Debate on bail laws

For the last 18 hours or so, I’ve been having a vigorous debate on whether Labour’s changes to the Bail Act, which make it harder for bail to be denied, are a good or a bad thing with a final year law student.  The debate has been via text message and I’ve lost count of the number of messages, but it only paused for a few hours overnight.  Debate by text message is fairly challenging as you have to make your case in a score words or so.

My basic argument to her is that the old bail laws, if anything, made bail too easy rather than too hard.  So making bail even easier flies in the face of logic.  We see the awful consequences in this article with the murder of a two year old by a man already on bail for another homicide.

Now she has argued that the threshold did not change, just that statute law clarified what was already case law.  But I don’t accept this as the rationale for the new law was to reduce the number of people in prison on bail, so it is designed to change the threshold.

Graeme Edgeler has a very informative post on the bail laws (and I suspect he agrees with my law student, not me, on the issue). I found it interesting that someone only loses the presumption they will get bail, if they have previously received 14 or mail prison sentences.  Now that is not 14 or more convictions – but 14 or more actual prison sentences.  Hell I would argue that a threshold of three or more prison sentences would be enough to change the presumption from getting bail to not getting bail.

Remember there are 18,000 court cases on hold because because of outstanding warrants against defendants. And that was before they made it even easier to get bail. And the last study of offending while on bail found around 20% of people on bail reoffend.  Again this suggests the law was making it too easy to get bail, not too hard.

And as reported here, not even breaching your bail conditions can be taken  into account, and one offender was arrested four times in one week, kept getting bail. Yes if you breach your bail conditions, but commit no other offence, then you can’t be remanded into custody.  So what does this mean – that bail conditions are effectively voluntary.

In fact if you read the concerns of the Police on the new law, it isn’t even so much just the new threshold, but the removing of breaching bail conditions as a reason to rescind bail.