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For the record, a regular American sent to jail will typically be afforded the opportunity to post bail and continue to conduct their life as an innocent person
by cookiecaper 9y ago
For the record, a regular American sent to jail will typically be afforded the opportunity to post bail and continue to conduct their life as an innocent person, pending the outcome of their trial.
- Zombieball 9y agoUnless the regular American is from a low income household and can not afford bail. For example: Kalief Browder.
- cookiecaper 9y agoIt's true that sometimes people can't make bail. Just a few quick notes about that. 1. Bail is refundable collateral. It's supposed to be priced within attainability, but it needs to be an amount sufficient to motivate compliance with the court. And when you're looking at criminal charges, that amount generally has to be quite significant, since compliance may result in incarceration or other seriously adverse outcomes. Also, bail will be set based upon the totality of the circumstances including the severity of the crime; the amounts you hear are frequently high because the crime must be serious and/or noteworthy to grab attention on the news. 2. There is a whole industry built up around helping people make bail. "I can't make bail" is not a novel problem and there is a lot of infrastructure in place to assist with this. 3. Excessive bail is not allowed and motions can be filed to get bail reduced. 4. No matter what, in every large system with rules that get enforced, there will be anomalies and anecdotes about the rules going awry. Isolated heart-wrenching stories of breakage should be addressed, but are not grounds for condemning the system as a whole.