In its order, the court agreed to take on the inquiry as
part of its “King’s Bench” powers, which gives it supervisory powers over the
rest of the statewide judiciary. Typically, the court only wields this
authority in matters of “great public importance. Judge John M. Cleland, a
senior judge from McKean County, has been named the special master who will
oversee the investigation, court documents indicated.
In March, attorneys for the Pennsylvania branch of the
American Civil Liberties Union and the Washington D.C.-based law firm Arnold
& Porter Kaye Scholer filed a lawsuit on behalf of 10 incarcerated people,
as well as a community advocacy group, arguing that “bail magistrates in
Philadelphia’s First Judicial District have failed to consider alternatives to
cash bail and have assigned cash bail to people who are too poor to afford it.”
In a statement, ACLU Executive Director Reggie Shuford, said
his organization is “grateful that the court understands that this situation
needs more investigation.
“People who have not been convicted of a crime are sitting
in Philadelphia jails only because they are too poor to pay the bail they’ve
been assigned. The Philadelphia courts have effectively criminalized poverty,”
he said.
In its legal filing, the ACLU claims that Philadelphia
courts are violating procedural rules with their bail practices. The high
court’s Monday order gives the ACLU and the Philadelphia court officials named
as defendants in the case 90 days to submit their evidence. From there, Cleland
has 60 days to submit his recommendations to the high court.
“There are people sitting in Philadelphia’s jails right now
who have not been proven guilty of a crime,” Nyssa Taylor, criminal justice
policy counsel for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “Bail
hearings in Philadelphia typically last less than three minutes, which is
wholly insufficient to inquire into someone’s ability to pay, and the person whose
liberty is on the line is not even in the room, as they watch the proceedings
by video. The bail system in Philadelphia must change.”
Some legal reform groups, including the Brennan Center for
Justice at New York University, have
called for the elimination of cash bail, arguing that the decision
regarding “whether a defendant should be jailed while awaiting trial is often
based on a defendant’s wealth and not on public safety considerations.”
The center’s
research has further found that “80 percent of
the accused are too poor to afford an attorney, more than 60 percent are
people of color, and the bulk of the cases are low-level,
non-violent offenses. Most of this population cannot afford bail and
are incarcerated before trial for long periods even though they have not been
found responsible for any crime.”
“[Sixty] percent of the jail population is not convicted but
being held pretrial,” Brennan researchers pointed
out in a 2012 report, adding that this “issue is a huge contributor to the
mass incarceration of people in the United States, resulting in overcrowded
facilities and unsustainable budgets … those too poor to pay a money bail
remain in jail regardless of their risk level or presumed innocence … U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder in 2011 stated that keeping people awaiting court
dates in county jails costs around $9 billion each year.”
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