San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin ends cash bail for all criminal cases
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Two weeks after Chesa Boudin took the oath of office as San Francisco’s newest district attorney, the city’s top prosecutor announced Wednesday that his office will no longer ask for cash bail as a condition for defendants’ pretrial release.
The policy, in which prosecutors will use a “risk-based system” that weighs whether a defendant might flee or poses a threat to public safety, fulfills one of Boudin’s key campaign pledges before his election in November. The former public defender has often said the cash bail system unfairly affects indigent defendants and people of color.
“For years I’ve been fighting to end this discriminatory and unsafe approach to pretrial detention,” Boudin said in a statement. “From this point forward, pretrial detention will be based on public safety, not on wealth.”
The shift to remove cash bail goes a step further than Boudin’s predecessor, George Gascón, who scaled back requests for cash bail by introducing an algorithmic risk assessment tool in 2016. The district attorney’s office on Wednesday said this tool “has allowed prosecutors and judges to preserve the constitutional protection of presumed innocence, while maintaining public safety through objective data.”
Read more: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-DA-Chesa-Boudin-ends-cash-bail-for-14996400.php
