Word: bail
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Judge Desmond's complaint is buttressed by some compelling testimony. In the current Atlantic, Chief Judge J. Edward Lumbard of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York writes that in his busy jurisdiction bail bondsmen steer paying defendants to "a lawyer who will kick back to them a substantial part of the fee." Often this "lazy and incompetent" court hanger-on falsely claims that he can "fix someone" for a higher fee. Since he "seldom knows any law or reads any cases," his arguments in court are "so transparently hollow that it is not easy for most juries...
...number of pre-trial prisoners and donated $70,000 to set up the Vera Foundation, which he named for his mother (because "I thought she would have liked what I was doing"). In cooperation with the New York University Law School, Schweitzer's foundation set up the Manhattan Bail Project, which has been operating for 31 months on a trial basis in Manhattan Criminal Court. Each morning, after the newly arrested prisoners are herded into the detention pen to await pretrial hearings, a team of Vera staffers, who by night are N.Y.U. law students, conduct interviews through the bars...
...remarkable trend is based on equally remarkable results. Of the 2,300 prisoners-ranging from muggers to embezzlers-that Vera has recommended for release, less than 1% have failed to show up for trial v. a 3% no-show rate in Manhattan for defendants who were free on regular bail...
...claim that the new system will work in all cases, and Vera itself avoids homicide, sex and narcotics offenses as too risky to handle. But the success of the project strongly suggests that many indigent defendants can be turned loose by sidestepping the old concept of money bail and substituting character checks and supervision (Vera sends special letters and makes telephone calls to remind the defendants to show up for trial). The Vera system would not only greatly reduce the cost of jailing pre-trial prisoners-$10 million annually in New York City-but would also give defendants a better...
...York City in January decided to adopt Vera procedures for all its criminal courts. Experiments with the system have also been started in eight other major cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy is encouraging federal courts to release more prisoners without bail. Reflects Louis Schweitzer: "There is an old saying, 'nothing is so terrible as watching a beautiful theory being butchered by brutal facts.' But this is one time when the facts came out as beautifully as the theory...