No. of Recommendations: 11
Eight felonies and three trips to TDC should satisfy the "safety of the community" criteria. It seems just so damn obvious.
No, it's not. I think you fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of bail and pre-trial detention.
Let's stipulate (for simplicity) that the defendant is a "well documented scumbag," based on his prior convictions and prison terms. Certainly a fair label. But the government isn't allowed to just lock someone up for being a well-documented scumbag. He was a well documented scumbag the day before his recent arrest (for which he was given pre-trial release), and the government had no right to imprison him before that recent arrest. We don't have precautionary or prophylactic prison sentences. Even well documented scumbags are fully entitled to liberty - even though it's "so damn obvious" that letting well documented scumbags roam around increases the risk of crime. Some folks might wish we could lock up people just because they're well documented scumbags, but that's not how our society or constitution is set up.
That doesn't change when he's arrested for the ninth time. He's presumed to be innocent of those charges. The judge is certainly allowed to take into account the defendant's past criminal record, but he's not allowed to use the fact of this charge as an excuse to deprive someone of their basic rights. If the recent charges don't make this guy any more of a danger to the "safety of the community" than he was before, the judge can't use bail for these charges as an excuse to imprison someone that wasn't imprisonable before. Charges aren't supposed to be an instrument for taking bad guys off the street - convictions are.
It's just fascinating to me that conservatives get into a huge lather about the idea that the Second Amendment exists to protect us against government tyranny, and then overlook that half of the Bill of Rights (the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments) primarily protect us against the criminal justice power of the government. That's where the risk of tyranny was seen to be by the Founders - that's the power they really worried about in setting out the BoR. It's the most significant, and terrifying, power we give to the government - the power to deprive people of nearly every liberty they have (even life) under the criminal justice system.
