LBJ Signs Bail Reform Act – Affirms Rights of Criminal Suspects
President Lyndon Johnson signed into law on this day the historic federal Bail Reform Act, which created a presumption of release before trial for federal criminal suspects.
The law largely replaced the old money bail system, which had resulted in poor defendants having to remain in jail while awaiting trial. Perhaps most important, the federal law inspired similar bail reform laws in the 50 states. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had set in motion bail reform on May 27, 1964, at a national bail reform conference.
On signing the law, President Johnson affirmed the constitutional rights of criminal suspects, as he had previously done, on March 8, 1965. Johnson is the only president to have publicly supported the constitutional rights of criminal suspects. LBJ on this day argued that “So our task is to rise above the debate between rights of the individual and rights of the society, by securing and really protecting the rights of both.”
Following the example and the spirit of the federal law, all of the 50 states also reformed their bail laws. The result was a significant drop in the percentage of jail inmates who were awaiting trial (from roughly 60 percent to about 35 percent from the early 1960s through the early 1980s). At that point, however, the “war on crime” gripped the public mood, and more criminal defendants were being held pending trial (either by law or because of bail amounts they could not afford).
The presumption of a right to bail was been undermined by the policy of preventive detention, which allows judges to deny to criminal defendants they believe are “dangerous.” See President Richard Nixon’s endorsement of preventive detention on January 31, 1969, shortly after he took office, and the Supreme Court decision on May 26, 1987 which upheld the constitutionality of the federal preventive detention law.
By the 2000s the impact of both the war on drugs and mass incarceration had almost completely wiped out the gains made by the 1966 Bail Reform Act. The response was a national movement to elimination the case bail system. Learn more about the movement here.
Read LBJ’s full remarks: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=27666
Learn more: Wayne Thomas, Bail Reform in America (1976)
Read the 2016 Brookings report on the injustices of the money bail system.