Nashville Community Bail Fund Files Lawsuit Over Davidson County Bail Practices

The Nashville Community Bail Fund is suing in federal court over local bail practices they say are unfairly keeping poor people in jail.

A coalition of criminal-justice-focused organizations — including the ACLU of Tennessee, the Civil Rights Corps, and the Choosing Justice Initiative — filed the suit on behalf of the bail fund. 

The complaint, which names Davidson County Criminal Court Clerk Howard Gentry as the sole defendant, generally discusses the ways the bail system disproportionately harms poor people. But it is focused particularly on a local rule that, the suit argues, violates the constitutional rights of jailed Nashvillians and threatens the continued existence of the Nashville Community Bail Fund. 

The rule in question, Rule 10(B), subjects cash bonds to garnishment for fines, court costs and restitution. The coalition of criminal justice organizations has previously argued that this rule is unlawful. In the suit, they write that, unless a person or entity attempting to post a bail bond signs a document agreeing to the garnishment, “Gentry’s office will refuse to accept a bail bond deposit, and the person on whose behalf bond was to be posted will remain incarcerated.

"In this manner," the suit continues, "Gentry unlawfully uses future garnishment of cash bail deposits as a pre-condition of someone’s pretrial release, for the sole purpose of ensuring post-judgment payment of fines, court costs, and restitution.”

But it also throws a wrench into the revolving fund model that keeps the NCBF operating. The bail fund was established in 2016 and was initially exempted from Rule 10(B). That meant that the fund could post cash bonds for people in jail and receive the whole amount back once the person showed up for court and resolved their case. But last year, Nashville’s Criminal Court judges revoked that exemption. Now the bail fund’s balance dwindles with every bond they post. In materials announcing the lawsuit, the Rev. Davie Tucker — the vice chairperson of the bail fund’s board of directors — says "the number of people we are able to bail out each month has dropped by over 60 percent” as a result. 

At a press conference Wednesday afternoon at American Baptist College, Tucker framed the lawsuit as a challenge to a bail system that is fundamentally unjust. 

"Right now, as every day, there is at least 1,000 people who are held in our local jail not because they are a flight risk, not because folk are afraid that they will reoffend, not because they are wanted anywhere else," he said. "They are held purely because they do not have the money to post bail."

He also shared a remarkable statistic emphasizing the fact that everyone awaiting trial in jail is innocent until proven guilty and many are never proven guilty. 

"[The Nashville Community Bail Fund] in the last two-and-a-half, almost three, years has posted over $2 million cash in the Criminal Court Clerk's office to free folk who would not have been freed otherwise," he said. "Of that number, 53 percent of the people that we've gotten out of jail, the state either chose not to try them or they were found not guilty." 

Former Metro Public Defender Dawn Deaner, who now runs the Choosing Justice Initiative, outlined the lawsuit's legal arguments. In short, the suit argues that Nashville's bail policy violates the Eighth Amendment right against excessive bail by making one's freedom contingent upon future payment of fines and fees, and the Fourteenth Amendment by depriving someone of their property without due process. Lastly, Deaner said, “This rule improperly burdens the constitutional and fundamental right we all have to pretrial liberty.”