During the meeting of the Criminal Justice Commission of the day May 12 to interview candidates for Connecticut’s next state attorney, Judge Andrew J. McDonald asked New Haven State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin: “Did you know that 40 percent of our prison population is people who have not been convicted of any crime, are they in pretrial detention?
Griffin responded that the challenges of COVID-19 had affected the courts’ ability to process cases, as many courts were closed during the pandemic. However, COVID-19 does not address the real reason most people are being imprisoned without conviction, long before the pandemic began: they do not have the resources to allow their release.
Connecticut has a reputation as an expensive state to live in. Expensive houses, expensive property taxes, expensive gas, expensive groceries, expensive health care, and it allows freedom for people with the means and resources to pay for it, but incarceration for those who can’t. Basar the freedom of an innocent person (because every person is presumed innocent until proven guilty) on that person’s ability to pay bail is fundamentally wrong and unfair Connecticut should stop using money as a way of imprisoning people who have less.
At the May 12 hearing, Judge McDonald referred to two recent cases, one in Stamford where a 15-year-old accused of sexual assault held on $150,000 bondand one in Litchfield where a A 75-year-old man charged with involuntary manslaughter was granted a $50,000 bond. which he published and was released. “For the life of me, I cannot understand the disparities that exist in bond determinations, both as recommended by prosecutors and sometimes as modified or imposed by judges,” Judge McDonald said. “And I think, frankly, it really feeds into the mistrust of the criminal justice system among members of the public.”
Hartford State’s Attorney Sharmese Walcott agreed during her interview before the Commission on May 12. “You can have the same person present for arraignment in a case in GA 12 and get bail, appear in GA 23 and get another, and GA 1 get something different,” said the lawyer Walcott. This is an alarming inconsistency for Connecticut’s 23 “area courts,” where justice is being determined by wealth and zip code.
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Gus Marks-Hamilton
According to the Penitentiary Department, on July 1 there were 9,936 people in custody. 40.5% of these people were not convicted. In real figures, that means 4,023 people imprisoned without being convicted.
A decade ago, in July 2012, there were 16,673 people in DOC custody, and 4,080 had been charged but not convicted. In other words, there are nearly 7,000 fewer people in prison now than a decade ago, a 40% reduction, but the number of people in pretrial detention has not changed.
Our criminal justice system is failing when the number of people incarcerated but not convicted approaches the same number of people who are.
The Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division monthly indicator report stated that as of June 1 there were 424 people jailed on bonds of less than $20,000. As of January 2020, people with bonds under $20,000 have a 10 percent automatic option, meaning that only 10% of bail could be paid in court to release a person from custody, and the money was returned at the end of the person’s case. For example, a person with a $15,000 bond could pay $1,500 to the court and receive it once their case is resolved.
Another 440 people had bonds between $20,000 and $50,000, 544 people had bonds between $50,000 and $100,000 and 2,374 people were held on bonds over $100,000. Of course, people on remand could also use a bail bondsman, but even that option is out of reach for people who may prefer to spend their resources on a lawyer to defend them in court ( and whether a person is assigned a public defender). , they probably couldn’t bail anyway).
Earlier this year, on May 10, an Ellington man was found guilty of murder by a jury. The man had been arrested and initially charged in April 2017, but had been able to to post $1 million bond and spent the last five years free from custody. I remembered that case because a month earlier, in March 2017, a teenager in Hartford was arrested for murder and also given a million dollar bond. Unable to afford that bond, the 17-year-old, who claimed a gun had accidentally gone off, was jailed and accepted a plea deal a year later. Two people arrested for the same charge and on the same bond, but with surprisingly different processes.
More recently, on May 23 of this year, a 17-year-old from Shelton charged with murder was released on $2 million bailbut right now there are more than 400 people in custody who could be free if they paid up to $2,000 in court.
Judge McDonald went on to question how bail was used during the CJC June 20 meeting in interviewing candidates to be the new state’s attorney in New Britain and New Haven.
“Do you think there is a problem in our criminal justice system with disparate treatment of defendants when determining bail amounts?” Judge McDonald asked attorney David Applegate.
“I do,” Applegate replied. “We use an algorithm and the variables are correlated with race… You’re talking about employment status, home ownership, whether the person is married. And these three things that would lead to a PTA [promise-to-appear]. “So you have an abusive white man in his 50s who beats his wife, recognizes himself for being married and owning a house, and is well on his way to a promise to appear, unlike a young black man who gets caught interfering with the police has all these factors working against him.”
The people of Connecticut cannot trust or have faith in this kind of disparate criminal legal system, especially for communities of color. Black and brown people have long been disproportionately represented in Connecticut’s prisons and jails, which represent approximately 70% of the population when they only make up about a third of the state’s total population. But the disparity is even greater when it comes to the prejudiced population where 73% are black and Hispanicand this has grown 65% five years ago.
Connecticut needs to build a different system that does not imprison people based on their inability to afford their freedom. States like New Jersey and New Mexico and the District of Columbia have phased out bail and replaced it with more equitable systems that don’t connect a person’s wealth to whether they can afford to be released. Connecticut should start doing the same.
Gus Marks-Hamilton is a member of the Connecticut Mirror Community Editorial Board.
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