Reading Assignments as a Condition of Bail? Really?

Well, as Judge Vaughn Walker says, it might have something to do with the seat.

That's because when Judge Walker's successor, Judge Yvonne Rogers, became a federal district court judge in San Fran, she seems to have inherited his penchant for creative sanctioning. You might recall Walker garnered fame not only for his role in striking down Prop 8's restriction on same-sex marriage, but also for the shaming sanction  he imposed on Shawn Gementera, who had to stand outside a post office with a sign that said "I stole mail.  This is my punishment."  (The Gementera sanction was affirmed by a divided panel on the Ninth Circuit and the opinion is now part of many crim law casebooks. Disclosure: I had a small role in the appellate proceedings.)

Now, Judge Rogers has triggered some curiosity across the country for a recent bail provision imposed on Otis Mobley. Specifically, while Mobley is released in advance of his upcoming trial, he is required, as a condition of bail, to read certain books for an hour a day and to write a report for a half hour a day.

The reading list hasn't yet been circulated, but still, one has to wonder about the suitability of such a condition with respect to bail. It wasn't included in the list of conditions recommended by the magistrate judge--not surprisingly.  Regardless of how one feels about such creativity in the context of punishment,* one has to wonder about its usage when it comes to bail conditions.

After all, bail is pre-trial, and thus pre-adjudication. Moreover, we do have this business associated with the presumption of innocence. SO, while it's one thing to say that the moral weight of such a presumption can be overcome when it comes to substantial and reasonable fears having to do with flight risk or danger to the community (or danger to the judicial process itself in cases of witness tampering), those issues are hard to imagine as related to the conditions associated with reading and writing reports. Rather, it seems as if reading and writing reports are tethered to the blaming and communicative functions of punishment for wrongdoing. To my mind, such conditions should not be imposed because they blur the lines of what we're trying to achieve, as a society, before and after adjudication. To be clear, I'm not saying that Mobley should not be released (although he has some, um, icky issues to work out) and I'm not saying he should be detained pre-trial. But the judge's order is curious because it is likely to be conceptually confused about the nature of pre-trial release and detention. It would be nice if we could find out, soon, what the judge is assigning, and why.

*Putting aside some rule of law reservations that nag at me about "creative" sanctions and punishment generally, I'm largely in favor of guilting punishments (which are designed to facilitate moral education without the public degradation associated with shaming punishments). As a general matter, it's fair to say that assigned reading and writing can facilitate those valuable guilting goals, perhaps even quite well. (Still, I'm not sure I'd go so far as ordering a defendant to write a book, as this WSJ story details about a defendant in a pharma-related crime.).  By contrast, I have a strong aversion to shaming punishments, which I think are largely illiberal and anti-retributive in spirit, as laid out here, among other places. For those interested in alternative sanctions more generally, I've linked to a few here (under media appearances) for some news stories over the years about the phenomenon.