Councilmember Brooke Pinto's Statement on Presidential Executive Order Seeking to Reinstate Cash Bail in the District:
"If we want to keep our communities safe, we need serious solutions to serious problems -- cash bail is not a serious solution. We have not had cash bail in the District of Columbia since 1992, when we implemented a risk-based bail system. Pretrial release decisions should be based on whether a person poses a safety risk to the community, not whether or not they can afford to post bail.
Judges must have the discretion to hold violent offenders before trial – what we refer to as pretrial detention -- if they believe they pose a risk to the community or they are a flight risk. I fought for these common sense changes to pretrial detention in my legislation Secure DC and Peace DC to empower our judges to make those decisions. The Council passed these reasonable changes to ensure that people who are posing a risk to our community can be held pretrial and it has made an impact in driving down violent crime since we made those changes in July of 2023. People who are not a flight risk nor a danger to the community should not have to await their trial in jail or in federal prisons which are located across the country.
The president’s order proposing to reinstate cash bail, push federal prosecutors to seek pretrial detention for anyone who is arrested instead of basing it on individual risk to the community, and hold people who are arrested in federal custody outside the District hours away from home while they await trial is overly broad and extreme and will not help in advancing our continuing goal of keeping all District residents and visitors safe."