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‘Tainted’ defendants get bad advice from ‘rag-tag’ Black Lives Matter, Texas judge says
A Houston felony court judge is facing calls for an investigation after he made remarks about young black men and a no-bond policy in the county where he serves — comments that the ACLU’s Texas branch has called “flagrant racism.”
Texas District Judge Michael McSpadden told the Houston Chronicle that he maintained a policy of denying personal bond to defendants before trial for years because he’s concerned those released would be arrested again for a different offense.
“Almost everybody we see here has been tainted in some way before we see them,” McSpadden, who serves in Harris County, told the Houston Chronicle. “They’re not good risks.”
McSpadden also told the Chronicle that many of the defendants who come before the court have a cavalier attitude about showing up.
“The young black men — and it’s primarily young black men rather than young black women — charged with felony offenses, they’re not getting good advice from their parents,” McSpadden told the newspaper. “Who do they get advice from? Rag-tag organizations like Black Lives Matter, which tell you, ‘Resist police,’ which is the worst thing in the world you could tell a young black man ... They teach contempt for the police, for the whole justice system.”
Personal recognizance bond allows defendants to be released from jail before standing trial without having to pay cash bail. McSpadden barred magistrates from offering personal bond from 2006 to 2017, the Chronicle reports.
The state’s ACLU chapter says the judge’s comments about “tainted” defendants and young black men amount to McSpadden “openly admitting racial bias against young Black male defendants who appear before his court.
“If there remained any doubt that the deck is stacked against people of color in our criminal justice system, Michael McSpadden just dispelled it,” Terri Burke, executive director of the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement Tuesday.
Last year, a federal judge overturned Harris County’s bail system in a ruling that found the system was unconstitutional in that it kept misdemeanor defendants who couldn’t afford bail in jail — “violating equal protection rights against wealth-based discrimination and violating due process protections against pretrial detention,” the judge wrote, according to the New York Times.
That ruling was largely upheld this month in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Texas Tribune reports. The court found that high bail amounts in the county benefit wealthy defendants over the poor.
A “wealthy arrestee is less likely to plead guilty, more likely to receive a shorter sentence or be acquitted, and less likely to bear the social costs of incarceration,” 5th Circuit Judge Edith Brown Clement wrote, according to the Tribune. “The poor arrestee, by contrast, must bear the brunt of all of these, simply because he has less money than his wealthy counterpart.”
The ACLU is asking the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct investigate McSpadden’s remarks, arguing that McSpadden is violating the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct, which might be grounds to remove him.
“When a sitting judge feels comfortable enough to admit openly and on the record that he uses bail orders to jail Black defendants on the assumption they can’t be trusted, it’s time to take action,” Burke added. “This kind of flagrant racism has no place in our justice system.”
The ACLU has called on McSpadden to recuse himself from cases involving black defendants until an investigation is complete.
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