Read on Twitter
I've been trying to pay bail for a middle-aged man who's being held in jail by New York City for over a day and a half now & he's still locked up. Holding presumptively innocent people for ransom is bad enough; NYC making it so difficult to pay the ransom adds insult to injury.
Just to recap, cash bail is a way for prosecutors & judges to imprison legally innocent people unless they can come up with a bundle of money. You can literally buy your pretrial freedom if you have access to money; otherwise you spend the pandemic in a disease-ridden cage.
By default, paying bail in NYC involves waiting around, sometimes for hours, in an uncomfortable & poorly ventilated jail room while a @CorrectionNYC employee ignores you through a plexiglass window. Sometimes no one's there. This is how I spent last NYE. https://twitter.com/srfeld/status/1212129405532876801?s=20
You can pay bail online, but only if the judge chose to specifically allow credit card payment. Judges often don't, out of either habit or spite. The man I'm trying to bail out was brought before a judge on Tuesday night, who fortunately did allow credit card payment.
However, I wasn't able to bail him out that night because he had to be bussed from court to jail first. The courts have a different bail payment system, so when someone's physically in court custody you can't pay online or at a jail, only at a courthouse. This makes no sense.
Once he was brought to jail, I still couldn't pay online because the judge's order allowing credit card payment somehow didn't make its way to @CorrectionNYC. It took a couple hours to resolve that. I finally paid bail 24 hours ago online. So why is this man still in jail?
I spent a while on hold with @CorrectionNYC & left a message that will never be returned, but the man's lawyer was able to reach them. Turns out that, though I got an email confirmation of payment & it shows up on my credit card bill, the city claims my payment didn't go through.
If that were actually true, you'd think I would be able to pay bail all over again, but instead the online button is grayed out & the bail information has disappeared for some reason. On the left is how it looked yesterday, on the right is today.
The only reason the city could legally hold this man in a cage is because of a court order setting bail. That bail's been paid for 26 hours now. NYC government should be treating this illegal imprisonment as an emergency.
Update: it’s been 30 hours & he’s still locked up. @CorrectionNYC’s online system now says the bail has been fully paid, so it won’t let me pay again, but they’re still claiming my payment didn’t go through so they won’t release him. Now at a jail trying to pay in person.
When you pay bail by credit card in person, @CorrectionNYC charges a significant fee you don’t get back, even if you get the bail itself back. The NYC council banned this fee last year but it paused the ban for 15 months to let a contract expire so I’ll have to pay an extra $350.
One thing I always hate about paying bail is that every part of the process reminds you that no one with any power over this system has ever had to pay bail for anyone.
