On May 16, 2023, the Los Angeles Superior Court issued a  issued a historic preliminary injunction (PI) ensuring that people arrested for low-level, non-violent offenses will no longer be detained in LA County jails pre-arraignment because they are unable to pay cash bail. The injunction requires the LA Sheriff’s Department and Los Angeles Police Department to follow an Emergency Bail Schedule (EBS)  that had been in place during the pandemic. The EBS was issued to help relieve overcrowding in the largest jail system in the country to prevent the spread of COVID.

LA Superior Court Judge Lawrence P. Riff ruled that the plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit Urquidi vs City of Los Angeles had demonstrated that they are likely to succeed at trial in showing that it is unconstitutional for LA County and the City of LA to jail people between arrest and their first court date simply because they cannot afford to pay money bail.

This ruling follows a weeks-long hearing that included testimony from multiple experts on the harms of wealth-based detention. Those harms include innocent people being pressured to plead guilty just  to avoid further incarceration, needless separation from children and other loved ones, job loss, loss of housing, and the undermining of public safety through the over-use of pretrial detention, which has been repeatedly shown to increase the likelihood of being charged with a crime in the future. The court notes that the defendants “do not dispute” those conclusion, adding that LA’s own Probation Department and Board of Supervisors have expressed “profound doubts about the wisdom, fairness, and constitutionality of the pretrial money bail system that operates to detain arrestees in jail solely because they are too impoverished to pay money bail.”

The court concluded: “[T]he uncontroverted evidence shows the PI will reduce the incidence of new criminal activity and failures to appear for future court proceedings . . . and decrease overcrowding at these Defendants’ jail facilities.”

The preliminary injunction implemented a return to the same criteria for release that were in place under the EBS started on May 24, 2003, and further instructs the parties to consult with each other to develop additional constitutionally sound, effective, concrete, administrable, and enforceable plans and procedures for pre-arraignment release of arrestees over the course of June and July. The court expects the lawsuit to proceed to trial on the merits in 2024.

Urquidi v. Los Angeles et. al, was first filed in November 2022 on behalf of jailed individuals Phillip Urquidi, Terilyn Goldson, Daniel Martinez, Arthur Lopez, Susana Perez, and Gerardo Campos. They are joined as plaintiffs by an interfaith coalition of CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice); its Executive Director Reverend Jennifer Gutierrez; Reverend Gary Bernard Williams, Pastor Saint Mark UMC and Board Member of CLUE; and Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, Professor of Rabbinic Literature, American Jewish University. The case was amended on April 10, 2023.