DURHAM – Mayor Bill Bell’s proposal for a $300,000 minimum bond in gun-related criminal cases won’t fly in this year’s N.C. General Assembly session, the dean of Durham’s legislative delegation says.
State Rep. Mickey Michaux, D-Durham, told the mayor and City Attorney Patrick Baker on Wednesday that legislators would have to pitch the idea as a statewide bill, meaning there’s no chance for it to come up in this year’s “short session.”
The rules for election-year short sessions dictate that legislators will consider only the state budget, bills that cleared one of the assembly’s two chambers the year before, proposals from legislative study committees and “non-controversial” local bills.
Bell wanted legislators to try to get the $300,000 bond proposal through as a Durham-only local bill.
But Michaux told him that wouldn’t work.
At present, state statutes don’t mention any dollar figure for any type of case, he said.
“You start setting a figure in bonds, you’re going to have to do it for all of” the state’s 100 counties, he said. “You have an equal protection clause of the Constitution you have to follow.”
Michaux said local legislators are willing to lend a hand next year, when the rules allow the state House and Senate to take up new matters.
But when the time comes, they and city officials will craft a bill that doesn’t include the $300,000 figure, he said.
Instead, they’ll borrow from the approach the state’s already taken to gang and drug cases, adding more gun-related aggravating factors into the things judges and magistrates are supposed to weigh as they’re deciding pre-trial bonds.
Baker had already watered down the mayor’s proposal, which originally called for a $300,000 minimum pre-trial release bond in any case accusing someone of a crime involving the illegal discharge of a gun inside the city limits.
The city attorney changed that to apply the $300,000 standard only to cases where an alleged transgressor had been out on bond for unrelated charges and had been convicted of a firearms-related crime sometime in the past five years.
That again was modeled on existing laws for drug and gang cases.
Baker in March said he’d pushed the change to get “us in the door of having a discussion” with legislators, given likely opposition from judges and defense lawyers.
Bell’s original proposal had indeed sparked opposition from defense lawyers who said an across-the-board, $300,000 minimum would likely violate federal and state constitutional bans on “excessive bond.”
Durham judges were also skeptical.
In March, Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson noted that the bond guidelines he and Chief District Judge Marcia Morey have given local judges and magistrates already suggest a surcharge in firearms-related cases.
And that makes them stricter than any similar guidelines used in other metropolitan areas of North Carolina, Hudson said.
Bell took Michaux’s stance in stride.
“Mickey’s point was that he didn’t think we could go around setting bail-bond limits in the general statutes,” Bell said, adding that he believes city officials “can accomplish what we’re trying to do” via an aggravating-factors approach.
Michaux is one of three lawyers in Durham’s six-man General Assembly delegation. He is the county’s senior state legislator, having served continuously in the N.C. House since 1983 after a four-year stint in the same chamber in the 1970s.
By Ray Gronberg
(The Herald Sun)
April 23, 2012
