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Here are the basics of the Brooklyn Defenders’ approach: An associate with the law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, which is partnering with the organization, will work pro bono with one of the public defenders to document each client’s finances, background, and community ties. They will then present their findings to a judge and either argue that bail is unnecessary or propose a form of bail the client can realistically meet. Where bail remains outside of the defendant’s financial reach, they will challenge the ruling in an appeals court.

In addition to seeing clients freed, the end game of the project is to change courtroom habit and get all parties involved following the law. “Part of this is just training judges,” Hechinger said. Systematic appeals—if accompanied by a steady stream of reversals—could also prompt reform by expending judges’ time and resources repeatedly redoing reversed bail determinations.

This August, I attended a test run of the project in the Kings County Supreme Court, where Brooklyn’s felony cases are tried. The defendant, Mordecai Omatiga, had never been arrested until earlier this year, when a police officer allegedly recognized him on the street from surveillance footage of a grocery-store robbery. When the officer arrested Omatiga, he said, he’d found a handgun and a bag of marijuana on him. Omatiga pleaded not guilty to the robbery and other charges.

At an earlier stage in his case, a judge had given Omatiga two choices if he wanted to post bail: He could deposit $50,000 with the court, or he could pay a bondsman more than $6,000 to post a $100,000 bond. Omatiga didn’t have that kind of money. He had a job, but he was attending vocational school and helping raise his five-year-old son.

Omatiga’s lawyers—Debora Silberman, a public defender, and Alejandro Ortega, an associate at Kramer Levin—presented the judge with a type of bail application that’s central to the Brooklyn Defenders’ initiative. The lawyers had spent the preceding weeks interviewing their client and his family, and reviewing their finances. What they’d found, they told Justice James Sullivan, was a man who was a minimal flight risk. His entire life was in New York, and he was very close to his family, which had attended every one of his court dates. If Sullivan wouldn’t release Omatiga outright, his parents—Nigerian immigrants—were willing to vouch for his return to court through an unsecured surety bond, one of New York’s nine bail options. They would be contractually obliged to pay the court if Omatiga jumped bail.

“They’re standing here in court to tell your Honor that they will, essentially, not have a dollar in their pockets,” Silberman said. “Every dollar would go to this court until Mr. Omatiga is returned.”

After a prosecutor spoke briefly, Sullivan denied the defense attorneys’ request. His reasons were threefold. He’d misread Omatiga’s clean criminal record and thought it showed a prior arrest for a violent felony. Although Omatiga denied involvement in the robbery, prosecutors said he’d acknowledged to police that he carried a handgun. And there was a video of the crime (though prosecutors and the defense disagreed whether the person in the video resembles Omatiga). “So the Court does not see any ground for changing bail,” Sullivan concluded. He made no mention of how specific factors that the bail statute instructs judges to consider affected his reasoning: Omatiga’s ability to afford cash bail, his ties to his community, and his family connections. The entire ruling took up less than half a page of court transcript.