In a Cash Bail System, Justice Depends on Your Bank Account

The call came at noon on a Friday from a number I did not recognize. It was my client’s brother. He had been trying to reach me for days, as I had been trying to reach my client for weeks through the jail’s messaging portal. He never wrote back.

“He is nonverbal.”

That was the first thing his brother told me. My client has a severe intellectual disability, and a court had already found him incompetent earlier this year, in the same courthouse. He was sitting in a county jail on a $10,000 bond for a non-violent misdemeanor.

Reagen E. Thomas is a criminal defense attorney in Houston. Since her first week in practice she has taken court appointments in small counties across Texas, and nearly all of her appointed cases are non-violent misdemeanors. No client is named in this piece and no case is identified.