Youngmi Lee (Brooklyn Defender Services) on bail overuse and partially secured bond issues

Thank you so much for having this hearing today, which we all in New York City, all five public defender offices felt was crucial to appear and to give testimony.

My name is Youngmi Lee.

I'm the Director of Law and Appeals at Brooklyn Defender Services.

Where I have worked for more than 28 years now.

One of my primary jobs is to assist lawyers and to also monitor our clients who are incarcerated at Rikers Island.

So I just want to throw out a BDS.

Kind of surprising piece of data.

In the past year, we represented more than 1,400 people who had bail set.

Most of them bail was set in criminal court arraignments.

Of those 1,400 cases, more than half of them resulted in dismissals.

With close to 45 receiving ACDs.

So what does this number tell you?

It tells us that bail is overused by judges.

I know that OCA has been making efforts and

I was very glad to see OCA come and give city council testimony because I do believe they are making an effort to really look at the jail population at Rikers Island.

At Rikers Island.

But when it comes to individual judges, and I think this is citywide, probably statewide, but definitely in Brooklyn, we see judges setting very high bail on cases that shouldn't have bail set at all.

We see judges circumventing that third bail form requirement that was part of the 2019 bail reforms.

That is the partially secured bond or the unsecured bond.

In the more than 1,400 cases,

that I reviewed, not a single one had unsecured bond.

All of them had partially secured bond.

The default was 10%, even though judges can do 1% to 10%.

We have also seen and

I know Legal Aid recently did a writ on this.

We have seen judges, when a surety appears who has a work history, who has pay stubs, they go to court

to bail someone out on a partially secured bond, and judges will either chastise the surety for trying to bail out a loved one,

and not follow the script that OCA has given them, but also find that they are not approved just based on their income alone,

I'm sorry, based on their income and disapprove them.

These are individual cases that

When bail can be posted, judges are even after setting unnecessary bail are now denying sureties from posting bail in the partially secured bond cases.

Based on our numbers, and these also include

a huge portion of the dismissed cases, 247 cases of those 1,400 bail cases had a much higher

partially secured bond amount than the commercial insurance company bond.

We had one case where bond was set at $2,500, cash at $2,500, and partially secured bond at $10,000.

A clear indication of that particular judge

circumventing the partially secured bail amount that's required in all bail setting cases.

Over the past year, just in terms of reducing the jail population, even if it's a little bit at a time,

DOC, and they have not come here to testify, DOC had suddenly, I want to say in the past two years, removed the credit card bail online option without explanation.

This was a method where sureties who lived out of state, who had credit cards, who had other family members could post bail online.

That method has been completely removed.

Credit card bail is still an option, but when people post bail with their credit cards at a DOC facility, which is Rikers Island right now,

a lot of people don't realize that there is a usurious 8% fee charged, which is the fee that is...

Charged also by commercial insurance company bond companies.

Just to wrap up, the City Council can ask for transparency, just in terms of asking OCA to provide data on the bail amounts that are set.

The three different forms that are required to be set when bail is posted, when partially secured bonds are disapproved by individual judges.

And finally, I just want to highlight that this is a problem citywide.

Supervised release is overused by judges.

More than 50% of people who are on supervised release

are charged with non-qualifying offenses.

I do have some questions for the panel.

Sure.

I'm just going to wrap it up.

There are many cases, whether they're qualifying offenses or not, who many people who are sitting at Rikers Island who maybe should be on supervised release,

but there are too many misdemeanor cases, too many nonviolent cases who are receiving over-programming through the supervised release program.

Thank you.

And I'll end it with that.

Thank you.