老澳门开奖结果

Margery Mock is 28 years old and the mother to an 8-year-old girl. She is currently unemployed and battling homelessness, having spent one month in a hotel and several nights in her storage unit, where all of her belongings are kept. She was recently arrested on an alleged criminal trespassing charge from trying to visit a relative at a motel and incarcerated on a $1,256 bond that she can鈥檛 afford.

Mock is a victim of Glynn County, Georgia鈥檚 wealth-based pretrial system. The county allows those with money to walk free while they await trial, while those who can鈥檛 make bail remain locked up. It also fails to provide people who can鈥檛 afford to pay for a lawyer with a public defender to argue for their release.

Both practices are illegal. The constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process prohibit people from being jailed simply because they cannot afford a monetary payment. The Sixth Amendment guarantees people accused of crimes will be appointed lawyers to defend them if they cannot afford to hire a private lawyer.

But Mock was incarcerated without anyone asking if she could afford to pay for her release or learning anything about her individual circumstances. It didn鈥檛 matter to the county that $1,256 is an astronomical amount for someone with no permanent address or reliable income. No one asked Mock what that bail amount 鈥� and the inability to pay it 鈥� would mean for her or her family. Rather, the Glynn County sheriff simply followed a bail schedule, a document that automatically sets money bail amounts according to the charged offense.

Even when people accused of crimes get their first court hearing, the judge usually does no more than confirm the bail amount they could not afford in the first place. To make matters worse, Glynn County only pays one lawyer to be the public defender in all misdemeanor cases. This contract defender, B. Reid Zeh, does not visit clients who are stuck in jail, file motions on their behalf, or appear at preliminary hearings to request lower bail. Instead, he usually meets clients when they plead guilty and simply signs off on their sentencing paperwork. Those with means face none of these barriers.

All in all, the Glynn County鈥檚 practices amount to one system for the poor and another system entirely for those of means. This reality was driven home on March 5 when none other than Zeh, the lone public defender in the county, was after an altercation at a local bar. His bail was set at $1,256, which he immediately paid out so that he could remain free as his case moves forward.

Had Zeh not had the means to pay his bail, as was the case with Mock, he鈥檇 have remained in jail as his case moved forward, in the same desperate situation that most of his clients are forced into.

In an effort to stop this discriminatory detention of the poor, the 老澳门开奖结果, the 老澳门开奖结果 of Georgia, and James A. Yancey, Jr., a local and longtime civil rights and criminal defense advocate, have sued Glynn County for jailing people like Mock, who cannot simply buy their freedom. We have also sued the county and public defender Zeh for failing to provide indigent persons with lawyers in time to fight for their release on lower or nonmonetary bail.

On any given day, Georgia county jails warehouse over , nearly 30,000 of whom are awaiting trial. Pretrial incarceration 鈥� locking up people who are presumed innocent and have not been convicted of a crime 鈥� is a key driver of Georgia鈥檚 exorbitant jail incarceration rate, which is the highest in the nation. In 2013, Georgia had almost double the annual jail admissions of Illinois, which is home to 2.5 million more people.

The county鈥檚 illegal practices disproportionately affect African-Americans, which isn鈥檛 surprising giving its history of racism and government overreach. According to the 1860 census, Glynn County had Georgia鈥檚 third-highest concentration of enslaved persons, amounting to 73 percent of the population. Today, despite making up only one-fourth of the county鈥檚 population, Black people account for half of the county鈥檚 jail population.

Beyond being illegal and disproportionately harming Black people, using money bail to incarcerate has disastrous effects on an arrestee鈥檚 criminal case. It is an open secret that pretrial detention is a prosecutor鈥檚 most powerful bargaining tool. In 2013, a story quoted the Glynn County prosecutor acknowledging the power of incarceration on money bail to achieve convictions, saying arrestees 鈥渏ust want to plead guilty, get back home and resume their lives.鈥� This attitude eviscerates the presumption of innocence and ignores the government鈥檚 due process obligation to presume release upon arrest.

consistently shows that being jailed before trial significantly increases your likelihood of conviction, mostly because people eventually break down and plead guilty. They do this even if their case could have been dismissed had they been able to buy their release or had a public defender to help them fight for lower bail.

And once released, there may well be further consequences. To make bail, arrestees and their loved ones often desperately scrape together money to pay bail and are then exploited by the bail industry.

Glynn County鈥檚 system of detention based on ability to pay is unconstitutional and inhumane. And the county鈥檚 failure to provide adequate public defense representation to indigent persons accused of misdemeanors only furthers the harms. Nothing personifies this more than the unfair way the system treats a Mr. Zeh and a Ms. Mock.