Illinois tends to be the hold of lunatic legislation, often as a result of racial demagoguery, emanating from Crook Cook County. The latest piece of insanity was the Orwellian legislation called the Safe-T Act which basically punishes police and aids criminals. Among its provisions was the abolition for cash bail for almost all offenses. That piece of lunacy is now on hold, as anyone who could read would have predicted would happen. The Illinois Constitution has this provision:
SECTION 9. BAIL AND HABEAS CORPUS
All persons shall be bailable by sufficient sureties,
except for the following offenses where the proof is evident
or the presumption great: capital offenses; offenses for
which a sentence of life imprisonment may be imposed as a
consequence of conviction; and felony offenses for which a
sentence of imprisonment, without conditional and revocable
release, shall be imposed by law as a consequence of
conviction, when the court, after a hearing, determines that
release of the offender would pose a real and present threat
to the physical safety of any person.
A judge in Kankakee County, based upon a suit by 65 States Attorneys ruled this provision makes the elimination of cash bail unconstitutional as it clearly does.
The Illinois Supreme Court has now taken up the case and placed a stay on enforcement of the cashless bail provision. The Court is controlled by the Democrats,
but I think they will hold the cashless bail act to be an unconstitutional infringement of the power of the courts to set bail. The rest of the Act, alas, has
gone into effect which will lead to an increase in the exodus of people from what is becoming a blue state sinkhole in the middle of the Midwest.
The motor for this is the notion (adhered to by characters like Bobby Rush) that blacks are an aristocratic stratum and deplorables like police officers and jail guards are getting above their station by detaining them and questioning them. Fancy bourgeois whites adhere to this notion as well (but fancy that they confer status, while Bobby Rush et al fancy they are born with such status); the fancy bourgeois retreat behind their doormen and their security gates and the walls of their private schools. What Scott FitzGerald said: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” It’s just disgusting.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/561632-rise-of-generation-of-censors-law-schools-latest-battlement-free-speech/
I missed this when it came out a year and a half ago. “Law student” is now a synonym for “asshole”.
The appeal of cashless bail laws rests on a superficially logical argument: the decision to hold someone in jail pending trial (while they are still presumed innocent) ideally should be based purely on whether or not they pose a threat to the community or a risk of flight, and not on how much money they have. The key word here, however, is “ideally”, and ideal conditions never exist in real life, so this policy never works in real life.
and not on how much money they have.
Yeah, and that demonstrated how little the legislators knew about the actual system. Most people who run afoul of the criminal justice system have modest resources, ranging from o to 500 dollars. Most of them are let out on recognizance bonds. Those with substantial priors, who are a danger to the community or are an obvious flight risk, are held, with bond being set high enough that they likely are aren’t getting out before trial. Accused with resources do get out on bond, but usually they would do so in any case, because they have no priors, or are accused of charges where public safety is not an issue. This was never about the actual bail system in Illinois, and was always about Democrats in the legislature playing George Floyd race games.
and was always about Democrats in the legislature playing George Floyd race games.
Playing those games invariably makes the world worse for the wage-earning stratum, who cannot hide from predators. Once you realize the Democratic Party is a manifestation of the dominant fraction of the professional-managerial stratum, and once you figure out that the people in that fraction are a mix of the feckless and the malevolent, it all makes sense.
The elimination of cash bail sounds great! (Wait, it doesn’t mean what I think it does, does it?)
The flip side is that if the law went into effect, voters would see the full effect of their lack of common sense at the polls when voting for their legislators.
The Left always gets (wounded) human nature wrong. It’s almost comical. And it would be if it only effected them, but it never effects them. It always effects everyone else.
The Left always gets (wounded) human nature wrong.
Some of them do. The rest of the are just careless people.