The City of Calhoun, Georgia, adopted a scheme by which bail was set to a pre-determined amount, resulting in Maurice Walker being held in jail for nearly 2 weeks on misdemeanor public drunkenness charges. Walker challenged detention on behalf of himself and those similarly situated, including persons held on traffic offenses.
The federal district court got it right and enjoined the city from enforcing its scheme: when setting bail for criminal defendants, basic due-process principles require a judge to take into account the defendant’s income and set an individually payable amount. That rule exists to ensure against a manifest injustice, converting pre-trial liberty from a right into a privilege of the wealthy. But Calhoun is pursuing an appeal, now making its second appearance before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. As Cato points out in our amicus brief supporting Walker (essentially the same one we filed at an earlier stage of litigation), the due-process rule that the city violated is quite literally as old as the common law.
That right to individualized bail has existed at law for nearly a millennium. Following the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, England developed a robust bail system which ensured the right to pre-trial liberty. The 1215 Magna Carta enshrined that right: “No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned … or victimized in any other way … except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” When the Stuart Kings of England attempted to impose further absolute monarchy, they chose to attack the right to pretrial liberty and aggrandize royal detention powers. In 1627, Charles I arrested five knights for unnamed offenses. Counsel for the knights challenged their detention on the ground of the Magna Carta’s liberty guarantee. The royalist King’s Bench denied that defense—contravening 400 years of law—but the House of Commons overruled the case in 1628 by passing the Petition of Right: “no freeman in any such manner as is before mentioned, be imprisoned or detained.”