Larry Price Jr. weighed 185 pounds in the summer of 2020, when he entered the Sebastian County, Arkansas, jail where he would die. When guards found him deceased a year later, he was alone in his cell, lying in contaminated water and his own urine and weighing 121 pounds. As the word “jail” suggests, he had not been convicted of a crime. Nor was Price, who suffered from schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, detained because of the crime he was accused of — verbally threatening police officers. No, Price died in jail because he could not afford a $100 bond for his release.
I thought of Price again this week when news broke Thursday that attorneys for former President Donald Trump had to resubmit his $175 million bond in his civil fraud judgment in New York to address missing financial statements and other documentation. And after that resubmission, New York Attorney General Letitia James questioned whether the bond underwriter actually had the $175 million in collateral, giving Knight Specialty Insurance Co. 10 days to come up with proof. This all comes roughly two weeks after a New York appeals court reduced Trump’s bond from over $450 million to $175 million, after Trump’s lawyers argued that securing the larger amount was a “practical impossibility.”
Debating whether Trump’s situation reflects the current law misses the point.
The leniency shown Trump makes for grim reading in contrast to the fate of Price — and thousands of other Americans. A 2020 Reuters report found that between 2008 and 2019, nearly 5,000 Americans died in 500 U.S jails without ever being convicted of the charges on which they were held, in many cases because they could not afford bail. People like Kalief Browder ($3,000 bail), Sandra Bland (a $500 bond) and Erick Tavira ($20,000 bail) have died by suicide in the face of awful conditions. The system disproportionately affects low-income and Black Americans and those with mental illnesses. Unfortunately, recent modest…
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