LA Superior Court Issues Preliminary Injunction in Money Bail Lawsuit

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Superior Court May 17 issued a preliminary injunction or PI ensuring that people will no longer be detained because they are unable to pay cash bail. The injunction requires the LA Sheriff’s Department and Los Angeles Police Department to follow a policy enacted during the pandemic in Los Angeles, home to the largest jail system in the country, that does not require people arrested in low-level, non-violent offenses to pay money bail before they are released.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff ruled that the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit had demonstrated they are likely to succeed in showing that it is unconstitutional for LA County and City of LA to jail people between arrest and their first court date simply because they cannot afford to pay money bail. This ruling follows a months-long hearing, which included weeks of testimony from experts on the harms of wealth-based detention, which demonstrated that money bail undermines public safety. The court concluded: “[T]he uncontroverted evidence shows the PI will reduce the incidence of new criminal activity and failures to appear for future court proceedings . . . and decrease overcrowding at these Defendants’ jail facilities.”

The court also noted that the defendants “do not dispute” the plaintiffs’ arguments, and that “many public officials in California” including LA’s own Probation Department and Board of Supervisors have expressed “profound doubts about the wisdom, fairness, and constitutionality of the pretrial money bail system that operates to detain arrestees in jail solely because they are too impoverished to pay money bail.”

Pursuant to today’s preliminary injunction, effective May 24, 2023, LAPD and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department will no longer be able to jail individuals who would have been released under LA’s most recent “emergency bail schedule,” which was implemented to reduce jail overcrowding during the pandemic. The parties will then have until July 5, 2023 to work together to design “constitutionally sound, effective, concrete, administrable, and enforceable plans and procedures” for pre-arraignment release of arrested individuals. The court expects the lawsuit to proceed to a trial on the merits in 2024.

Learn more about the case here.