Bail Bonds industry planning to appeal new bail reform
Senate Bill 10 passed this week, eliminating the cash bail system and not everyone is happy about it.
The bail system has been in place for decades and a lot of people have said there needs to be some kind of reform, but now there’s a lot of questions surrounding how well this total elimination of cash bail will work.
“It’s very odd that we’re going from a historical bail system to an all or nothing approach on pretrial release. I think this is a major seat change in criminal justice,” says Legal Analyst Steven Clark.
Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 10 this week eliminating cash bail. Instead, those arrested will go through a pretrial risk assessment.
“They will evaluate the individual, look at their background, determine their ties to the community to decide if they’re someone that can be released,” says Clark.
The bills give officials with the court or a personal agency the court hires, 24 hours to determine if the suspect should be released. That time can be extended or passed to a judge.
Clark says, “They will have a right to a pretrial detention hearing before a judge at some point later and then a judge will decide after hearing additional information from lawyers and prosecutors and victims as to whether that person should be in custody.”
Ray Ruiz, owner of Aardwold Bail Bonds in Santa Cruz has worked in the industry for more than 20 years. He said he’s in favor of a bail reform, but this is not the right way to go about it.
“It’s in our constitution, our right to bail. You know if you have this in California it’s crazy it really surprised me,” said Ruiz.
Ruiz said this industry is not going down without a fight.
“We’ve got an appeal going on, we’re going to go ahead and get the signatures required to put it on the ballot in 2020 November and we’re going to go ahead and let the voters decide what kind of reform we should have.”
Another concern for those who are released without having to post bail, is they don’t have as much of an incentive to come back.
