If there is a bad idea on the political Left in this country, rest assured that it will be embraced sooner or later by the Democrats who misgovern Illinois.
For the sake of racial politics, Illinois has done away with cash bail. Cash bail is one of the few portions of the criminal justice system that worked well, with judges using cash bail to hold dangerous defendants and/or frequent flyers. Now if a judge deems a defendant, except in a handful of crimes, to be a danger to the public or a flight risk, the overburdened court system must hold a swift evidentiary hearing to determine if a defendant is dangerous or a flight risk. This trial before a trial, puts an impossible burden on prosecutors. We will have a revolving door system where defendants are released to wreak havoc, defendants who have no intention of returning to court for subsequent proceedings in their cases. Madness, pure and simple.
This sort of thing is a prime indicator of the utter indecency of the Democratic Party and the fecklessness of its voters.
Could this be a reaction to the prisons being too full? The knock on affect is that if you need more “trials before trials” to determine if a person is eligible for parole, you are taking the pressure off the prison system and placing it on the courts. Which I’m assuming are not properly resourced to cope with this new way of operating. I mean you are not all of a sudden going to put out ads for more judges, or build extra courthouses over night. It’s shifting the problem around, exacerbated the problem in the long term.
No, this is about Democrats ensuring that they get ninety percent of the black vote. Identity politics plain and simple. The Sheriffs, who are in control of the jails in Illinois, are overwhelmingly against this.
[…] Democrats Scramble to Find a Replacement for Retiring Mitt Romney – The American Catholic No Cash Bail Goes Into Effect In Illinois – Donald R. McClarey, J.D., at The American […]
No, this is about Democrats ensuring that they get ninety percent of the black vote.
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I suspect much more popular with black politicians than with street-level blacks, though the street-level blacks never seem to react to this sort of nonsense.
For many years, I lived in non-metropolitan counties in New York where the homicide rate is shy of 1.2 per 100,000. At that time, there was a block of neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side that, taken together, had a population of 650,000 and a homicide rate of 45 per 100,000. There was another block of neighborhoods on the west side of town which had a population of 350,000 and a homicide rate of 51 per 100,000. There was Harvey, Illinois in suburban Cook County, which had a population of about 25,000 and a homicide rate which bounced around 30 per 100,000. There was East Chicago, a burg in adjacent Lake County, Indiana, which had a population shy of 30,000 and a homicide rate of 29 per 100,000. Gary, Indiana next door had a population of 80,000 and a homicide rate of 58 per 100,000. This was all pre-Ferguson and pre-George Floyd.
There were two obvious indications right from the start that this was a bad idea: the SAFE-T Act was given a highly contrived acronym for a name (it stands for “Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity – Today”) in a manner similar to the USA PATRIOT Act, RESTRICT Act, etc., and it was passed in the final hours of a lame duck legislative session. There’s also way more to it than just the “no bail” law: it imposes all sorts of new conditions on police hiring and training, use of police body cams, sentencing, sentence credit for prison inmates, etc. Some of these provisions don’t go into effect for another year or two but agencies such as the Law Enforcement Training Standards Board are already issuing rules related to the act.
“The Sheriffs, who are in control of the jails in Illinois, are overwhelmingly against this.”
So are the police chiefs and the police union, the FOP. The FOP in fact put on a strong PR drive against the bill, but the Dems’ lapdog media in the state essentially ignored them. Police are, of course, no longer the “good guys” in the Democrats’ pantheon.
I recently saw this video about Chicago store closings:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUDPbAf9bU0