AUSTIN (Nexstar) — While the Texas Senate passed every part of State Sen. Joan Huffman’s, R – Houston, bail reform package with broad bipartisan support, some advocates hope the Texas house takes a closer look.
“Texas’ pretrial system is broken,” Emma Stammen, policy strategist at the Bail Project, said. “It allows the rich to walk free, while everyone else is forced to stay behind bars.”
Senate Joint Resolution (SJR) 5, a proposed constitutional amendment to give judges more discretion to hold people accused of committing violent crimes without bail, passed the Texas Senate 28-2. Senators said it’s needed to protect innocent Texans from violent criminals.
“This is not a Republican bill or a Democratic bill,” State Sen. Royce West, D – Dallas, said. “It’s a common sense bill, we must protect victims of crime.”
Stammen, along with representatives from the Texas Civil Rights Project and the Vera Institute for Justice, argued keeping people in jail without bail actually makes Texans less safe.
“People who are jailed pretrial are more likely to be arrested again in the future because of just how destabilizing incarceration is,” Stammen said. “These chances jump from a 24% chance of rearrest just after one day in jail to a 45% chance after three days in jail.”
Stammen is concerned with SJR 5 in particular, because it allows judges to deny bail to people accused of violent crimes “to reasonably ensure the person’s appearance in court,” a broad power.
“Specifically the amendment would allow judges to detain people without any representation from a defense counsel, without requiring risk determinations to be tied to specific substantiated facts, without any testimonial evidence and without a clear distinction between willful flight and simple non appearance,” Stammen said. “Without that clear distinction, this amendment could result in people being detained pretrial simply because they might miss a court appearance. Missing a court appearance is certainly inconvenient, but it’s no reason to keep someone detained pretrial indefinitely.”
However, the senators who voted for the legislation feel like the types of defendants who judges would have this power over — those who’ve been accused of committing either a sexual first-degree felony, a violent crime or continuous human trafficking — makes the amendment narrow enough.
“It’s sexual crimes, it’s violent crimes, it’s human trafficking, it’s literally the worst of the worst,” State Sen. Mayes Middleton, R – Houston, said. “People committing those kinds of crime should not be back on the street.”
As a proposed constitutional amendment, SJR 5 would have to get 100 out of 150 possible votes in the Texas House and then receive majority support from Texans on the ballot this November.
