“Sound mind.” In a(n unfortunately increasingly common) case of bail reform potentially gone wrong, civil rights advocates in Durham, NC are arguing that Durham’s new pretrial release policy provides judges with far too much discretion to jail people pretrial.
Beyond feeling the changes do far too little to end or reduce the use of money bail, advocates also “worry that language in the policy effectively criminalizes mental health and substance abuse problems” because magistrates and judges, under the new policy, are allowed to reject pretrial-release options for people they perceive to be not of “sound mind” (with no specific criteria for that determination provided). ACLU attorneys report they’ve never seen “that phrase in a local bail policy.”
Summarized by Lillian Kalish