In re Torres on H.C.

Juvenile Law Center, National Center for Youth Law, and 10 other national and California-based family advocacy, children’s rights, and racial justice organizations, filed a letter brief in support of Rudolph’s Torres’s petition for review in the California Supreme Court. Mr. Torres, an unhoused person, was held in pretrial detention because the court imposed an excessively high bail. Mr. Torres asked the court to review whether imposing intentionally unaffordable bail violates the California Constitution's provision limiting pretrial detention to cases involving violence and a showing of future dangerousness.

Our brief focused on the impact of pretrial detention on parents and their children. We explained how charging parents unaffordable bail can lead to the state placing their children in the foster system and can even lead to permanent termination of parental rights. We focused on the harms of foster system involvement and the disparate impacts of unaffordable money bail on California’s Black, Latine and Indigenous children and children in poverty due to the deep racial and economic disparities in both the foster care and carceral systems.

The California Supreme Court unfortunately denied Mr. Torres’s petition for review.

LEGAL TEAM

Attorneys

Kate Burdick, Marsha Levick, Nadia Mozaffar