Alabama's Problem With Violent Suspects Killing People While Out on Bail
While some push to eliminate cash bail, others are trying to increase it for violent criminals, the State Supreme Court takes a look, and voters will have their say in 2022
Americans have recently begun waking up to the disastrous consequences of bail reform efforts that are being led by progressive district attorneys across the nation.
The case of Darrel E. Brooks in Wisconsin is just the latest, if not most tragic, example. He ran over his girlfriend with a car in early November, but despite the seriousness of the charge and his long wrap sheet, Brooks was let out on a mere $1,000 bail. Two weeks later he drove through the Christmas parade in Waukesha, seriously injuring dozens of people and killing six, including four grandmothers and an 8-year-old boy.
While the enormity of the Waukesha tragedy is unusual, the process that contributed to it isn’t. Courts often let suspects charged with violent crimes out with little to no bail while their cases work through the slow gears of the criminal justice system, sometimes releasing known predators like Brooks to prey upon our communities for months, maybe even years before they face justice.
But are things like this happening in Alabama?
A quick search of the internet just turned up the following:
Mobile: Christin Brionna Edwards was charged with four counts of attempted murder last month while being out on bail on a 2019 murder charge. The district attorney said the process is a “revolving door.”
Montgomery: Jeremie Rashad Wright was charged with murder last month while he was already out on bail after being charged with another murder committed in 2018.
Tuscaloosa: Deramus Devalle Harris was charged with murder last month while out on $75,000 bail from another murder charge in 2020.
Birmingham: Anthony Needham shot his girlfriend in the head in 2018 and was charged with murder. He was let out of jail two days later on $100,000 bail, and several months later he shot and killed a man during a robbery.
Huntsville: Charles Price Preston was charged with murder last year after having already been arrested 17 times for various other crimes, including assault, rape, and robbery.
And the list goes on and on and on and on ...
So, yes, it is happening here in Alabama. And often.
Wake-up calls
Some may recall the kidnapping and murder of 19-year-old Aniah Blanchard of Homewood in October 2019.
Her alleged killer, 29-year old Ibraheem Yazeed of Montgomery, was well-known to police. He was out on bail after being charged earlier in the year with robbery, kidnapping, and attempted murder. Yazeed and three others allegedly robbed and beat two men in a Montgomery hotel, including a 77-year-old man who was left near death. Yazeed was also accused in 2012 with attempting to kill two police officers with his car, and he was arrested in 2017 for aggravated battery on another police officer.
Prosecutors say Yazeed — still walking free after all of that — kidnapped Blanchard from an Auburn gas station, shot her in the head, and dumped her body in a wooded area of Macon County.
Prosecutors and victim advocates say that current Alabama law prevented the courts from holding Yazeed without bail for his earlier charges because none of them were capital crimes or met others standards, and that Aniah’s killing was a wake-up call. From the Alabama Constitution of 1901:
“ … all persons shall, before conviction, be bailable by sufficient sureties, except for capital offenses, when the proof is evident or the presumption great; and that excessive bail shall not in any case be required.”
The governor signed a bill named “Aniah’s Law” earlier this year that would change that, adding murder, kidnapping, rape, assault and other violent crimes to the list of charges that could lead to a defendant being denied bail. Voters will decide if Aniah’s Law becomes part of the state’s constitution in November 2022.
But there have been wake-up calls like this before.
Nobody answered.
One came in 2010, when Michael Jerome Lee, 21, who was already out on bail in Mobile for two felony drug charges, walked past his neighbors, pulled up his shirt to reveal a pistol tucked into his pants, and asked, “What are you looking at?” He was arrested for menacing, posted a scant $500, and was turned loose.
A few weeks later, Lee and three other men knocked on the door of the Midtown Mobile home of 23-year-old Kyser Miree, a native of Birmingham who was an engineer at Chevron. They barged in and demanded money. Then Lee shot Miree in the head, killing him as he lay on the floor pleading for his life.
“I sure wish (Lee) had been in jail at that point,” the district attorney at the time said.
What else is being done
Aside from Aniah’s Law, prosecutors are seeking to increase the maximum amount of bail for murder, which is currently set by the State Supreme Court along the following lines:
Capital felony: $50,000-no bail allowed
Murder: $15,000-$150,000
Drug manufacturing and trafficking: $5,000-$1.5 million.
So, as you can see, someone charged with dealing drugs can be held for 15-times the amount of bail than someone charged with killing another human being.
A rules committee of the Alabama State Supreme Court recently approved a motion from Montgomery County District Attorney Daryl Bailey to increase bail for murder to $1.5 million, after having already increased the maximum from $75,000 to $150,000 in 2014.
“Since then, we have had more homicides and more people who have gotten out of jail while awaiting trial on their homicides and then committed new offenses,” Bailey told WSFA last month.
The opposing view
There’s no better place to start than with the Constitution of the United States. Its framers were foremost concerned with liberty, and included this Eighth Amendment in the Bill of Rights:
“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
The argument being this: the state mustn’t deprive a person of their liberty without first being convicted by a jury of their peers. Otherwise, corrupt or misguided prosecutors could go around simply charging people with crimes (it’s been said a grand jury could be persuaded to “indict a ham sandwich”), delaying their trials, and ruining them financially. It’s also an easy way of dealing with dissent, and it’s practiced throughout the world.
And it’s wrong.
