BUFFALO, N.Y. — Some wonder if bail reform played a role in the AMBER alert issued out of North Tonawanda Tuesday.
"People can now get out of jail pre-trial, they can now get out on less than 10% of the original bond," said (D) Erie County District Attorney John Flynn. A family or friend can now come in and vouch for them or put the money down for them where before it had to be the defendant so more and more people now are getting out on serious violent felonies."
Flynn considers that one of the drawbacks of the state's bail reform which went into effect last year. He was asked about it during a press conference after an AMBER alert went out Tuesday for a teenage girl believed to have been abducted out of North Tonawanda suspected to have been by a man who was released from the Niagara County Jail last week after being held on rape and criminal sexual act charges. While he wouldn’t address the case directly, Flynn did speak about how someone with similar charges would be impacted before and after bail reform.
"When you write legislation, you're not writing legislation on a macro level. Legislation is drilled down to a micro level where it is specific now in the bail statute and that's where the bail reform has been problematic," said Flynn.
The DA supports bail reform but thinks there are issues that need to be worked out. He says a great deal of people facing misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies are now not showing up to court. He also believes judges need to make sure cases for those who commit violent offenses are adjudicated appropriately.
"You got to separate the violent criminals from the nonviolent criminals and you have to have different standards for each group of people," Flynn said.
"I don't understand how any politician would ever say that the bail reform is moving in a negative direction," said Christian Parra, lead community organizer for Western New York's chapter of Citizen Action.
He added that rollbacks on bail reform were already implemented last summer and that data showing who's sitting behind bars would prove why bail reform is needed in the first place.
"If we look at the data of how many people are actually convicted in the U.S. and New York state as a state it's like half of the percentage, so that means that half of the people that are getting arrested in New York state are actually innocent and a lot of people are pleading to deals because they're scared if they go to trial, they're going to do serious time for something they didn't do," Parra said.
Niagara County District Attorney Brian Seaman said when Mesko was arraigned, his office asked for $10,000 cash bail. The court set the bail at $1,000.
“Faced with the inevitable release of the defendant given the bail amount my office determined not to subject our witnesses to testimony and cross-examination at a preliminary hearing,” Seaman said in a statement. “This resulted in the defendant’s release on February 10th.”
Seaman said his office has to weight the cost of running the hearing, which is subject to testimony and cross-examination. He said it could be quite uncomfortable, against the benefit of continuing the bail if the hearing was successful.
He released the following statement, in part: "In this case, my office determined that given the bail amount, and the very high likelihood that the defendant would be able to post that bail in short order, it would not make sense to subject our witnesses to the preliminary hearing. Simply stated, we did not want to have to subject our witnesses to uncomfortable testimony, only to have the defendant get out by posting $1,000 a day or two later. These decisions are made on a regular basis by DA’s Offices, and it is not unusual for a defendant to be released rather than run a preliminary hearing, particularly when the bail amount involved is low."