Darrell Brooks mowed down parade attendees after being released from jail on an ‘inappropriately low’ $1,000 bond.
Wisconsin lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes has scaled back much of his progressive rhetoric in an effort to win backing for his U.S. Senate bid, but his support for ending cash bail could prove costly in a state where the Waukesha Christmas parade massacre is still fresh in the minds of many voters.
In 2021, a man with a lengthy rap sheet killed six people and wounded dozens when he drove his car through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis. At the time of the massacre, the suspect, Darrell Brooks, was facing multiple pending cases in Milwaukee County involving second-degree reckless endangerment and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
According to Milwaukee County’s Democratic district attorney, John Chisholm, an “inappropriately low” $1,000 cash bond in the pending cases allowed Brooks to leave jail in a matter of days, after which he drove into the crowd.
Brooks’s risk assessment, which identified him as high risk and listed his previous felony convictions and charges in cases involving violence, had not been uploaded into a case management system. The prosecutor, without access to the risk assessment and working to manage an overwhelming case load, recommended that bail be set unusually low for the circumstances.
Despite the low bail playing a major part in Brooks’s ability to drive into the Christmas parade, Barnes’s campaign said in February that he still supports legislation he introduced in 2016 as a member of the state assembly that would have ended “monetary bail as a condition of release” for criminal defendants and prohibited judges from detaining defendants based on the “nature, number and gravity” of the charges.
Under the proposal, a judge would be required to release a defendant unless there was “clear and convincing evidence” that he was a flight risk or a danger to an individual or a witness.
Barnes’s campaign argues that Brooks would have been detained pretrial under his proposal.
Crime is set to be a defining issue among Wisconsinites in November: A recent Marquette University Law School poll found that 88 percent of Wisconsin voters are concerned about crime, and 87 percent are concerned about gun violence. The issues came in behind only inflation, which concerned 94 percent of voters.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee released an ad last month reminding voters of the role that cash bail played in the Christmas parade tragedy.
Yet the Barnes campaign said in February that he would support a bill to eliminate the use of cash bail nationwide, if elected to the Senate. The federal justice system does not use cash bail as a condition for pre-trial release.
“The lieutenant governor believes we should decide who is imprisoned before their trial begins based on how much of a risk they pose to the community, not on how much money they have,” Maddy McDaniel, spokeswoman for Barnes’s campaign, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
McDaniel also said at the time that Barnes still supports a bill he pushed in 2016 that would have lowered the penalty for bail-jumping in some cases. Defendants facing felony charges who violate the terms of their release before trial would currently face an additional felony charge, but under Barnes’s plan they would be hit with a misdemeanor as long as they did not commit a new crime.
“Dangerous individuals like Darrell Brooks shouldn’t be able to get out of prison by paying $1,000 or $100,000,” McDaniel said. “The bottom line is money shouldn’t have anything to do with public safety.”
By contrast, Wisconsin governor Tony Evers, a Democrat who has also faced accusations of being soft-on-crime, told a local news outlet that cash bail is “one of those things that should be kept.” He also signaled a willingness to explore stricter bail options in the wake of the Waukesha Christmas parade.
By May, Barnes seemed less willing to speak out about his support for eliminating cash bail: “What I support is a bail system that decides who should stay in jail based on the severity of the crime, based on the likelihood to reoffend or cause harm.”
Asked whether that means he supports the elimination of cash bail, Barnes said only that he did not want non-violent offenders held because they couldn’t afford bail and again added that “it should be based on the severity of the crime or past violent history.”
Under Wisconsin’s Constitution, cash bail is not intended to prevent a threat to public safety but is meant to ensure the accused’s appearance in court. A resolution to amend the state constitution to allow the severity of a crime to be a factor in setting bail amounts passed the state assembly with bipartisan support in February.
Republican state senator Julian Bradley has proposed requiring a bond of at least $10,000 for defendants who have been previously convicted of a felony or violent misdemeanor.
Barnes’s opponent, Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) has repeatedly targeted the Democrat’s positions on crime and policing.
“That type of rhetoric, those types of actions – the ‘defund police,’ the no bail,” Johnson told reporters last month. “Just letting a revolving door in our criminal justice system.”
Cully Stimson, an expert in crime control at the Heritage Foundation, told National Review that while proponents of bail reform argue cash bail is discriminatory and that more lenient procedures would not increase crime, “there is no study out there — none — that has survived peer review that says that crime goes down or remains the same if you eliminate cash bail.”
In Cook County, Ill., circuit court chief judge Tim Evans announced in 2017 that he planned to reduce or eliminate monetary bail for many pretrial defendants.
Then, 18 months later Evans’s office performed a study and said the new policies increased the percentage of defendants who were released pretrial from 72 to 81 percent and that more lenient release procedures did not increase crime.
The news spread across the country as promising evidence in favor of bail reform — but it turned out the study was flawed.
A later peer-reviewed study found that that the number of released defendants charged with committing new crimes increased by 45 percent after the new program was implemented and the number of pretrial releasees charged with committing new violent crimes increased by an estimated 33 percent.
A Chicago Tribune analysis of the study done by Evans’s office “found flaws in both the data underlying Evans’ report and the techniques he used to analyze it — issues that minimize the number of defendants charged with murder and other violent crimes after being released from custody under bail reform.”
“But the damage has been done,” Stimson said. “Because a lot of cities now are still citing this Chicago study as ‘proof’ that not requiring bail won’t increase crime and it’s a good thing basically.”
“The consequences are pretty obvious,” added Stimson, who previously served as a judge, prosecutor and defense lawyer. “A lot of people who are really dangerous who need to be held pretrial or need to be have a high bail set won’t have either of those happen and they’ll go out and commit more crimes.”
In 2019, New York State passed a bail reform law that set qualifying offenses for which judges could set bail and hold a defendant in jail. A number of crimes were excluded from the list, including residential burglaries nearly all felony drug cases, and cases in which the defendant was charged with unarmed robbery while committing the crime with the help of another person.
The 2019 law and its later amendments did not allow the judge to factor the defendant’s likelihood of reoffending or the risk to public safety when determining release conditions.
An August 2022 report from the Manhattan Institute found that by March 15, 2020, just two-and-a-half months after the law went into effect, crime had risen 20.05 percent in New York City over the same period year-to-date in 2019, including a 26.5 percent increase in burglaries, 33.9 percent increase in robberies, 22.9 percent increase in shooting incidents and 68 percent increase in car theft. Only murder and rape decreased, both crimes for which judges were still able to set bail.
“These social justice warriors, these mass incarceration fanatics, who talk about fake terms like mass incarceration and decarceration and progressive prosecution are the ones who are causing, through their policies, the spike in crime and the rise in crime in these cities,” Stimson said. “They are to blame and their policies are to blame, period.”