else got me out of jail’” and subsequently feel the need to go out and put their lives at risk, she said....

Local bail funds are... encouraged not to identify which inmates are most “worthy” of release based on their past criminal records, Pilar said, since she and other incarceration- and bail-abolition activists see defendants as having been “targeted and criminalized by police” and the victims of a “racist criminal legal system.” 

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"Kyle Rittenhouse was released from jail in Wisconsin on Friday afternoon after his attorneys posted $2 million bail..."

"... setting the teenager free as he awaits trial for fatally shooting two men and wounding a third during summer protests in Kenosha, police said. His release came over the objections of family members and lawyers for two of the men he shot. They had asked for higher bail and voiced concerns Rittenhouse would flee, which his lawyers have said he would not. The 17-year-old’s release was funded by donations sought by his attorneys, who appealed to the political right, where Rittenhouse is popular. Those lawyers also are seeking to overturn Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s victory."

The Chicago Tribune reports.

"Today, [Google is] announcing a new policy to prohibit ads that promote bail bond services from our platforms."

"Studies show that for-profit bail bond providers make most of their revenue from communities of color and low income neighborhoods when they are at their most vulnerable, including through opaque financing offers that can keep people in debt for months or years. We made this decision based on our commitment to protect our users from deceptive or harmful products, but the issue of bail bond reform has drawn support from a wide range of groups and organizations who have shared their work and perspectives with us...."

A Google press release.

Marginal Revolution reacts:

Google’s decision to ban ads from bail bond providers is deeply disturbing and wrongheaded. Bail bonds are a legal service. Indeed, they are a necessary service for the legal system to function. It’s not surprising that bail bonds are used in communities of color and low income neighborhoods because it is in those neighborhoods that people most need to raise bail. We need not debate whether that is due to greater rates of crime or greater discrimination or both. Whatever the cause, preventing advertising doesn’t reduce the need to pay bail it simply makes it harder to find a lender. Restrictions on advertising in the bail industry, as elsewhere, are also likely to reduce competition and raise prices. Both of these effects mean that more people will find themselves in jail for longer....

In addition to being wrong-headed, Google’s decision is disturbing because it is so obviously a political decision. Google has banned legal services like bail bonding and payday lending from advertising on Google in order to curry favor with groups who have an ideological aversion to payday lending and the bail system....

Google’s decision to use its code as law is an invitation to politicization. Moreover, Google is throwing away its best defense against politicization–the promise of neutrality and openness.

Isn't at least part of the problem here that Google's approach to serving ads would cause these ads to appear on the screens of black people and to feel racist? I mean, we've talked many times about what Google seems to think of us based on the ads they're giving us. I haven't been that offended, but I was bemused by Google's seeming impression that I am a crazy old cat lady, and some of my readers have wondered why Google was giving them Ashley Madison (adultery) ads. Imagine getting a bail bond ad and thinking the only reason for this is that I'm black. I suspect that's what Google is really concerned about.

"In an unusual move during the more than 2-hour bail hearing, Mr. Zimmerman... briefly took the stand and offered an apology to the victim’s parents..."

"... who were in the courtroom."

“I wanted to say I am sorry for the loss of your son,” Mr. Zimmerman, 28, said, speaking publicly for the first time about the Feb. 26 shooting. “I did not know how old he was. I thought he was a little bit younger than I am. I did not know if he was armed or not.”...

According to their lawyer, Benjamin Crump, Mr. Martin’s family was “completely devastated” by the judge’s decision that Mr. Zimmerman could be freed on such a low bail [$150,000]. He also described Mr. Zimmerman’s apology from the stand as “self-serving” and said he considered it a ploy to help win his release from jail.

"Judge Who Set Unsecured Bail For Jerry Sandusky Is A Second Mile Volunteer."

"District Judge Leslie Dutchcot... ordered that Sandusky be freed on $100,000 unsecured bail." The prosecutors wanted $500,000 and a leg monitor.

So... is Jerry Sandusky not a flight risk? Maybe not. If you look at the grand jury report, page 20, you'll see that when Sandusky was confronted with the allegations about "Victim 6," he said: "I understand. I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won't get it from you. I wish I were dead." That suggests his orientation leans toward escape by suicide. I'm no expert on the standards relating to bail requests, but don't you think that someone who'd consider suicide as the solution lacks the energy and determination to flee or at least is unlikely to flee successfully? I don't know. Presumably, he has plenty of money, and he knows he's likely to lose it all in the various lawsuits that will be filed. What's $100,000 to him?