The crusade against cash bail
Landmark case will go before California’s Supreme Court
Sometimes, when Kenneth Humphrey meets new people, they’ll tell him that he’s the reason they aren’t stuck in jail.
The name of the 66-year- old from San Francisco has been reverberating through California’s justice system for nearly three years now. His challenge of the $600,000 bail a judge assigned him in 2017, after he was charged with robbing and threatening his elderly neighbor in a residential hotel for $5 and a bottle of cologne, led to a landmark appellate court ruling known as the “Humphrey decision,” which upended the bail process and is now before the state Supreme Court.
Defendants who can’t afford to post bond file “Humphrey motions” to lower their bail amount. They ask for “Humphrey hearings” where judges must consider how much they can pay as well as whether they could be released with conditions that don’t involve putting up cash.
Since his release in 2018 after almost a year in jail awaiting trial, Humphrey has completed a courtmandated treatment program and is staying clean after decades of drug and alcohol addiction. He has left the city that was his lifelong home, settling in Vallejo with his longtime girlfriend.
“My freedom means a whole lot to me,” Humphrey said. “Everybody who knows me, and sees me, knows that I’m not the same person.”
And his message to those who credit him for their freedom speaks to the responsibility he feels as the face of the movement to overhaul or even abolish the cash bail system:
“Do yourself a favor,” he tells others out on bail and awaiting trial, who are often under court- ordered monitoring, “pay attention to your ankle monitor.”
Humphrey is an example of what activists, defense attorneys, reform-minded prosecutors and politicians call the extreme inequity of the cash bail system, which typically requires a defendant to come up with 10% of the bail amount, with a bail bonds company fronting the rest. The six-figure bond a judge assigned Humphrey meant the retired shipyard worker sat in jail as his case slowly worked its way through the court system, whereas a wealthy defendant could have gotten a bail bond and walked free while waiting for trial.
“Mr. Humphrey is going to be known as the most historically significant individual in the history of California bail reform,” said Raj Jayadev, a co-founder of the group Silicon Valley De-Bug, which is part of a network of activist groups encouraging defendants and their families to use the Humphrey ruling to challenge high bail amounts. “How he has naturally worn his leadership position in this moment is really powerful.”
The San Francisco judge in Humphrey’s case set his bond using a document called a bail schedule, which assigns a bail amount to each criminal charge, as well as factors such as prior convictions on a defendant’s record.
When the judge added up the schedule’s prescribed amounts for the charges against Humphrey — felony counts of robbery and residential burglary, and two misdemeanors for elder abuse — plus convictions on his records from decades prior, the total came to $600,000.
“It was both extraordinary and typical for the time,” said Anita Nabha, Humphrey’s attorney from the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. “The average American wasn’t aware of the fact that we have these outrageous price tags on freedom.”
The judge later reduced the amount at another bail hearing, but only to $350,000, concluding that while Humphrey wasn’t accused of taking much, the charges were serious. Prosecutors said he followed a 79-year-old man who used a walker into his apartment, threatened him and robbed him. Little was taken only because the victim didn’t have much to steal, the judge said.
Throughout the process, prosecutors argued Humphrey was a threat to the public and a risk to flee because he faced a potentially long prison term if convicted. Some prosecutors and law enforcement groups, as well as the bail bonds industry, say requiring defendants to put down cash is the best way to ensure people show up to their court dates and don’t commit new crimes during their release.
The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office and the nonprofit Civil Rights Corps appealed Humphrey’s bail, leading to the January 2018 decision in which California’s 1st District Court of Appeal wrote that by setting a bond amount far beyond what he could pay, the judge had effectively denied Humphrey access to bail altogether. Judges can deny defendants bail if they present a substantial safety risk, but the appellate court’s panel found judges must ensure defendants are not imprisoned solely because they cannot afford to post a bond.
The state Supreme Court later agreed to hear the case, but it has been on hold while other actions played out: State lawmakers separately passed a 2018 law that would have eliminated California’s cash bail system, but that law never went into effect because it was challenged by the bail bonds industry. That challenge led to a referendum on this year’s ballot, Proposition 25, to uphold the legislation. When voters rejected the proposition, they killed the 2018 bail reform law and sent the focus of efforts to overhaul the system back to Humphrey’s case before the state Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, the robbery case that sparked this yearslong saga remains unresolved. Humphrey has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Nabha declined to discuss the case in detail and directed Humphrey not to talk about it during an interview.
Even with the time Humphrey has already spent in jail, a conviction could put him back behind bars for a very long time. But, Nabha said, “On my watch, I have no intention of letting him set foot in any cell.”
A spokesman for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the case.
Humphrey knows the spotlight the court case has put on him, and as a role model of sorts, he said he diligently follows the conditions of his release. He talks by phone each day with members of his Alcoholics Anonymous group since in-person meetings aren’t an option during the pandemic.
Humphrey spent much of his life in the city’s Fillmore District; the Turk Street residential hotel where the robbery happened was a block away from a duplex on Eddy Street where he grew up, with three generations of his extended family taking up both apartments.
His Texas-born parents, like many Black families during the Great Migration, had left the South for the neighborhood that was known as the Harlem of the West. He eagerly recalls the bunk beds in the room he shared with his siblings, the Midtown Lanes bowling alley that was practically his second home, and how bustling Fillmore Street “used to be lit up like a Christmas tree.”
But after his father was murdered in 1969, Humphrey said he was “exposed to another side of life” as a teenager. He started drinking and doing drugs, sparking the addiction that consumed much of his life.
Now he returns to San Francisco only if he needs to go to court, meet with his attorneys or go to a doctor’s appointment. Otherwise, he says, “I try not to go back.”
If he is in the city, Humphrey sometimes stops by the Fillmore to say a quick hello to old friends who are still there. Every so often he’ll pause for a cigarette outside the duplex on Eddy Street, but he doesn’t linger long before heading downtown to catch the ferry back to Vallejo. Practically all of his family members have left San Francisco.
“I keep it moving because I don’t want to be stuck there,” he said. “I’ve been down that road.”