Our Priorities
These are the main programs and policies we are currently advocating around!
Life happens. We have all been late or missed an appointment because there was an unexpected traffic accident on the way, or because our car had an issue when we tried to start it in the morning, or our children needed us, or we simply just got the days mixed up. People with court obligations should not face increased criminal penalties because life happens to them too. We are embarking on a campaign to support people who have court obligations by removing the risk of increased penalties for those who unintentionally miss a court date.
Currently, a person who misses a court date, even for a good reason, can be hit with a new criminal charge for “Failure to Appear,” which can be a felony resulting in $2,500 in fines and one to five years in jail. The Coalition is proposing legislation for the 2024 General Assembly that would eliminate the separate criminal offense of Failure to Appear and add guardrails for how courts issue bench warrants, which is a special type of arrest warrant for when someone doesn’t make it to court. The guardrails would include a 48-hour grace period before the issuance of a bench warrant, so that if an individual was unable to appear in court, they would be able to communicate it to their lawyer, the Clerk’s office, or others who can communicate it to the Court. The guardrails would also ensure that if an individual is detained—either in another jurisdiction, or because they’re in a hospital—that is not grounds to issue a bench warrant.
In addition to the affirmative legislation, we are supporting a budget amendment that would allow courts in the Commonwealth to set up court reminder systems to help individuals better prepare for upcoming court dates. Medical offices send frequent appointment reminders, so why shouldn’t the courts?
Court appearance fairness
In Virginia, people detained pretrial can sit in jail for days, and in some places a week or more, before they can challenge their detention. While they wait, jobs and housing are lost, medication and treatments are missed, children are without their parents. And when they finally appear in court, they often face a complicated system alone.
For three years, the Virginia Pretrial Justice Coalition has championed counsel at first appearance (CAFA) legislation that would ensure every person in jail has meaningful representation when going in front of a judge for the first time. We are continuing to build support for CAFA across Virginia on both local and statewide levels.
Beyond legislation, the PJC continues to work on statewide initiatives around early and meaningful representation and counsel at first appearance through a locality-driven lens. The PJC is part of a grant-funded initiative to launch pilot programs, where local jurisdictions will set up systems of providing counsel at first appearance. PJC members are engaging in court observation, stakeholder meetings, and story collection to further inform this advocacy work. We hope that these pilots will grow community support and show feasibility for future statewide advancement.
Early and meaningful appearance
In 2020, PJC helped enact groundbreaking, and unanimously passed, legislation on the collection and public release of pretrial data from across the Commonwealth. We are seeking to connect the pretrial data set to other major data sets across the Commonwealth, including housing data, health data, and academic data, in order to more broadly understand the ramifications of pretrial detention and surveillance. By connecting the pretrial data set to these other large data sets in the Virginia Longitudinal Data System, researchers, organizers, and policy makers will be able to draw a more complete picture of the real costs of pretrial detention in Virginia.