Bail limit for repeat offenders falls in Texas House

AUSTIN – The Texas House on Monday rejected a last-minute proposal asking voters to amend the state Constitution to automatically deny bail to certain repeat offenders, with Democrats banding together to defeat a final part a long-running push to jail more dangerous defendants before trial.

Senate Joint Resolution 87, part of a broader package stiffening the state’s bail laws, fell short of the 100 votes necessary to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, winning votes from all present Republicans and just nine Democrats. It failed, 93 to 32, with 19 Democrats declining to take a position by marking themselves “present” or not at all.

The House will have one more chance to adopt the proposal tomorrow, though its path to 100 votes remained unclear. The House approved the centerpiece of the bail package and one of Gov. Greg Abbott’s top priorities, Senate Joint Resolution 5, last week.

Under the state Constitution, almost everyone who is arrested has the right to be released on bail. The limited exceptions are people charged with capital murder and those accused of certain repeat felonies or bail violations. According to the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court, bail cannot be excessive, and pretrial detention largely should not be considered the default unless the defendant is a flight or safety risk, as criminal defendants are still legally presumed innocent.

SJR 87 would have automatically detained and denied bail to anyone accused of certain felonies if they had previously been convicted of a felony or were out on bond at the time of the alleged offense. The resolution would have required a judge to find “probable cause” — a relatively low burden of proof — that the defendant committed one of the listed offenses, which include murder, aggravated assault and human trafficking.

Proponents of the measure, which sprinted through the Senate this month, argued that requiring automatic denial of bail was necessary to rein in judges letting dangerous defendants out on bond and to protect the public from people who commit more crimes while out of jail before trial.

“If we do not pass it, we will not be able to properly constrain judges who would release certain very dangerous people on the streets of our cities, our towns and our counties in the state of Texas,” Rep. Mitch Little, R-Lewisville and the proposal’s House sponsor, said on the floor Monday. “That is the moral conundrum we are in: Are we willing to allow the law to remain unchanged and put more people at risk?”

The House agreed unanimously to name the measure, “Jocelyn’s Law,” after Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old Houstonian whose alleged killers were found to have entered the United States illegally from Venezuela. (The suspects were out on federal custody, not on bail, at the time of the crime.)

“We’re talking about an effective class of people that amounts to 0.0084% of our population,” Little said. “That is a number that is so infinitesimally small that it will not matter to you unless you are Paul Castro and your son David is shot in the head on the freeway in Houston for no reason at all. It is a number that will not matter to you unless you are Alexis Nungaray and your daughter is gone forever.”

Democrats and civil rights advocates denounced the measure, arguing that it obliterated defendants’ due process rights and judges’ discretion to consider whether someone is a flight or public safety risk.

“You have a prior conviction and someone accuses you of something new — straight to jail,” said Rep. Joe Moody of El Paso, the top Democratic negotiator on bail issues this session. “Not only have you not been convicted of the new accusation, but nothing even has to be considered in terms of your dangerousness or your flight risk.”

“We don’t do that anywhere, ever, for any other kind of bail setting,” he added. “We never have, and we shouldn’t do it now.”

Moody argued that Senate Republicans were “moving the goalposts on bail” and trying to force SJR 87 through in the final days of session after months of uphill negotiations to secure a bipartisan agreement on the main proposal of the bail package, Senate Joint Resolution 5, which was adopted overwhelmingly last week.

As Moody spoke against the measure, Rep. Harold Dutton Jr., D-Houston, lined up at the chamber’s back microphone to ask questions in opposition to the proposal. His favorite refrain about the Senate, as members well know, goes, “If they won’t respect us, they need to expect us.”

SJR 87 “was filed just days ago at the end of session and rocketed over to the House,” Moody said, highlighting several bipartisan House criminal justice bills that have languished in the Senate. “This just isn’t about the bad policy contained in SJR 87. This is about the dignity of this chamber, and I see Mr. Dutton standing at the back mic. Mr. Dutton, this is an ‘expect us’ moment.”

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read original article, click here.