Governor's Proposal To Modify Bail Law

 The changes to the bail reform law, proposed by Governor Kathy Hochul, are sensible and needed and will preserve the benefits of bail reform while remedying the law's unintended downside.

As a retired Criminal Court judge, former prosecutor and charter participant in the Manhattan Bail Project (which promoted pretrial release without bail), I have long denounced the misuse of bail to incarcerate poor people, more often persons of color, and have advocated and successfully utilized pretrial release without bail in most cases.

However, New York is alone, and wrong, in limiting the factors a judge may consider in weighing bail decisions to a single criterion, the likelihood of a released defendant's return to court when required. By denying judges the discretion to hold persons whose release would pose a danger to the community by reason of propensity for violence, serious mental issues and repeated acts of violence, with or without weapons, the courts are stripped of an essential, judicial power and the public is exposed to unacceptable and unnecessary risk.

The governor's proposal not only addresses identified shortcomings in existing law; it makes welcome additions to funding for pretrial, mental health and employment services, so that persons held can be sooner released safely and keep those persons already released from reoffending.

Senate Hearing on Nomination of Judge Jackson

 Sen. Lindsey Graham's prosecutorial inquisition of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, disrespectful in tone, contemptuous in manner and unfair in blocking the judge's attempts to respond, was unwarranted, reckless, and unworthy of a senator and the process of judicial selection. After first professing offense at earlier attempts by Democrats to block the judicial nomination of Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a Black woman, and reenacting his out-of-control rant, last performed at the Kavanaugh hearing, Sen. Graham then disgraced himself and the process by using the occasion to make direct appeals to his rightwing base and by launching long, angry and accusatory tirades at Judge Jackson while refusing to allow her to complete her answers.

One can only hope that fair-minded viewers will see the parallels between the despicable treatment of this Black woman and the disparagement of Anita Hill by this same Senate committee more than 30 years ago.

Jackson's Record as Defender Likely Target of Senators

 

A host of Republican senators, many of them lawyers who should well understand the duty of an attorney, especially when appointed by the court, to effectively defend an accused, plan to attack Judge Ketanj Brown Jackson at the hearing on her Supreme Court nomination, for her brief tenure as a public defender.

The hypocrisy of these senators knows no bounds. Though they profess to be champions of constitutional rights and the rule of law, when it comes to the defense of indigent criminal defendants by women attorneys of color, they opt to punish the defenders of those rights for daring to accept their court-assigned clients and to represent them to the best of their ability.

It is troubling that these same senators raise no such objections to judicial nominees whose careers may have been spent soliciting the lucrative cases of corporations charged with serious criminal violations which affect the public at large.