‘They are pulling it out of thin air’

Connecticut Supreme Court asked to reverse $20 million bond set in killing of Yale grad student Kevin Jiang

Qinxuan Pan, the MIT researcher held on a $20 million bond after allegedly gunning down Yale graduate student Kevin Jiang and eluding police for months, argued to the state Supreme Court Wednesday that he is being kept in custody illegally because the high bond in his case violates the constitutional guarantee to reasonable bail.

The hourlong hearing in Hartford sounded at times like an exploration of how the judicial bail system operates in Connecticut. If there was agreement, it was in the belief that for practical reasons — volume of cases and limited resources — the bail amount that determines whether an accused is free or incarcerated before trial are set by presumption rather than hard evidence.

Pan asked the high court, among other things, to reverse two Superior Court judges who set the $20 million bond in separate proceedings, arguing the amount is disproportionately high for a murder case because the authorities exaggerated the likelihood of his flight to China and the amount of money at his disposal through his family.

Justice Steven D. Ecker said bail was set at least in part on the belief his family was wealthy when there is no evidence on the record to support the belief.

“I just don’t know how you get to that number,” he said. “They are pulling it out of thin air.”

Attorney Norm Pattis argued that prosecutors in Pan’s case, and in general, “pick and choose” and “interpret and misinterpret the facts” they present to courts during hearings at which bonds are set or modified. The result, Pattis argued, are bond amounts based on unchallenged, incomplete or inaccurate information.

“What we have here is a bail system with the moral ethos of a used car salesman,” Pattis said.

State prosecutor Timothy Sugrue argued that a variety of factors in Pan’s case — the violence of the offense, his mental health, his ties to China, his family’s wealth and suspicion that they

unchanged over the past week.

Of those hospitalized, 75% have not been vaccinated against COVID19, according to state numbers, despite the fact that the vast majority of Connecticut’s oldest and most vulnerable residents are vaccinated.

Deaths

Connecticut reports COVID-19 deaths only once a week, on Thursdays. As of last week, the state had recorded 8,394 coronavirus-linked deaths during the pandemic.

The United States has recorded 651,856 COVID19 deaths, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Vaccinations

As of Tuesday, 74.3% of all Connecticut residents and 85.2% of those 12 and older had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, while 66.7% of all residents and 76.5% of those 12 and older were fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.