ACLU is suing Manatee, Sarasota sheriff’s offices over ‘unconstitutional’ bail amounts
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida is challenging bail practices in Manatee and Sarasota counties with a class action lawsuit alleging people’s constitutional rights are being violated.
Filed on Monday in the Second District Court of Appeals, the class action was filed on behalf of 11 people held in pre-trial detention in Manatee and Sarasota county jails because they cannot afford bail.
The petition claims the state has failed to provide alternate conditions of release for each of the 11 people, who have testified they cannot afford their bail in violation of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, which requires prosecutors prove that pre-trial detention in necessary.
“Unaffordable cash bail without due process promotes wealth-based incarceration and is an unconstitutional practice,“ Benjamin Stevenson, staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida, said in a news release Monday.
“People caught in this system often lose their jobs, homes, ability to take care of their families and prepare for trial, simply because they cannot afford their pretrial freedom. For too long we have ignored that detention is the practical result of an unaffordable bail and imposed de facto detention without really studying whether other options exist and whether locking a person up is really the only reasonable solution.”
This is part of a nationwide effort by the ACLU to fight a cash bail system that discriminated against the poor.
Last December, a federal appeals court upheld the decision of a lower court in a similar case which found the Dallas County, Texas, bail system unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge David Godbey banned Dallas County from using a fixed scheduled when setting bonds.
The current lawsuit names the state and Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells and Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman as respondents in the case, each in their capacities as sheriff.
Each jail holds approximately 300 inmates solely because they cannot afford their bail amounts, according to the ACLU.
All 11 people named in the ACLU lawsuit filed motions to modify their bonds with the 12th Judicial Circuit Court — which includes Manatee, Sarasota and DeSoto counties. They each testified at hearings about their inability to pay, which prosecutors did not dispute, according to the petition. But the court failed to make a ruling about whether bond was affordable, and prosecutors also failed to prove why other conditions of release would not be sufficient.
Instead, judges in each case left bond at previously set amounts, or lowered them to amounts that the individual still could not afford. Those bonds range from $500 to $250,000, according to the petition.
This story was originally published November 16, 2021 at 6:55 PM.
