Sometimes, the criminal justice system just fails miserably. — Dan

On November 21, 2014, Aitabdel Salem went to a store — Zara, if you’re interested — in Manhattan. He was allegedly there to shoplift, not shop. Salem, then age 41, was in need of a coat for himself or a loved one, and decided to simply take one and walk out the door. But his heist wasn’t well-planned or executed. A police officer stopped Salem and Salem, allegedly, pushed back. The officer arrested Salem, who was charged with assaulting a police officer. Salem was sent to Rikers Island, the city’s most notable prison, with bail set at $25,000 — a price he could hardly afford.

But that changed just a week later — or, it should have. On November 28, Salem’s formal indictment hearing took place in a New York City court room, and the prosecutors — for reasons unclear — were unable to immediately secure an indictment for that assault. The court ordered Salem to be released until such time he was formally charged.

And he was — in April of 2015, or about five months after he should have been. The reason? $2.

Yes, two dollars.

At some point before the arrest at the Zara store, Salem was arrested for a pair of minor offenses, most likely related to tampering with the machines that New Yorkers used to use to buy subway tickets. Being minor, nonviolent offenses, the court set the bail for each of those two alleged acts at $1 — a token amount when attached to the $25,000 bail for the larger crime. (As People Magazine notes, “Oftentimes, a judge will set bail at $1 for lesser charges when a defendant’s existing bail on more serious offenses is deemed sufficient.”) So when the judge dismissed the charge of assaulting a police officer, Salem’s bail dropped from $25,002 to a mere two bucks. All he had to do was pay that small fee — something he could easily come up with — and he’d be a free man. But he didn’t pay, at least not right away. Why? Because no one ever told him about the dropped charge or the bail reduction.

As the Daily News reported, Salem wasn’t present at any of his bail hearings other than the first: “at each court date after his arraignment, his lawyer waived his appearance and allowed the proceeding to go on without him.” As a result, Salem wasn’t in the court room when the judge explained that he no longer had to pony up the $25,000. And neither his lawyers nor the city’s prison officials, Salem claimed in a later lawsuit, notified him of the massive bail reduction. He only found out when, the next spring, he made a passing inquiry about his bail status and found out that it would only cost him $2 to go home. On April 15, 2015, a prison chaplain paid the fee on his behalf, according to the Daily News.

Salem, of course, ended up suing the city and the Legal Aid Society, which provided him with his attorneys. But the story doesn’t end well for Salem. In 2018, according to the Queens Eagle, “a Manhattan Supreme Court judge threw out the case, ruling that the handling of his case and his lengthened time in prison did not violate his due-process rights.” And to make matters worse for Salem, when he received that bad news, he was once again sitting behind bars. Less than a month after his delayed release from Rikers, prosecutors formally charged him with the assault from November.

But Salem wasn’t there for that hearing, either. According to the Washington Post, he “was arrested again for failing to appear at an arraignment for the original assault charge” — his layers claimed that “the letter informing Salem of his court date was lost in the mail and had been stamped ‘return to sender’ by the post office” — but it didn’t seem to matter. The court set his new bail at $30,000, a price he could hardly afford. Salem ultimately pled guilty to the charge and was sentenced to up to five years in prison. The only silver lining? He did get credit for the time he served from November 2014 through April 2015.

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Today’s Bonus fact: It’s common for people in sketchy, unlawful professions to wear a lot of jewelry, with pimps stereotypically leading that list. There’s a reason for that. Rick Harrison, star of the TV show Pawn Stars, explained the rationale to NPR in 2011: “When you get arrested for pandering, they take your cash — because the cash was obtained illegally — but they don't take away your jewelry,. And a pimp knows that if he buys jewelry in a pawn shop, if [he] brings it back to a pawn shop and gets a loan against it, [they'll] always get half of what you paid for it — as opposed to buying it in a jewelry store, when [they] don't know what [they're] going to get. So, when they get arrested, they will always have someone bring their jewelry down to me. I will loan them half of what they paid for it — and that's their bail money.”

From the Archives: A Fishy Sentence: OK, ok, the failure to pay bail is a small, small part of the story here. It’s really more about the fish.

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And thanks! — Dan