Paul Manafort Has Inadvertently Helped America by Showing the Absurdities of Its Bail System

June 9th, 2018

Awake Goy

American citizens don’t have a lot they can thank Paul Manafort for. Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, is suspected of colluding with Russia and enriching himself through years of influence-peddling that involved a multitude of financial crimes. But his indictment last year by special counsel Robert Mueller has done us a huge favor by drawing attention to one of the great travesties in the way America treats people accused of crimes: its bail system.

When he was indicted, Manafort received a felony defendant’s dream-come-true: staying out of jail on bail despite multiple counts (though he seems, since then, to have blown that deal to pieces — more on that later). Last October, prosecutors and the judge took the time to negotiate an intricate $10 million bond agreement with Manafort’s lawyers. He was allowed to live, with a monitoring device around his ankle, in various luxury residences he owns in northern Virginia; Palm Beach, Florida; and the Hamptons, a tony New York beach area.

It often goes this gentle way for influential people who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Before Harvey Weinstein was arrested on rape charges last month, his defense team was able to negotiate a bail package that allowed him to stay free for $1 million, which he paid with a cashier’s check. When Weinstein was briefly taken into custody, police officers used three sets of handcuffs connected in a chain behind his back to spare him discomfort due to his considerable girth (and he still complained). He was whisked through the arraignment process in a notably speedy manner — surrendering at 7:30 in the morning, he left the court in time for brunch.

A disproportionate number of people targeted by the bail system are minorities.

Despite a bail reform movement that made important headway in the past few years, fairness remains elusive for large numbers of people who are fed into the gears of the criminal justice system. I recently wrote about Reality Winner, a National Security Agency contractor who was denied bail after being charged under the Espionage Act for releasing highly classified information; other news organizations connected the charges to a story published by The Intercept on June 5, 2017, containing an NSA document that reported on Russian hacking against the U.S. voting system. Though the document Winner allegedly released helped alert Americans to Russian interference, and Manafort is suspected of helping the Russians, Winner is the one who has been confined to a small Georgia jail for more than a year before her trial, which is not scheduled to begin until October. (The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media, has contributed to her legal defense through its Press Freedom Defense Fund.)

Manafort’s preferential treatment reveals a racial inequity, too: A disproportionate number of people harmed by the bail system are minorities. One of the most well-known victims was Kalief Browder, who was arrested at the age of 16 for allegedly stealing a backpack, and was held for three years on Rikers Island without a trial. At the beginning, Browder was jailed because he was unable to pay his $3,000 bail, and by the time his family raised the money, bail was no longer offered to him. He finally was released but his ordeal was not over. This week is the third anniversary of his suicide.

Most lawyers can only dream about their run-of-the-mill clients receiving Weinstein-style treatment for offenses that are less serious than the sexual assault charges against the Hollywood mogul. Defense lawyer Matthew Daloisio noted in a widely-circulated post on Twitter that while Weinstein got through the judicial system in less than three hours, the man who followed him into the same courtroom was held in jail overnight — for a total of 16 hours — due to an arrest for an unpaid $195 fine on marijuana possession

7:30am: #Weinstein turns self in. 9:30am: arraigned with pre-arranged 1M$ bail check ready & courtroom packed. 10:00am out the door & on his way home. 10:30am. Courtroom empty, next case, man arrested on warrant for not paying 195$ fine 4 weed. Been in jail since 7pm last night.

— Matthew W. Daloisio (@rambledove) May 25, 2018