So for example, a guy murders people, gets arrested and a bail is set for 5 million dollars. Does the guy walk off if the bail is paid? plz 🙂
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Bail is mean to ensure that you show up in court.
For this reason bail is never granted to murderers or robbers or thieves, but only to people accused of being murders, robbers and thieves.
You are innocent until proven guilty and innocent people are normally allowed to walk around freely.
However there is als the fear that someone accused of a crime might not stick around until trial.
For this reason there has been the tradition that people give up something to show they have a reason to show up in court.
Nowadays that is usually money.
You give the court $10,000 to hold onto for you until trial and they give it back to you when you show up in court.
The giving the money back happens wether you are found guilty or not.
Bail is not supposed to be punishment but just a way to ensure that someone actually shows up in court.
In theory at least. in practice the way it works in the US can be quite different.
The people who ask for and determine the bail often are elected and don’t want an opponent they campaign against saying they are soft on crime. So they set up bail amounts that are far higher than anyone can actually pay.
In the US there is also a bail industry, where people who don’t have the money for bail ask a bondsmen to post the bail for them.
The bail bondsman won’t do this for free though. They will ask for a fee. that fee is usually about 10% of the total bail.
The critical part is that unlike paying the bail yourself, if you go though a bondsman you won’t get your money back when you show up for trial, even if you are found innocent.
The system is very broken and has moved very far away from its original purpose of ensuring that people show up in court to punishing people for being poor.
Either someone is a flight risk or a risk to the community or they aren’t putting up something they value like their savings or the deed to their home as collateral to ensure they show up is fine, but making them pay extra for being poor serves no purpose.
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