January 7, 2022. Partner Andrea R. Gold and co-counsel Blake Strode were quoted regarding their Maplewood, Missouri cash bail case in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Messenger’s op-ed, “Can’t Pay the Court? Go to Jail. Debtors’ Prison Lives On,” published in The Washington Post today.
The case, attorneys Andrea R. Gold and Blake Strode say, is emblematic of how cash bail and fines and fees work hand in hand to create a two-tiered justice system.
“Every night,” Strode told me, “thousands of people in this country are kept in jail because they simply cannot afford to buy their release. In Maplewood, thousands of class members were held in jail because they could not afford a sum of money that represented the fines they owed or would owe to the city.”