On Sept. 4, 21-year-old Joshua Pomier will have
served nearly four years in a detention center near
San Bernardino, California. Pomier is charged with
multiple counts of car theft and robbery.
There are two deeply troubling problems with the
amount of time he has spent behind bars. One, he
has not been convicted of any of the crimes he’s
charged with. He had barely turned 18 years old when
he and another juvenile were arrested for the crimes
in September 2004. Pomier and family members
vehemently protest his innocence. The even more
tormenting problem is not Pomier’s guilt or
innocence, but the absurdly long length of time that he
has been jailed awaiting disposition -- any
disposition -- of the charges leveled against
him.
His bail was set at nearly a half million dollars, and
there have been several delayed court dates. During
that time, he has been relentlessly pressured to
accept a plea bargain that will require him to serve a
lengthy prison sentence. Pomier has refused and
continues to protest his innocence.
Pomier is African-American, and his dragged-out
incarceration without being convicted of anything is
not unusual. In fact, he’s a near-textbook example of
how thousands of mostly black and Latino young
adults and juveniles languish for months, even years,
in America’s jails with high or no bail, receive shoddy
or non-existent legal counsel and are browbeaten and
even threatened by harried, overworked and often
indifferent public defenders and prosecutors to accept
deals.
The Coalition for Juvenile Justice estimates that on
any given day, nearly 30,000 youth between the ages
of 14 and 18 years old are locked down in juvenile
detention centers nationally for interminably long
periods awaiting disposition of their cases. Even with
the plunge in juvenile and adult crime, the numbers of
youth and young adults incarcerated for lengthy pre-
detention jail time nearly doubled in the 1990s. During
the same time, the rates of excessive pre-trial
detention time dropped for white youth.
The young adult defendants are nearly always faced
with excessively high bail, and for juveniles, no bail. In
the juvenile system, most states do not permit bail.
Juveniles are considered wards of the court, and pre-
trial release is solely at the discretion of the judge.
High bail or lack of bail, clogged court calendars, and
overcrowded jails virtually ensure that defendants
such as Pomier get lost in the system without any
disposition of their case. In one study, the Sentencing
Project found that blacks on average were held for a
year or more without any action on their case.
