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A new effort by the ACLU of Nebraska will monitor courts across the state to make sure judges are complying with laws that require them to take into account a person’s ability to pay fines or post bail.
The 2-year effort will use law clerks and volunteers to monitor hundreds of hours of court proceedings to see if judges are following statutory reform laws passed in Nebraska over the past few years. Those laws require judges to find out more about a person’s ability to pay cash bail or fines. Adam Sipple is the Legal Director for the ACLU of Nebraska and said in many cases, it doesn’t appear that’s happening.
“Based on our initial assessment and review of several courts, some judges aren’t following or complying with the statutory reforms at all, not conducting any individualized assessment of a person’s ability to pay,“ Sipple said. “The bail hearings, the misdemeanor sentencing hearings look just the way they did 20 years ago.”
Sipple said when defendants can’t afford to post bail for sometimes minor offenses, they end up behind bars, often for longer than any sentence they might have gotten if they had been convicted. He said fixing the system wouldn’t take much time at all.
“Meaningful progress can be made in one or two extra minutes,” Sipple said. “Simply asking the question, ‘Are you financially able to post this proposed amount of bail?’ normally leads to a positive result and a more fair system of setting bail.”
He said similar monitoring programs have led to lawsuits in other states, but he hopes it doesn’t come to that in Nebraska. He said in many cases, judges are asking about the ability to pay fines and bail and he hopes other judges will see what’s working and ask more questions themselves.