Days after a man died at the Shelby County Jail, and a week after The Commercial Appeal reported that the jail’s intake area was backlogged with nearly 400 detainees, local bail reform nonprofit Just City said it was going to attempt to bail out as many people as possible with its bail fund.
In total, Just City Executive Director Josh Spickler said, the nonprofit will pull down $50,000 from its bail fund to help as many people as it can. As of the morning press conference on Aug. 1, Spickler said the nonprofit had identified 30 people it could bail out.
“Just City, for the last eight plus years, we’ve been paying bail,” Spickler said. “We’ve been paying bails in the amount of $1,000, just like the one Rockez McDaniel had. We’ve spent more than $3 million in this community to purchase peoples’ freedom through a corrupt bail system that we’re trying to change. But before we change it, until we change it, we can use it. So we have.”
What happened to Rockez McDaniel?
Memphis police officers “responded to a mental consumer call” for McDaniel on July 20, according to an affidavit. When police arrived, one officer used a Taser to arrest McDaniel because he shoved “one of the responding officers to escape.”…