In response to recent efforts to increase bail in Alabama, several individuals signed a joint op-ed published last month in the Montgomery Advertiser:
“We write as advocates who have represented numerous people accused of violent crimes, who were detained pending trial, and who were ultimately acquitted of these charges and released as innocent people. But in the interim, they lost jobs, homes, and — in some cases — their families.”
The authors argue that increasing bail also disproportionately harms the poor:
“Making bail of $150,000 requires either cash payment of $15,000 to a private bonding company or posting of a property bond with property that has at least $150,000 in equity. In Alabama, where the median per capita income is around $27,000 a year, most middle-income people could not easily afford these payments — and no poor person can.”
They further contend that, despite highly publicized murders like those of Aniah Blanchard and Kyser Miree, this isn’t the public safety concern that such anecdotes imply. They point to an analysis of recent crimes by the Montgomery Advertiser:
“The reporter also analyzed the circumstances of the defendants in fifty-three Montgomery homicides charged in 2021 — and found that only 24 had even been released from detention. Of those 24, only eight had any pending prior charges, and only two of those were for crimes of violence — and none were for murder.”
Those are all fair points, and they do make the case for greater scrutiny when someone is denied bail. After all, our criminal justice system is just another arm of government, and government does indeed make mistakes, sometimes serious ones.
Such scrutiny could come via a variety of ways, from requiring the state to publish an annual list of defendants who were denied bail but who were eventually acquitted — a scorecard so the public would know if their district attorneys were potentially abusing the power — to requiring the state to compensate an innocent person for lost time and wages while held without bail. This is sometimes done when the state wrongfully convicts someone, and holding someone for months, maybe years, who is eventually found not guilty is essentially the same thing. At the very least it would incentivize prosecutors to apply the power only when they knew the defendant was caught red-handed and the murder case against them was a slam dunk — which is what the people are asking for.
But while the case for lower bail, or even no bail, for non-violent crimes can be made, the weight of even a single life lost changes the calculation when the charge is murder. People aren’t too worried about a guy making bail after he steals a lawnmower from Home Depot. They are worried about a known killer making bail after the cops and the courts are certain that he’s guilty.
I took a cursory look at data provided by the Jefferson County District Attorneys Office and found that of the 253 suspects charged with manslaughter, murder, and capital murder in that jurisdiction since 2019, at least 85 were held without bond at the time of their arrest or indictment — or about 34-percent.
That sounds fairly high to me, but … one of those let loose was Travec Brandon Ard. He was charged with capital murder for a 2019 killing and let out on $75,000 bail in early 2020, but less than two months later was arrested for allegedly killing another man, his second capital offense in less than a year.
Known predators like Ard must be kept off the streets. That’s the priority, and if it comes at the expense of making room by eliminating cash bail for certain non-violent offenses, that’s a trade most people would be willing to make, and even expect.
Noted journalist Matt Taibbi, who has spent a great deal of time covering the issue and who supports bail reform, made this point on a recent episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast:
“There is a galaxy of people who get what they call “nuisance bail.” In other words, whether it’s for solicitation, disorderly conduct, or vandalism … prosecutors have this whole thing where they play games and they will try and get the judge to set bail just outside of the person’s ability to pay. They do an assessment of where you live, whether you have a job, whether you have a telephone in your house, all of this stuff, and they know roughly what you can afford when they go to ask for bail. It’s kind of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge thing between the judge and the prosecutors. That’s why there were calls for bail reform. What we’re really doing was setting bail so high that … people had to make a decision to plead early or sit in a place like Rikers Island and lose their jobs while they wait to adjudicate some really minor offense. So, there’s a good reason for bail reform, but that doesn’t mean that bail in all cases needs to be eliminated.”
A stolen lawnmower can be replaced. A person’s life cannot. That’s the difference here.
Going forward
Both sides are a little right, and both sides are a little wrong.
Prosecutors and courts across the nation are facing calls for bail reform partly because, as Taibbi explained, some have used it as a tool to gain plea agreements for minor offenses. Such behavior spawned the bail reform movement, which contributed to events like the Waukesha tragedy. That, and it’s not what our Framer’s intended. Quite the opposite, in fact.
That must stop.
But prosecutors and courts must also have the tools necessary to keep people safe from known predators, and that includes locking-up alleged kidnappers, rapists, and murders who are caught red-handed and who the state has overwhelming reason to believe would pose a risk to public safety.
We mustn’t simply give the state a blank check, however. It’s a safe bet that the government will abuse whatever additional power the people grant, without vigilant oversight. As Benjamin Franklin warned, “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
We deserve both.
Aniah, Kyser, and all of the other victims deserved both.
And with the enactment of Aniah’s Law, the increase of bail for murder, and the strength and will to ensure the state doesn’t abuse its authority, we just might be able to have it.
(Editor’s note: I’ll be taking the Christmas break off. See y’all in the New Year!)
Yet another well-researched and very well-written post. I was very informed by reading, and I got a good grasp of both sides or the argument.
I couldn’t help but think of Kyle Rittenhouse. The DA In Wisconsin could have set bail so high, without hard evidence, that Kyle may have pleaded guilty to second degree murder or manslaughter just to get out of jail at some distant time.
I tend to agree with your conclusion based on the frequency of occurrences and the upcoming vote to hopefully stem the tide of these tragedies.