This injustice primarily impacts the poor. The key ways to being released from pretrial detention are hiring an attorney, paying bail, or bribing officials. Naturally, the poor have the least access to these options. There are also racist impacts from pretrial detention. As Schoenteich notes, “Ethnic minorities are also disproportionately represented in pretrial detainee populations around the world — Dalits in India, African Americans in the United States, Aboriginal people in Australia.” The report also notes that individuals with mental illnesses and cognitive disabilities are more likely to be detained awaiting trial.

The Open Society report examines the problem globally. But when I think about pretrial detention, two specific cases come to mind: Chelsea Manning and Matthew Stewart.

Chelsea Manning is the heroic whistleblower who released classified evidence of war crimes and other US government misconduct to the journalistic organization WikiLeaks. Manning’s disclosures shed light on what McClatchy Newspapers called “evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence.” The outrage caused by exposure of this brutal war crime helped end the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Manning’s disclosures revealed that Hillary Clinton ordered diplomats to spy on and commit identity theft against UN officials. Her disclosures also uncovered evidence related to child sexual abuse by US military contractors in Afghanistan. 

Were any of the criminals Manning exposed held accountable? Of course not. Instead, Chelsea Manning was held in pretrial detention for years before being convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison, simply for releasing information. She was held in solitary confinement, a cruel form of psychological torture, throughout her detention. UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez investigated the conditions under which Manning was held and concluded “that the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement… constitutes at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture. If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture.” Moreover, there is some evidence that the torture was a bigoted response to Manning’s gender identity and expression. As Joanne McNeil reported in Jacobin,

Manning was tortured in part because he [sic] signed a few letters from the brig as “Breanna Elizabeth.” Marine Corps Master Sgt. Craig Blenis defended his cruelty in a December pre-trial hearing. Coombs asked why the marine thought Manning’s gender dysphoria should factor into his “prevention of Injury” status. Blenis answered because “that’s not normal, sir.”

In a sense, the pretrial torture of Chelsea Manning was not just a crime, it was a hate crime.

Matthew Stewart did not survive pretrial detention long enough to be convicted or acquitted. Late at night on January 4th, 2012, armed men broke into his home with guns blazing. Matthew, a startled gun owner and Iraq war veteran, fired back on the home invaders, killing one and wounding several others. But because they were police officers carrying out a drug raid, Matthew was not treated as a homeowner engaged in legitimate self-defense. Instead, he was locked up in the Weber County Jail and charged with murder. He was subjected to social isolation and other abuses for a year and a half before he eventually committed suicide. He was found in his cell hanging from a bedsheet. After his death, the degradation still didn’t end. Police officers trespassed in his home again even after he was dead and the state’s case against him was closed. Officer Jason Vanderwarf harassed Matthew’s grieving family members on Facebook, writing “now you all can feel our pain.” Vanderwarf was one of the initial aggressors, having lied on the initial search warrant and participated in the home invasion.

Pretrial detention is an appalling human rights abuse. Obviously, it undermines the right to due process and the presumption of innocence. It can be used to torture and brutalize detainees, especially political prisoners who have offended state functionaries, as Matthew Stewart and Chelsea Manning did. And pretrial detention is most often used to cage and abuse the most vulnerable in our society: the poor, ethnic minorities, and people with psychiatric and cognitive disabilities. Let’s end this injustice.

I possess neither Emile Zola’s writing talent nor his penchant for presidential flattery, but I think I may perhaps lay rightful claim to some semblance of his well-developed sense of moral outrage.

I address you as “president” only as a concession to popular convention. In truth, your claimed authority is a fraud, and your actual status is that of defendant in the matter of the persecution of Bradley Manning.

From the beginnings of this drama, it was clear to all who cared to notice that Manning is no criminal but rather the worthy nemesis of a crime syndicate formally headed by yourself. He was wrongfully arrested, illegally detained without charge for a period far in excess of the legally prescribed maximums, and finally and illegally put on trial not for his alleged criminal acts but for exposing your crimes and the crimes of your gang, “the government of the United States.”

Neither the verdict nor the sentence are any surprise; the “not guilty” verdict on the charge of “aiding the enemy” is clearly intended as a distraction from the irrefutable fact that the entire trial was a farce and a sham, conducted in open violation of the law, and that not a single charge is valid. The purposes of show trials and the punishments which follow are to procure convictions and make the public quail in terror before the awesome power of the state, not to render justice, and in this respect the Manning court martial puts Stalin to shame. Colonel Denise Lind’s blatantly and irrefutably illegal actions and rulings as “judge” would make Vyshinsky blush.

The Manning show trial is the latest evidence that Thomas Paine erred in claiming that “society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.”

While the state is indeed evil, it is far from necessary. It is wicked through and through. It is born of coercion, weaned on theft, raised on corruption and thrives on murder.

In the round it can do not good at all, and any specific good it may seem to do must rest on a foundation of evil.

To give me a dollar it picks your pocket for two. To feed your child lunch it deprives a family of dinner. If it suffers you and your neighbors to live it murders a village elsewhere, and if it removes so much as an ounce of weight from your chest that you might breathe easier, it places a pound on your shoulders and orders you to carry.

To willingly tolerate the continued existence of such an evil, or to purposely delay, impede or oppose that evil’s abolition, is to become an accessory to that evil.

As an anarchist, it goes without saying that I support the abolition of the state. The Manning show trial is one more argument for appending to that statement the clauses “as soon as humanly possible” and “by any means necessary.”