Atlanta City Council plans to create a 17-member committee designed to review and update an ordinance that eliminated the Municipal Court’s cash bond requirement for low-level offenses.
Municipal Court previously held people in jail who were unable to pay bail, even if they were not yet convicted of a crime related to traffic, city ordinances, and misdemeanor criminal offenses. That system changed in 2018 when the council unanimously passed an ordinance championed by Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms as her first initiative for people impacted by pre-trial detention.
But according to a resolution sponsored by City Councilman Julian Bond, the Municipal Court recently reported that the number of defendants who are not showing up for court has more than doubled after the ordinance’s implementation.
Additionally, the court reported that one-third of the people who missed their court date later committed another offense after their pre-trial jail release, according to Bond’s resolution.
“When we passed that reform in 2018 … we took away, unwittingly, the infrastructure to make bail reform work,” Bond said after the council unanimously passed his resolution.
The resolution empowers the city to form a working group to study what can be done to ensure people attend their court appearances. The group will also study the causes of ordinance violations and misdemeanors to determine how Atlanta can “break the cycle of arrest and incarceration for repeat offenders of low level offenses,” according to the resolution.
The group has 60 days to submit recommendations to the council’s Public Safety and Legal Administration Committee, according to the resolution.
Several residents submitted hours of prerecorded comments in opposition. Jack Curran and Natalie Buck called it a “bail reform rollback bill” even though the resolution states the city will not consider a repeal of the 2018 ordinance.
“Removing bail reform is damaging at any time, but the COVID-19 pandemic adds another layer of harm,” resident Clara Kelly said.
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