Rand Paul and Kamala Harris Team Up to Reform Bail Practices
WASHINGTON — The last thing Ato Walker expected when he went out for a pre-birthday drive in 2014 was to have a traffic stop escalate into a physical encounter with police, then have his bail set at more than $165,000.
After his bail was reduced to $85,000, his mother used her retirement savings to pay a bail bondsman the nonrefundable, mandatory 10 percent to free him.
His case was eventually thrown out, but the memory lingers.
“There are too many people that are up-charged, like I was," Walker said.
Now two senators from opposing parties — Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif. — are working on a bill to overhaul the nation's bail system in an attempt to prevent what happened to Walker from happening to others. The bill, titled the Pretrial Integrity and Safety Act, aims to address what the senators see as flaws in the system by providing grants to states and Indian tribes to change or replace it.
“In our country, whether you stay in jail or not is wholly determined by whether you’re wealthy or not — and that’s wrong,” Harris said in a newsrelease. “We must come together to reform a bail system that is discriminatory, wasteful and fails to keep our communities safe.”
In a New York Times op-ed in July, the two senators said there are “450,000 Americans who sit in jail today awaiting trial because they cannot afford to pay bail.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rand-paul-and-kamala-harris-team-up-to-reform-bail-practices/ar-AArBLXq?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=edgsp
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This is a really important issue that will now go nowhere with Rands help. I can't understand why black Democrats keep working with Rand. He doesn't have any sway within his party. He doesn't even add a single additional Republican vote to a bill.
I remember falling for the headlines of Booker and Rand working on criminal justice reform. Then month after month and now years have gone by. The bills they submitted haven't been voted on. I'm not even sure if they have gone to a committee or been scored by the CBO. Rand party controls both houses and the Presidency and there's been jack shit done about criminal justice reform.
The only reason Rand does this is for the headlines of look he works for Democrats.
