Quote (WickedDarkJuggalos @ Nov 22 2021 10:29pm)
Iirc New York can hold without bail. I am not aware of any recent politically charged cases.
They passed a controversial bail reform law last year, which eliminated bail entirely and just divides crimes into 'released without bail' and 'remand', and virtually everything short of capital offenses are release without bail. No amount of bail jumping, violent assaults, DUIs, weapon charges, etc will ever get you held in jail. Coupled with their standard dismissal of charges / downward departures / suspended sentences, its pretty common for people to have 30+ arrests and not spend a day in jail or prison. It also created this very obvious problem where they don't even hold people in jail for skipping their court dates, thus allowing people to just ignore the system entirely, since even if they are tried in absentia they just get a suspended sentence instead of a prison sentence. Then, just to make it insulting to sane people, they added in a bounty system where people who show up for their court dates get handed free swag bags when released, given gift cards, baseball game tickets, cash, etc.
A pretty good example of how it politics overrides their system on paper is when the law first got excoriated in the national press with the Tiffany Harris case, who committing numerous hate crimes against orthodox jewish women. She'd assault some jew, get arrested, get released, assault another jew, get arrested get released, etc. As soon as she was released. When the story took off, they eventually just held her on a psychiatric observation to get around the bail law, then charged her with federal hate crimes under a felony statute that allowed remand since it wasn't a state law. Then released her again anyway, but I think that was the end of it since they actually could and would hold her on the federal charges