Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison interviews New York City attorney, public defender and social justice advocate Robin Steinberg. She is the founder and former executive director of The Bronx Defenders, a public defender office which served more than 35,000 low-income New Yorkers every year. She’s taken the Bronx Defenders holistic defense model to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is executive director of Still She Rises. It is the first public defender office in the nation dedicated exclusively to the representation of mothers in the criminal justice system. (Oklahoma incarcerates a higher percentage of its women than by any other state – 142 out of every 100,000 female Oklahomans are incarcerated.) With 35 years of experience as a public defender, Steinberg tells Morrison, “People are not equal under the law.”
Steinberg (B.A. UC Berkeley, 1978; J.D. NYU School of Law 1982) is taking on the legal system over cash bail. If you’re arrested and a judge sets bail, you can pay it and go home. But if you (or your family) can’t afford to pay bail, you stay in jail until you get a trial, which in some cases can take years.
Steinberg calls her national fight against this inequality The Bail Project. “Poverty is not a crime” is the tagline. The mission of The Bail Project is to combat mass incarceration by keeping tens of thousands of Americans out of pretrial detention. It pays people’s bail so they don’t have to sit in jail or plead guilty to a crime they may not have committed — just because they can’t afford to pay bail. According to The Bail Project, “90% of people who are held in jail on bail will plead guilty just to go home, even if they did not commit the crime.”
Steinberg tells Morrison, “When the awesome, terrifying power of government is coming after an individual and trying to lock them in a cage, you are presumed innocent before they can do that. I want to live in that country, don’t you?” Innocent until proven guilty should not depend on race or income, but in America that is the reality. Dateline airs Fridays at 10pm on NBC.
NOTE: Just days before the airing of this Dateline episode, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the California Money Bail Reform Act, which abolishes bail for suspects awaiting trial. The new law goes into effect in October 2019.
