Ending Cash Bail May Not Be as Bad As Some Allege
The law ending cash bail will take effect September 18.
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OPINION
When Democrats in the General Assembly passed the first version of the so-called “SAFE-T Act” or “Pretrial Fairness Act” in the minutes before the legislature adjourned sine die in 2021, it was a document riddled with contradictions, flaws, and serious concerns about how to keep bad people off the street.
Republicans acted like cash bail was the only thing keeping us from a real life version of the bad “The Purge” horror movies. Democrats treated us as if we were stupid and couldn’t read what was in the bill, and many had the gumption to lie repeatedly about it during the fall campaign last year. They claimed there weren’t felony offenses a judge was prohibited from holding a defendant on, even though a bipartisan group of State’s Attorneys told them differently.
The lawsuit was already filed by the time the legislature amended the law late last year. The reality is the law that will take effect in September is vastly different than the original law passed in 2021.
There was a long list of changes to the law, engineered mostly by the late Sen. Scott Bennett, that made the list of charges much longer that a judge can order pretrial detention for.
The list now includes all felonies that are not eligible for probation. It also includes first and second degree murder, predatory criminal sexual assault of a child, armed robbery, home invasion, arson, aggravated kidnapping, and others.
I’ve been told by multiple current and former Republican and Democrat prosecutors and judges that the idea of ending cash bail isn’t the deal breaker, but it was the limited list of charges judges could use to hold a defendant that posed the most risk. Many will tell you the list now is much more encompassing to give judges the latitude they need.
But the biggest problem facing the criminal justice system in the state is prosecutors, specifically Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, to actually prosecute crimes instead of employ some pathetic catch-and-release system that leads to this never-ending cycle of crime and criminals.
Democrats have bypassed the previous changes to bail laws that include daily bond credits and a serious decrease in the amount of cases that are bonded in the first place. The hypotheticals of poor people rotting in jail is far from reality.
Implementing the law over the next two months will be complicated, for sure, and there will likely be some tweaks that are needed.
But, at this point, the doom and gloom we’ve heard from the right is overblown, too.
We’ll know more soon.