The conveyor belt driving Dallas County’s hulking jail
complex, the seventh largest in the country, operates in a courtroom deep
inside the Lew Sterrett Justice Center downtown. That’s where magistrates hold
around-the-clock hearings to determine bail. On any given day, about 70 percent
of the jail’s roughly 5,000 inmates are there because they can’t afford the
price tag placed on their pretrial freedom. Arrestees say that before they
enter bail hearings, jailers warn them that the price could increase if they
talk without permission. The hearings often last less than 60 seconds.
Though the bail hearings have serious ramifications for
defendants, they are largely conducted in secret. Attorneys, family members,
community activists and journalists are not allowed inside these court
proceedings. The Dallas County Sheriff’s Department says that’s because guards
“need to focus on the safety of the inmates and magistrate judge.” In
January, lawyers with the ACLU of Texas, Civil Rights Corps and the Texas Fair
Defense Project sued Dallas County officials on behalf of several poor people,
many of them homeless, who were stuck in jail because they couldn’t afford
bail. The lawsuit alleges this system of “wealth-based detention” lets rich
defendants buy their freedom and violates poor arrestees’ constitutional rights
to equal protection and due process.
The attorneys are also suing on behalf of two advocacy
groups, Faith in Texas and the Texas Organizing Project (TOP), which have tried
and failed for months to gain access to Dallas County’s bail hearings. Faith in
Texas organizer Brittany White says, “They’re making decisions about someone’s
freedom in secret.”
Elizabeth Rossi, an attorney with Civil Rights Corps, a
Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, alleges that Dallas County is violating the
First Amendment rights of community members who want to monitor court hearings.
“These hearings result in the mass pretrial detention of poor people and people
of color,” Rossi said. “Dallas must open these hearings so that a bright light
can be shed on the devastating, mass violations of civil and human rights that
are happening in the jail every day.”
For several weeks, I asked multiple Dallas County
departments to explain why the public can’t view these bail hearings; none
would discuss the matter, citing the pending bail lawsuit. Dallas County felony
court judge Brandon Birmingham, a defendant in the case, wouldn’t comment
either, but he has in the past escorted
at least one reporter to the jail to observe hearings. Citing his busy
schedule, Birmingham wouldn’t do the same for me during a trip to Dallas in
late March, though he offered to help sometime in the future. Sheriff’s
department spokesperson Melinda Urbina later sent me an email stating
Birmingham “did not obtain permission from us to allow an observer to enter,”
and that bail hearings are closed to the public for security reasons.
It’s not hard to imagine why Dallas County likes to conduct
its bail hearings in private. In Harris County, video footage of hearings,
which are open and recorded, has become critical evidence in a nearly
identical lawsuit and also bolstered advocates’ campaign to build
public support for reform. Footage of magistrates browbeating poor defendants
was even cited in the federal court ruling that declared Harris County’s bail
practices unconstitutional last year.
The footage also inspired state Senator John Whitmire,
D-Houston, to file a complaint with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct,
which in January issued rare public admonishments against three Harris County
magistrates for refusing to consider other conditions of release for poor people,
such as so-called pretrial bonds that use monitoring instead of cash to make
sure that defendants show up for court. The fallout from those videos has even
raised the question of whether elected judges lied about Harris
County’s bail practices.
Rossi argues that closed-door legal proceedings are just one
reason Dallas County’s bail system is arguably worse than Houston’s. In Dallas,
according to the lawsuit, poor arrestees languish even longer in jail. Rossi
says that her group has found indigent people charged with petty crimes stuck
in lockup for nearly two weeks on $500 bail, still without a lawyer or court date.
She says she never encountered that kind of neglect, “where someone appears to
get lost in the jail,” in Harris County.
In February, a federal appeals court largely upheld a
groundbreaking ruling in the Harris County case that declared it unconstitutional
to jail people before trial just because they’re too poor to pay bail. The
ruling concluded that a heavy reliance on cash bail exacerbates racial
disparities in the criminal justice system and leads to an unacceptable pattern
of “sentence first, conviction after.” The ruling also cited research showing
that people in jail are much more likely to plead guilty and face longer jail
sentences compared to those who can afford to pay for pretrial release.
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