Fewer defendants have been re-arrested for crimes after being released on bail or bond since Shelby County implemented its standing bail order in February, new data shows. 

The percentage of defendants who were re-arrested after being released was 7% from Feb. 15 to July 31, after the standing bail order took effect; 11% of defendants were re-arrested after being released from Aug. 1, 2022, to Jan. 31, 2023, according to data presented Monday.

General Sessions Criminal Court Division VII Judge Bill Anderson and Lead Judicial Commissioner John Marshall presented the data report to the Shelby County Commission Monday, Sept. 18.

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“People have been clamoring for this kind of data for many months, and certainly crime by far is the number one issue on people’s minds in Memphis and Shelby County,” Commissioner Mick Wright told reporters after the meeting. “So, we were excited to have them here with us to get these reports and get a sense of what is happening in General Sessions Criminal Court.”

Anderson and Marshall gave Monday’s report in response to two resolutions passed by county commissioners — one in August 2022 and one in June — both of which asked for data centered around the bail order. They wanted to know how judicial commissioners were complying with it in how they have set bail, and how often defendants have been re-arrested after being released on bail or bond, among other things. 

Marshall explained that it took so long to create the reports because it was the first time that they were created.

“There was nothing like these reports before,” he said.

The report includes information on 8,988 cases from Aug. 1, 2022, to Jan. 31, 2023, and 8,233 cases from Feb. 15, 2023, through July 31, 2023.

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The preliminary results do not account for the time frame and case-quantity discrepancies, according to a summary of the data. 

“That sort of analysis will hopefully be available in future reports,” the summary reads. “We are cautiously optimistic that lower re-arrest will be reflected in a more comprehensive data set that will be shared once completed.”

Future reports will include demographic breakdowns for defendants, the total number of defendants who have been released on their own recognizance, and data on affordable and unaffordable bails that have been set for defendants, according to the summary.

Marshall said Monday that the additional data was already prepared but that pretrial services found “discrepancies” and wanted to fix them before. it was presented. 

Marshall said that most of the re-arrests were related to domestic violence or for minor offenses. 

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“There are some violent re-arrests but not as many as the public has perceived,” he said.

Marshall and Anderson both answered questions from commissioners and a few community members at the meeting about the data and about the bail setting process in Shelby County. 

Wright asked if Marshall and Anderson believed that the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center, aka 201 Poplar, was a “revolving door,” to which it has been commonly referred.

Marshall said that based on the data, he disagreed. He said that the rearrest is lower than he thought it would be but cautioned that it was only a “snapshot in time.”

“I want to make clear that this is looking at the period whether they were rearrested or not, but I think the statistics bear out that it is not a revolving door,” he said. 

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Wright told reporters after the meeting that it was too early for him to give an opinion about the data, but he said the lower rearrest numbers were a “good thing.”

“But it’s also a different time period (before as opposed to after the standing bail order),” he said. “It’s different months that you’re looking at throughout the year so I’d want a longer period of time before I made any hard-and-fast rules but I do like the fact that we’re looking at this longer period time of six months, and we’ll be continuing to follow this every quarter and we’ll be able to get a better perspective of what is actually happening on the ground, and not just case by case but an objective sense.”

The county’s standing bail order was officially implemented on Feb. 15. Multiple parties, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Lives Matter and local nonprofit Just City, threatened legal action against the county because of alleged unconstitutional bail practices.

The order was part of the negotiation to avoid a lawsuit. It created the Bail Hearing Room, a courtroom at 201 Poplar dedicated specifically to bail hearings. It also made defendants’ financial situations a factor when setting bail and gave them the right to a full bail hearing within 72 hours if they are still in custody.

The data presented Monday is the second set to show positive results for the standing bail order.

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Just City released its own data May 30 that looked at average bail amounts for defendants before and after the order was implemented.

The data, which spanned from Feb. 17 through May 19, showed the average bail set for those accused of violent crimes had gone up — from $84,385 to $92,182 — while bail for non-violent offenses went down, from $12,128 to $10,575.

Just City Executive Director Josh Spickler spoke at the meeting Monday and said that he and the other groups originally brought up the bail issues to the county because they anticipated that the reform now in place would yield the results the data showed.

“I don’t want to diminish anyone’s experience out in the streets of Memphis or at the courthouse or across the street, but we are headed in the right direction. We don’t have to choose between justice and safety. We can have them both, and I think that’s where we are headed,” he said.