Word: bail
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bystander shot in the thigh and Joseph Gruttola on the run. Three more policemen chased Gruttola (who had been shot in the jaw), caught him and charged him with robbery and attempted murder. Then, to their indignation, the accused cop-shooter was released by Judge Bruce Wright on bail of just $500 in cash...
Mayor John Lindsay professed himself "dismayed"; Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy called the judge's ruling "a disgrace." Despite various legal maneuvers, however, Judge Wright held firm. "Bail is not a game of money to be won only by the rich," he said. "It is to assure appearance in court, and if the accused has roots in the community, then there is no [high] bail." Gruttola, the father of two, owns a home and runs a driving school and insurance business, and Wright refused to increase bail "simply because a public officer is the alleged victim...
That $500 fuss came at a time when the whole bail system is under attack. Last week, in fact, a commission studying the New York State court system despaired of the whole thing and recommended that bail be done away with. Instead, it proposed that all defendants be released until trial, except certain suspects who a judge thinks are not likely to return. "The possibility that a defendant might commit a criminal offense while on release should not be a ground for detaining him," it said...
Pressures. The bail system, by contrast, achieves the same ends by disingenuously avoiding those problems. Astronomically high bail has, in fact, long been used to confine suspects who are considered dangerous. The Eighth Amendment does ban "excessive bail," and the 1966 Federal Bail Reform Act provides careful guidelines for federal judges. In state courts, however, exactly how much bail is excessive remains a matter for a judge's discretion...
...Bail is also widely criticized because, in the words of the New York commission, it "arbitrarily discriminates against the poor" and puts those who cannot make bail under added "pressure to plead guilty." But precisely because of the latter reality, bail serves an unspoken purpose. Getting rid of it would very likely cut guilty pleas and further increase the already crippling delays in the courts...