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Alec Karakatsanis

8 Jul, 9 tweets, 3 min read

Thread. This is the story of Tracy, who was arrested for vandalizing her boyfriend's car. She couldn't pay a few hundred dollars cash bail that the judge required for her release. A few days later she died in a Houston jail cell. (1)

In Tracy's case, the judge required a total of $3,000 in cash bail. Tracy was sick and wasn't even brought to her own bail hearing. Based on prevailing profit rates in the Texas bail industry, she could have been free had she been able to pay a private company $300. (2)

Two days later, one of the other women in her bunk found Tracy hanging from a sheet. She was pronounced dead two days after that. (3)

@CivRightsCorps

Tracy is one of many people who died in Texas jails after being trapped there because they can't pay cash. In the 6 years before @CivRightsCorps @FairDefense sued in Houston, 55 people died in that one jail because they were too poor to pay cash bail. (4)

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1358086745443696640

To understand what happened, you need to know that only the U.S. and its former colony the Philippines allow for-profit corporations to make profit from a money bail system. (5)

Throughout the U.S., police, prosecutors, and judges use cash bail to keep poor people in jail before trial to coerce them to plead guilty. They all know that the system would crash otherwise because they are arresting too many people to give them all lawyers and jury trials. (6)

@keribla

Tracy's is one of the few jail deaths the media bothers to tell you about. I haven't linked to the story by the brilliant @keribla b/c the @HoustonChron chose to print Tracy's mugshot. But what stories the media chooses to tell shape how people see the horrors of this system. (7)

The Texas legislature is on the verge of dramatically expanding the cash bail system in Texas. They have set a special hearing for Saturday. If the bill passes, more people will die, more families will be separated, more people will lose their jobs, housing, and medical care. (8)

@TxJailProject

You can read more people's stories from the amazing archive by @TxJailProject at sheddinglight.in/texas/ (end).

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Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

10 Jul

Thread. People don't understand the corruption connected to civil forfeiture. I once had a client arrested for marijuana. The cops used civil forfeiture laws to take his car. The officers would then drive around my client's neighborhood mocking him from his own car.

The cops had followed him around for months pulling him over, and one time they claimed that their drug dog smelled marijuana in his car. After hiring an expert to analyze the records, I later discovered they had fabricated the training records for the drug dog.

But they used this fabrication to get a search warrant for my client's house because judges will sign virtually any drug search warrant police request. They raided his home with a SWAT team and found marijuana and seized his car.

Read 5 tweets

Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

9 Jul

@HoustonChron

The media is fabricating a new racist hysteria about crime and then falsely linking that fear-mongering to the most minor efforts to make the punishment bureaucracy less barbaric. Today, the @HoustonChron published what might be the single worst piece of journalism yet. (1)

I will not link to the piece, but two reporters worked with the DA and the cops to write an article blaming murders on vague "bail reform." Please understand: the thesis of the article is refuted by all of the overwhelming empirical evidence. The article is a total sham. (2)

Every rigorous academic examination shows that rampant pretrial human caging and family separation that results from this country's shameful use of cash bail leads to *more future harm.* But the authors suggest that releasing presumed innocent people leads to more "crime." (3)

Read 6 tweets

Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

7 Jul

According to testimony in the Legislature yesterday, 70% of Texas judges make bail decisions "based on their gut feelings."

Understand what this means: if you're poor, court proceedings with lawyers and actual evidence don't exist in most of Texas for your initial bail decision. A judge decides whether you are caged in dangerous conditions or home with your children and family based on their "gut."

The result? The basic constitutional rule that presumptively innocent people must be at liberty prior to being convicted absent exceptional circumstances is a hollow joke. There are 5,400 human beings in the Houston jail alone who are caged solely because they can't pay bail.

Read 4 tweets

Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

6 Jul

Thread. Have you ever heard of "civil asset forfeiture"? You're never going to think about the police the same way again. (1)

A few years ago, when I was at the public defender's office, my very poor clients kept telling me the same story: they would be walking down the street and DC police would stop them, search them at gunpoint, tell them to open their wallets, and take all the cash they had. (2)

The wildest part? The DC police would then send them a letter saying that, if they wanted to challenge the police taking of their cash, they would need to pay either $250 or 10% of the amount taken, whichever was more! (3)

Read 13 tweets

Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

5 Jul

Thread. This is a story you won't hear on the news, but it's as important as anything you will read. Here is the story of one man who got lost in jail, and it says a great deal about our society. (1)

The man was arrested by sheriffs in Houston for possession of meth. He was kept in a cage before any legal proceedings unless he could pay a predetermined amount of cash--a problem across Texas. He was too poor to pay, so he stayed in jail. (2)

Court records show that cops, prosecutors, and judges knew that he had “been determined to have a mental illness or to be a person with an intellectual disability by the local mental health authority.” (3)

Read 13 tweets

Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

5 Jul

A giant scandal: We now know that, as local governments around Miami gorged police departments with cash for drug enforcement, wasteful overtime, low-level crimes of poverty, and military equipment, they basically ignored building safety laws. nytimes.com/2021/07/04/us/…

The perversion of our safety priorities by corrupt cops and prosecutors is a national epidemic. Did you know that there are about 100,000 significant violations of the Clean Water Act each year, resulting in rotting teeth, cancer, kidney failure, and damage to the nervous system?

Tens of millions of people are exposed to dangerous chemicals in drinking water due to these crimes. Prosecutors and state/federal officials who call themselves "law enforcement" choose simply to ignore the vast majority of these corporate pollution crimes.

Read 6 tweets

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