Brooklyn lawmakers seek to create hate crime exemption in bail reform law
Following a recent spike in anti-Semitic incidents across the city, a pair of Brooklyn lawmakers have moved to amend the state’s newly enacted bail reforms by making hate crimes bail-eligible.
The bills — introduced last week in the State Senate and the Assembly by Sen. Andrew Gounardes and Assemblymember Simcha Eichenstein — would amend the current law to allow a judge to set bail for someone who has been accused of committing a hate crime. This would serve as an amendment to the state’s brand new bail laws, which went into effect on Jan. 1. The reforms eliminated cash bail and pretrial detention for those accused of committing a range of misdemeanors and non-violent felonies, including if they were bias motivated.
“This is something that I think should have been included in the original bail negotiations last year but wasn’t,” Gounardes told the Brooklyn Eagle. “And, as we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks and in the data over the last year, incidents of hate crime — not just to the Jewish community but within others as well — have risen. I think that this highlights the need to have some ability to evaluate these cases on a one-by-one basis, especially because hate crimes, which are meant to terrorize an entire group of people, can have a greater impact on public safety.”