Judge orders change at jail

A judge has ordered El Paso County officials to stop holding defendants who can’t afford a $55 county fee for pre-trial services after they have been granted a personal recognizance bond.

William Bain, El Paso County’s top judge, signed the order on Wednesday about a week after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Jasmine Still.

Still spent 27 days in jail because she couldn’t pay the $55 fee after a judge approved her release on a personal recognizance bond, which is a written promise to appear in court.

El Paso County charges a $55 fee to all defendants to help defray the costs of monitoring suspects while their cases wind through court.

Still, who had a newborn child, was unable to pay the fee and ended up pleading guilty to a drug charge rather than fight it in court so she wouldn’t lose custody of her children. The pre-trial fee was a classic case of being penny wise and pound foolish, according to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Colorado on Nov. 7.

In its attempt to recoup the $55 cost of pretrial services, El Paso County spent about $2,400 holding Still, the lawsuit says. A judge determined that Still should be released on her own recognizance because she was not a flight risk and posed no threat of harm to others, the lawsuit says.

An ACLU attorney says the $55 fee has kept people who should have been released on their own recognizance in jail for up to 119 days solely because of personal poverty, the lawsuit says.

In 2016, Colorado passed a law that closed a loophole critics contended gutted efforts to prevent the jailing of poor people who can’t pay fines for low-level offenses. The law specified that jailings could occur only after a court hearing determined the fines were not an undue hardship.