Pretrial release in federal courts: A structural model with selectivity and qualitative dependent variables

Pretrial release is the legal process by which defendants who are accused of criminal offenses are released from detention pending trial. Evaluators are frequently concerned with the qualitative and quantuative importance of defendant and offense variables in the determination of which defendants gain release and, for those who are released, which defendants will engage in pretrial misconduct. This article presents a method for deriving unbiased parameter estimates, using maximum likelihood techniques m a structural equation paradigm, for the release decision and indicates how these techniques can be extended to the analysis of pretrial misconduct. The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protectsaccused defendants by the dictate that &dquo;excessive bail shall not be required.&dquo; In 1951, the Supreme Court decision in Stack v. Boyle defined &dquo;excessive bail&dquo; as anything greater than the amount that would guarantee the appearance of the accused at trial. The Federal Bail Reform Act of 1966 went a step further to ensure that the accused is not detained unjustifiably or discriminated against financially. The act mandates that all defendants (except capital offenders) be eligible for release. As Landes (1974) has demonstrated, legality and reality may differ. Judges also seem to consider the potential for pretrial crime when setting bail conditions. Findings similar to Landes’s, which pertained to New York City, have been reported in other settings (Bynum, 1977; Roth and Wice, 1980; Toborg, 1981; Stryker et al., 1983). These studies imply that judges do not adhere strictly to constitutional dictates and that some defendants may be financially discriminated against