A federal judge has temporarily blocked part of a new Georgia law from taking effect this week that would have stopped people and charitable organizations from posting bail for someone else more than three times a year.
The judge’s order at the end of last month came in response to a lawsuit by the ACLU and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center. They represent a non-profit organization and a church group that raise money and pay bail for low-income people who would otherwise remain behind bars before going to trial or otherwise having their cases resolved.
Andrea Young, the ACLU of Georgia’s executive director, said she was “quite pleased the judge ruled quickly, and prevented this cruel law from going into effect. It’s an indication we’re likely to prevail.”
The complaint asserts that the section of the law limiting the number of times a bail fund can help others violates the constitutional freedoms of speech and association and the religious liberty of the plaintiffs. The section would also require people paying bail for others to meet the same requirements as bail bond companies – including having a certain amount of money in escrow, paying fees and holding a business license, as well as obtaining a sheriff’s approval.
Signed into law by Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor, on 1 May, SB 63 “imposes what are arguably the most severe restrictions on charitable bail funds in the nation”, according to the lawsuit, serving to “effectively eliminate” them.
The judge’s stay will last 14 days, while both sides of the lawsuit submit briefs and a hearing is held. But the law has already had an impact, with a national organization, the Bail Project, pulling out of Atlanta in June.
The Bail Project has worked in 30 US cities since 2018, said spokesperson Jeremy Cherson. In that time, SB 63 is “the most severe [law] … we’ve seen nationally”, he said. It “was going to basically make it impossible for us to continue working”.
Experts on the issue told the Guardian the law is both part of a nationwide pushback against bail reform and unique in one of its apparent motivations – stopping the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, or ASF. ASF is a non-profit organization that has bailed out most of the more than 100 people arrested in connection to continuing protests against a $109-m police and fire department training center colloquially known as “Cop City”.
Young, of the ACLU of Georgia, said she has seen the Georgia legislature “make the effort to restrict protestors’ rights” every year for the seven years she has been in the state, calling SB 63 “part of a continuing pattern”.
At the same time, “the law takes place in the context of the raid on [ASF], and the Rico indictment”, Young adds.
Police staged a Swat-style raid on the fund’s Atlanta house in May, seizing computers, cellphones and other devices. Members of the fund are now defendants in the state’s Rico case, in which the Georgia attorney general Chris Carr alleges that 61 people formed a criminal conspiracy in connection with the movement to stop Cop City.
“The strategy or goal revealed from this legislation is that legislators, prosecutors and police departments see the bail system as a weapon against people they want to see prosecuted and put in jail without having to justify it – poor people, Black and brown people, marginalized people and political activists,” said Marlon Kautz, one of three ASF organizers.
The plaintiffs in the ACLU and Georgetown case are Barred Business, an Atlanta non-profit organization, and two members of a church in Athens, Georgia.
The non-profit organization “opposes mass incarceration and the money bail system, which have disparate impacts on people of color and other marginalized groups”, according to the complaint. Along with other organizations, Barred Business participates in “Black Mamas Bail Out,” an event “that aims to ‘free as many Black mamas and caregivers as [they] can so they can spend Mother’s Day with their families and in their communities’”.
The event seeks “to bring attention to the more than half-million people in jail [nationwide] who have not been convicted of any crime, but don’t have the money to post bail”, according to the complaint.
The United Methodist group bails out people who are being held in the local jail before going to trial because they can’t even afford small amounts, often less than $100. The church members see the work as an extension of their faith, and informed by the Bible.
Other states have passed or introduced legislation in recent years to restrict bail funds – like Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia – said Jocelyn Simonson, who analyzes bail funds in her new book, Radical Acts of Justice. But Georgia “is targeting not just bail funds – but the community”, she said – as with the church plaintiffs.
If the lawsuit doesn’t prosper, and SB 63 goes into effect, “the majority of the people affected are going to be poor people of color – at a time when jail deaths are on the rise”, Simonson said. Fulton and Clayton county jails have both seen record number of deaths in recent years, and Fulton’s is under federal investigation.
Simonson added: “The scope of this is breathtaking.”
