Photo by Philippe Oursel / Unsplash
An Atlanta group bailed fathers home for Father's Day, held before trial only because they could not pay. An ancient law says wealth must never sit in the judgment seat.
You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor, nor show favoritism to the great, but you shall judge your neighbor in righteousness.
Leviticus 19:15
For Father's Day this week, a group in Atlanta paid to get fathers out of jail. Not fathers a court had found guilty of anything. These were men in the Fulton County Jail still waiting for a trial, held for one reason: they could not afford bail. Pay it and you wait for trial at home; cannot pay and you wait in a cell. Nearly four out of five people in that jail have never been convicted. The group bonded out eleven fathers, in time to be with their kids.
There is a line in the law of Moses about how a judge must rule, and it cuts in a direction most people do not expect. It forbids injustice in court, and then it names what must never tip the scales: not the poverty of the one, and not the wealth of the other. Do not favor the poor. Do not favor the great. In this vision, justice is meant to be blind to money in both directions.
Cash bail does the reverse. It hangs a price on the door of the cell and lets the price decide. Two men can face the same charge, both still presumed innocent, both waiting for the same trial, and one drives home while the other stays locked up. What separates them comes down to a number in a bank account. Money has been handed the one job the law said never to give it.
The fathers who walk out are no more innocent than the ones who stay behind. The only difference is that someone could pay. That is worth sitting with the next time we picture who belongs in a cell, and why they are there.