Clarence Barnham is a soft-spoken 53-year-old man with a wheezy voice and bright, twinkling eyes. He’s struggled with drug addiction and mental illness for over a decade, and has a long arrest record because of it. Nearly all of his fourteen convictions have been for drug charges; he’s never been accused of a violent crime and only missed a court date once.
It’s not the kind of a criminal history that would seem to indicate that Barnham, who’s lived in West Baltimore his whole life, would be a public safety or flight risk. But after an August arrest for distribution and possession of heroin (charges he contests), he sat in jail for three months, unable to pay his $25,000 bail. In October, having found an in-house drug rehabilitation program through his public defender, Barnham was granted another bail review. At the rehearing, both Barnham's public defender and the prosecutor agreed he should be released without bail, citing the drug treatment program, his steady employment and family support network. But the pretrial service agent insisted on $5,000 bail—reversing his own agency's position in the first hearing and even interjecting after the prosecutor spoke to insist on bail being given.
[For more of this story, written by George Joseph, go to http://www.citylab.com/crime/2...by-algorithm/505514/]
Comments (0)