Reforming Bail Reform

A few years ago I was watching a video of smart people doing dumb things.

A man was up on a tall ladder in a tree clearing out branches with a chainsaw. He’d reach out with the saw, touch the branch and “whoosh” it would drop to the ground below. The man was a whiz with that chainsaw and in no time he was ridding the area of all the unwanted tree limbs.

The problem was he was so focused on cutting the branches quickly; he wasn’t paying attention to the bigger picture. Can you guess what happened next?

Yep, he only had one branch left to cut so without hesitation he reached out with the saw and cut through it like a hot knife through butter. It was just then he realized it was the very limb his ladder was leaning on for support and as the branch came crashing down to the ground, so too did the ladder and the genius holding the saw.

Somehow he didn’t break his back when he hit the dirt and the, still-running, chainsaw fell mercifully just to his side and didn’t take off any human limbs.

I thought of our friend on the ladder this week as I watched the governor and state lawmakers scrambling to explain the new bail reform law and why so many people arrested for hurting others were set free only hours after being arrested. I have no doubt all those in favor of the reform had the best intentions when they crafted the law but they were in such a hurry to push it through last year, they didn’t realize they’d be chopping off their own limb.

And now, like that man on the ladder, they are looking for a soft landing that allows them to fix the law before a very bad person walks out of jail and kills someone. Which, let’s be honest, seems about as likely as the sunrise in a state of 20 million people.

When I write these columns I try to avoid the low hanging fruit, so saying that blanket bail reform was a misguided idea seems a bit like piling on at this point. When I see newspapers all over the state, some very much left of center, saying this reform is dangerous then you know something is seriously wrong with it.

Democrats don’t usually go against the governor, at least in public, but many are and they want the law changed.

The breaking point for the Capital Region I think was the man released this week after being arrested in the death of an infant. This came only hours after a different guy was set free after being arrested for choking a woman and violating an order of protection. You’d think when they wrote this law around a conference table last year someone would have raised their hand and said, “But if you choke women or kill babies, in that case, you can still get bail set, right?”

The governor said earlier this week that there were some unexpected consequences playing out. That’s funny because for months I’ve heard law enforcement types telling those of us in the media that this was exactly what was going to happen; violent people getting released and victims living in fear

I agree it’s unfair that someone sit in jail for months because they are poor and their family can’t pull together fivethousand bucks to get them out as they await trial. The problem is, as is often the case with laws, they are so broadly written they take a chainsaw to a problem when a scalpel is what’s needed.

I’m also not a fan of taking all decision making out of the hands of judges. We have some pretty smart judges all over this fine state and I’d like them to be able to look at each case and say, “I know what the law says but I have veto power here and this guy needs to be locked up or at least have very high bail set.”

I also applaud the law’s effort to speed up what’s known as “discovery” so defense lawyers have a fighting chance to see all the evidence. However, with such a backlog of cases, I worry the deadlines are now too tight and we’ll see dangerous people released and charges later dismissed because an overworked Assistant D.A. couldn’t get the lab results back in two weeks.

I also worry that bad people who get caught will be released without bail, hop in a car and drive west until they hit the ocean. Then when they are stopped a year from now for speeding in San Diego and the computer tells the officer this person is wanted in Scotia, New York for choking a woman, no one here will bother driving 3,000 miles to go get them. The nice thing about bail is it was an incentive to show up for your court date or someone was going to lose a lot of money. Now, there’s zero incentive if you’re guilty.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Let’s fix the law and avoid hell altogether shall we.