| Updated: March 3, 2021, 5:36 p.m.
As the clock ticks down the final hours of the Utah legislative session, a group of state prosecutors and public defenders came together Monday to call on lawmakers not to repeal a broadly supported bail reform package enacted last year.
Proponents of the reforms which aim to keep relatively low-risk defendants from sitting behind bars
for weeks or months awaiting trial
because they’re poor, while rich people can simply post bail and walk free say the system now in place under HB206 is significantly better than the old one, which was based on cash bail.
A legislative effort to repeal last year s bail reform would leave Utah vulnerable to costly legal challenges and would walk back progress that s made the state safer, top prosecutors and defense attorneys from Utah s three most populous counties said Monday.
| Updated: 8:19 p.m.
Police officers who work in Utah schools should receive mandatory training in cultural awareness and how to de-escalate conflicts with students, a state lawmaker has proposed.
Rep. Sandra Hollins, D-Salt Lake City, believes requiring that instruction could help reduce the number of young people of color referred to the juvenile justice system in Utah, where they fill detention centers at disproportionate rates. And she’d also like the training to include how law enforcement can respond sensitively to students with disabilities, those experiencing mental health crises and anyone who has been exposed to trauma.
“We need to make sure our vulnerable kids are not going through that school-to-prison pipeline,” she said Thursday during a committee hearing for her bill. “They are now. And we need to stop it.”
| Updated: 9:01 p.m.
Last legislative session, Rep. Stephanie Pitcher wrangled together groups from across the criminal justice system to solve what she sees as a longstanding flaw in the way Utah treats defendants before trial, when their guilt or innocence hasn’t yet been established in court.
Her problem was this: Why should relatively low-risk defendants sit behind bars
for weeks or months awaiting trial
because they’re poor, while rich people can simply post bail and walk free?
It’s a question that has prompted a bail reform movement across the nation in recent years, but also one that has bedeviled states given the high stakes involved, with some debates pitting public safety versus personal liberty. So it astonished some last year when Pitcher, a Salt Lake City Democrat whose full-time job is as a prosecutor, managed to assemble a broadly supported reform package and to win approval from the Republican-dominated Legislature.