In a 5-2 ruling Tuesday morning, the state’s highest court overturned a ruling by a Kankakee County judge that the law ending cash bail was unconstitutional. The end to cash bail will now go into effect across the entire state on Sept. 18, according to the Illinois Supreme Court ruling.

  • MasterOBee Master/King@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The court’s decision today holds – as my office has consistently advocated – that the General Assembly had the authority to eliminate cash bail and replace it with a system in which people are detained pending trial only if they pose a threat to the public or are a flight risk.

    I’m not too knowledgeable about how the system works, but isn’t this kind of what we did, just now without any requirement for bail?

    This seems to remove the only encouragement to return to court without an appropriate replacement.

    To my knowledge, I thought bail was basically a ‘loan’ that you get back when you return to court.

    • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Cash bail drastically over affects poor people. If you dont have money to put up or assests to leverage, you hsve to take a loan that costs 10% of the loan total, i.e if you need 50k, you still need 5k to give up.

      If you cant do the above like many poor people, you are stuck in jail while not being convincted of a crime. This almost always costs you your job, your home, all your belongings, your car, custody of your children, on and on. There are countless horror stories of people spending years in jail awaiting trial to be aquiteed and released, having lost everything they have in the world while being found not guilty of the crime.

      This system ends that. If youre a flight risk or violent, you stay in jail. If not, you can carry on your life until youre convicted, which is both just and reasonable. It puts the poor and the rich in the same justice system, and thats a good thing.

    • burningquestion@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      No, if you skip hearings for a criminal charge they can issue a warrant for your arrest, throw your ass in jail more or less anywhere they find you in the States, fine you, hit you with another set of criminal charges, and refuse to release you because by that point you’re by definition a flight risk.

      Please try to understand something about the American criminal justice system before you comment on it.

      Edit - while apparently you can often get bail back under the right circumstances, bail is generally so expensive that even with a bond most people can’t afford it. If bail is only affordable to rich people, it’s in practice a special privilege of the rich.

      • SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What? Yes, you get the bail money back. Otherwise, a bail bondsman would just be throwing that 90% away every time.

        • burningquestion@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Had to look it up to double check and edited my comment quite a while before you posted yours, so all I can say is, sure, I agree with you, not that I understand why you chose to respond to an earlier version of my comment. Or did you really spend fifteen minutes drafting a two sentence comment?

          Although having seen court clerks play all kinds of nasty games with delivering court notices to defendants and the challenges many indigent defendants face, "you get your bail back if you never miss a single hearing is pretty slim comfort in the real world…

          • SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            You know I can see the timestamps, right? You posted the comment at 17:09:18, I replied at 17:20:56, you edited at 17:24:00.

            Even if you edited multiple times and that’s only the most recent one, yes, in whatever time it was between me opening this post and submitting the comment, I did spend some time reading about bail, first just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and then just out of curiosity.

            • burningquestion@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Thanks for noticing I edited the comment a couple times.

              Anyways, it took you fifteen minutes to check four or five results on Google? Okay.

      • MasterOBee Master/King@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Please try to understand something about the American criminal justice system before you comment on it.

        I wrote a comment starting that I’m not knowledgeable and asking for more opinions.

        You told me I don’t understand it, need to read up more and that you have the answers. Then you have people correcting you and you need to edit and correct your comment.

        Seems like I have the right amount of confidence in my response, and you are way too over confident.

        • burningquestion@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You were repeating common right-wing talking points about this in exactly the same concern trolling style that many right wing trolls use and have used on this exact topic of discussion. I just didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt that you weren’t exactly what you appeared to be and replied as though you were concern trolling. I still responded to your points.

          Also, how much does it really change anything if you get bail back or not? Does it? How so, if so?

          Additionally, I caught my mistake quickly and corrected it on my own. The people who are correcting me spent twenty minutes lovingly researching and crafting two sentence responses to an issue I caught on my own and fixed within a couple of minutes. I don’t know why you shouldn’t trust me based on needing to make a single correction. Based on this, you shouldn’t trust any human, living or dead, including the reporter who wrote the above article.

      • islandofcaucasus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Lol I like that you talked shit about their lack of understanding of the criminal justice system, yet you clearly didn’t understand how bail works. Please try to do better in the future

        • burningquestion@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Forgetting a single thing about a system I haven’t studied or interacted with in over fifteen years doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. You never forget or incorrectly remember anything?

          Was I wrong in other parts of my comment? In what other ways did I betray a lack of understanding of the criminal justice system? Was my understanding overall better or worse than the person I was replying to? Did I really show a lower overall level of understanding than the right wing concern troll I was responding to?

          Was my bit about bail even the main point of my comment?

          In what ways should I do better in future? Never make mistakes? Not correct myself when I catch them? Not complain when other people pile on to correct me long after I’ve corrected myself? Not get annoyed when people who are clearly an order of magnitude slower than me take it on themselves to correct mistakes I’ve already fixed? Please help me be “better,” whatever that’s supposed to mean in this situation.