Serial killers get their bail set less than that. I hope this story can get national buzz. It is beyond outrageous.

$888,888 for bail? I mean, that number alone should be an alert that something is up.

This is blatant injustice at work here.

We need to find out which Assistant DA was responsible for this and get the phone number to his office.  Hound him until he's shamed into doing the right thing.  Do this for everyone else involved as well.

There are rumors that Houston Mayor Bill White, who's a Democrat although the office is non-partisan, may run for Senate in 2008 against Cornyn. If he intervenes to help stop this absurdity, the netroots would be extremely supportive of him if he decides to run. He needs to get on this now - for moral and political reasons.

Dealing with these situations, as awfull as they are. Is far better when you are in power. Can some please say excise profits tax.

Big yawn so far from Democrats and mass media.

Washington Post ran a story at least:

HOUSTON -- According to the laws of economics, a $5.25-an-hour night cleaning woman with breast cancer is no match for the multibillion-dollar corporations that run the energy capital of America. But that's only one of the assumptions being tested in a strike of 1,700 Houston janitors that began almost four weeks ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con tent/article/2006/11/16/AR2006111601765. html

Sounds like [yawn, zzzzzzzzzzzz] an illegal that needs to be deported before she starts putting more of a burden on our welfare.

Hillary Clinton is busy looking out for the suffering middle class voters, who need her help most with taxes, just like Sherrod Brown and other newly elected ersatz populists will.

Thanks, Matt, but are you sure you aren't straying from the party line, like that awful liberal pornographer Virginia mistakenly elected to the Senate?  Your progressive credentials may be in jeopardy.

Best,  Terry

I thought bonds were set (or at least assented to) by judges -- is it just different in Texas?

Remember Chad Castagana?  The Freeper who sent white powder to Keith Olbermann, among others?  Guess what his bail was?  Give up?  $300,000.

So a postal terrorist gets less than half the bail of a striking janitor.  No Gitmo for him, either.

Hopefully this story is going to erupt into the corporate media soon, thanks to Matt S.  But please push this through your blogs, discussion groups, etc.

Thanksgiving is this Thursday, and the janitors had nearly nothing before they went out on strike.  Last month.

What were they charged with?

I went to the Houston Chronicle. I didn't see any coverage today about it. I assume they had some perfunctory article about it when it happened. But I do not see a single editorial column condemning this.

This is so nuts.  Will they sentence them to 30 years on a chain gang, too?  Another example of how illegal immigrants can be exploited.  If they can do this to citizens/legals in order to create fear in organizers so they can keep them in line, imagine the intimidation, fear and absolute control they would have over illegals.  This is such utter bull shit.  How can they get away with it?  

I'm glad the Post picked it up, anyway. Given that Bill Keller's dad was CEO of Chevron, odds are fairly good the Times won't.

The link in line one to HoustonJanitors.org gives the phone numbers for Chevron officers in Houston (and San Ramon) down on the right-hand corner, and in point 2, provides a letter to the entire roster at the Hines managing company who are the bargaining group.

I found it easy to add a few paragraphs about local conditions, to let them know that this police response will bring lasting shame on the city. Look at the one incident in New Orleans and the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago where horse-mounted police took extreme actions.

Aha, this calls for Anderson Cooper and Keith Olbermann to investigate and publicize!

The SCOTUS case cited by Professor Findlaw is Stack v Boyle:

the modern practice of requiring a bail bond or the deposit of a sum of money subject to forfeiture serves as additional assurance of the presence of an accused. Bail set at a figure higher than an amount reasonably calculated to fulfill this purpose is "excessive" under the Eighth Amendment.

Looks like a slam dunk - should have got the District Judge out of bed already, surely?

Two big flashing warning signs:

First, the report Matt links is a press release from the SEIU. No source is truly independent, but...

Second, that $888,888 number sounds not quite right. I thought it might that it was a big round number split 44 ways - but no. (That would be 39,111,072.)

Is there a criminal lawyer in the house? Isn't bail inevitable set at a round sum amount?

I think this needs some decent reporting.

The Houston Chronicle has been incuriously silent about the excessive initial bonds, but the SEIU has later reported that a magistrate reduced the bonds for the Class B misdemeanors to $1,000 each and the protesters were released.

Normally, in Texas, an assistant district attorney or city attorney would request a bond, which would be set by a justice of the peace or other magistrate. If somebody did set an $888,888 bond for a Class B misdemeanor, that needs to be examined.

The bail makes perfect sense, in a way.

Woman bludgeons her grandchild to death?  Well, that's horrific, but it's hardly a threat to the corporate masters of America.  Stab a guy in a bar?  As long as it's not the bar at the country club, who really cares?  Protest for labor rights?  Now that's a threat.

Your post makes clear you dont understand how bail is supposed to work.  It is NOT supposed to have anything to do with the crime charged.  It IS supposed to have to do with how likely the suspect is to flee.  Even by that criterion the Houston case sounds excessive, but it is not for the reasons you cite.  You should be more careful before propagating misconceptions like this - Before a trial you are not guilty of anything.  You are innocent.  Therefore the nature of the crime cannot be a factor.  Only whether or not you will show for the trial.

Houston, I think we have a problem.

somebody screwed up.  Bail was supposed to reference the Satanic number $666,666.  It would appear that another party must have their hand on the scale too.

Incidentally, if any one cares, $1000 is perfectly reasonable for a Class B misdemeanor in Texas.

We sat down in the intersection and the horses came immediately. It was really violent. They arrested us, and when we got to jail, we were pretty beat up. Not all of us got the medical attention we needed. The worst was a protester named Julia, who is severely diabetic. We kept telling the guards about her condition but they only gave her a piece of candy. During roll call, she started to complain about light-headedness. Finally she just collapsed unconscious on the floor. It was like she just dropped dead. The guard saw it but just kept going through the roll. Susan ran over there and took her pulse while the other inmates were yelling for help, saying we need to call somebody. The medical team strolled over, taking their own sweet time. She was unconscious for like 4 or 5 minutes.

They really tried to break us down. The first night they put the temperature so high that a woman--one of the other inmates--had a seizure. The second night they made it freezing and took away many of our blankets. We didn't have access to the cots so we had to sleep on a concrete floor. When we would finally fall asleep the guards would come and yell `Are you Anna Denise Solís? Are you so and so?' One of the protesters had a fractured wrist from the horses. She had a cast on and when she would fall asleep the guard would kick the cast to wake her up. She was in a lot of pain.

The guards would tell us: `This is what you get for protesting.' One of them said, `Who gives a shit about janitors making 5 dollars an hour? Lots of people make that much.' The other inmates--there were a lot of prostitutes in there--said that they had never seen the jail this bad. The guards told them: `We're trying to teach the protesters a lesson.' Nobody was getting out of jail because the processing was so slow. They would tell the prostitutes that everything is the protesters' fault. They were trying to turn everybody against each other.

I felt like I was in some Third World jail, not in America. One of the guards called us `whores' and if we talked back, we didn't get any lunch. We didn't even have the basic necessities. It felt like a police state, like marshal law, nobody had rights. Some of us had been arrested in other cities, and it was never this bad before.

More here:

http://www.houstonjanitors.org/anna-deni se-solis/