The US Supreme Court declined Monday to take up the question of whether states can impose schedule-based cash bail on an indigent defendant before allowing their pre-trial release from jail.
Bradley Hester originally brought the case Hester v. Gentry in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama with the assistance of the Alabama ACLU, Civil Rights Corps and the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2017, Hester was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia. He was held in jail pre-trial due to his inability to afford a $1,000 bail, based on the Alabama bail schedule in the Alabama Rules of Criminal Procedure. In Hestor’s class action suit, Hester and his attorneys claimed that the Cullman County, Alabama bail system violated the 14th amendment, as indigent defendants were denied due process and equal protection.
The lower court ruled in favor of Hester, enjoining the county from imposing cash bail amounts on defendants who could not afford them. Judge Madeline Hughes Haikala in her opinion, stated:
The level of certainty that the clear and convincing evidence standard provides is necessary to ensure fundamental fairness in bail proceedings. The detention of a criminal defendant in Cullman County without a specific degree of confidence that detention is necessary offends a fundamental principle of justice.
However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturned the lower court on appeal, finding that Cullman County’s bail system was constitutional. Judge Barbara Lagoa, writing for the majority, held:
Under our plenary de novo review of the facial constitutionality of the current Cullman County bail system, we conclude that the district court erred both in finding that the bail system discriminated against the indigent and in finding that the bail system deprived pretrial detainees of procedural due process.
Judge Robin S. Rosenbaum filed a dissent in the appeals court decision, accusing the court of refusing to fully analyze the 14th amendment implications of the case, arguing:
In short, Cullman County’s current bail system unconstitutionally violates indigent arrestees’ Fourteenth Amendment equal protection and due-process rights. The majority opinion avoids this conclusion only by disregarding the facts that the district court found about how Cullman County’s current bail system operates in practice.
The American Bar Association filed an Amicus Curiae brief encouraging the Supreme Court to take up Hester, saying:
The adverse effects of pretrial detention can last for years. For example, pretrial detention decreases an individual’s future employment prospects, and increases in pretrial detention rates are associated with increases in county-level poverty rates.
A coalition of legal scholars who research bail also encouraged the Supreme Court to take up the case, asserting “This Court should correct the Eleventh Circuit’s departure from centuries of Anglo-American tradition protecting defendants from arbitrary pretrial detention.”
Cullman County Sheriff Matthew Gentry, who is named in the suit as a defendant, dismissed concerns over the county’s bail approach, saying “I’ve had to talk to mamas, daddies, aunts, grandparents that have had loss because of a no-bail system… that’s something that no one should have to do, there’s no citizen of Cullman County that should be faced with tragedy because of failures in the system.” Gentry’s counsel stated in their brief in opposition that “Petitioner Hester is not seeking certiorari of the actual decision below, but is instead belatedly attempting to reshape his arguments into an independent substantive due process claim that has never been part of this case.”
