The Brief

By most metrics, Gerald Kowalczyk was a uniquely bad candidate to leave jail before his trial. He had a criminal record of more than 60 convictions, a history of failing to adhere to his release conditions and a pretrial algorithm’s assessment that he presented the highest risk score possible.

A San Mateo Superior Court judge set his bail at $75,000, an amount Kowalczyk, homeless and unemployed, could not pay. The charges were that he used someone else’s credit card to buy a $7 cheeseburger.

He served six months for the 2021 offense, but his case revived California’s long-running debate over bail amounts and it is still playing out. Now, the California Supreme Court is examining his case to decide if it is constitutional for judges to set bail at amounts far higher than a defendant can pay.

The case could help resolve the messy climate around bail in California four years after voters by referendum overturned a law that would have eliminated the cash bail system. Court decisions and a 2008 voter-approved law have created conflicting directives for judges deciding whether they can hold someone before trial at a price tag the defendant cannot afford.

The question for the high court is whether two articles in the California Constitution can harmonize: a defendant’s right to be released on bail except for certain violent or sexual crimes, and a separate article created by the 2008 ballot measure that instructs judges that “public safety and the safety of the victim shall be the primary considerations” in setting bail amounts.

“The fundamental question you have to ask yourself is, is money a good proxy for somebody’s culpability,” said Santa Clara University law professor David Ball, who co-authored an amicus brief in support of Kowalczyk. “Are rich people safer than poor people, are poor people inherently guiltier than rich people? And I don’t believe that’s true.”

Kowalczyk was 55 when he was arrested and charged with three counts of theft. He told police he had found credit cards at gas stations around San Mateo and swiped three of them while trying to buy a cheeseburger. He then tried to have the charges refunded, which the restaurant manager refused, and attempted to return the food.

Kowalczyk was unable to pay his way out of jail, spent six months incarcerated and then pled guilty to one count of theft before he was freed. While in jail, he missed a scheduled surgery on a cyst in his jaw that left him deaf in one ear, according to his appeals lawyers.

Before his plea, Kowalczyk appealed to the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco, seeking his release. The case bounced between the appeals court and the Supreme Court until last year, when the high court accepted the case. Lawyers on both sides have submitted briefs but the case has not yet been scheduled for oral argument.

Further complicating the issue is a 2021 California Supreme Court decision that forbids judges from setting bail amounts higher than what a defendant can pay, unless the defendant is a danger to the public or unlikely to show up for court.

That decision did not immediately end cash bail for indigent defendants, a UCLA School of Law review found in late 2022. In fact, the authors said, many judges interpreted the decision to mean that they have even more authority to hold people without bail.

Disagreement over bail’s purpose

Ball, the law professor, argues that Kowalczyk’s bail didn’t do what bail is supposed to do: It didn’t make the public any safer, because Kowalczyk didn’t present a threat to the public.

“This guy was trying to buy a hamburger,” Ball said. “There’s no horror movie that’s ever been made about the guy who bought a hamburger with somebody else’s credit card.”

But San Mateo Deputy District Attorney Joshua Martin, who will argue the case before the Supreme Court, said Kowalczyk’s bail wasn’t about protecting the public, but was instead necessary to ensure he would show up to court.

“The baseline should be release (from jail) if someone doesn’t have the means to post bond and is not a violent person, that’s our position,” Martin said, “but there is a sort of a rational limit to that when you imagine someone who simply refuses to come back to court.”

Nationally, the median bail for felonies was $10,000, but 32% of people who were being held in jail between April 2023 and April 2024 reported an annual income of less than $10,000, according to a report from the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit that advocates against mass incarceration.

The most recent decision in Kowalczyk’s case was in the 1st District Court of Appeal, which found in December 2022 that the California Constitution “does not prohibit courts from fixing bail at an amount a defendant cannot likely meet” but added a caveat: “it will be the rare case where such a monetary condition is truly necessary.”

Kowalczyk’s legal team is appealing that judgment and argues that the appeals court decision muddies the water on bail release decisions, potentially throwing the entire system into chaos.

“The lower court’s opinion will cause confusion in the trial courts,” wrote Kowalczyk attorney Marsanne Weese. “This opinion has created a situation in which trial courts can now opt to forego the rigorous evidentiary requirements of (the Constitution) by simply imposing a de facto detention through unaffordable bail.”

High interest in bail case at California Supreme Court

The case has attracted outside attention — 14 organizations filed amicus briefs, 11 in support of Kowalczyk, including ones from Human Rights Watch and the bar associations in Alameda, Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties.

Three organizations filed in support of the San Mateo District Attorney’s Office, including the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation and the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.

Ball argues that the impact of incarceration on a person’s life needs to be considered in cases of non-violent, non-sexual crimes.

“Being in prison and being in jail harms people because it results in worse outcomes and because you know if you have a job you’re going to lose it,” Ball said. “I mean look at him, right. He could have healed himself and gotten housing, which might put him on the path where he doesn’t have to use a fake credit card in order to get some food to eat.

“We want that, right? Putting him in jail is not gonna address any of those problems.”

Greg Totten, CEO of the California District Attorneys Association, wrote in an amicus brief supporting the government’s case against Kowalczyk that the court system needs the coercive effect of cash bail to keep operating.

Eliminating the financial aspect of bail “makes the criminal justice system the proverbial revolving door and undermines the entire voter-approved purposes of the body of laws governing pretrial detention and bail in this state,” Totten wrote, “namely public safety and ensuring that defendants appear in court.”

It was March when a group of California lawmakers decided they’d broach a sticky topic: child marriage.

Over the next three months, Democrats would devise a plan to persuade reluctant colleagues to finally outlaw the practice and contend with special interest groups that might work against them.

In what might come as a surprise, it’s legal for anyone younger than 18 to get married in California, so long as a parent and judge approve. Perhaps even more surprising, two influential groups in Democratic politics — the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood — have historically staunchly supported the law.

Children have a right to marry, the ACLU argues, and stripping them of that right would take away a pathway to their emancipation and independent healthcare decisions. For Planned Parenthood, the freedom for children to marry is about allowing people reproductive choice and bodily autonomy.

Just two other states — New Mexico and Mississippi — have no minimum age to wed. And while minors can marry at any age in California, advocates say it’s hard to hire a divorce attorney before 18.

About 9,000 children are married each year in California, the vast majority of them girls marrying adult men, according to the nonprofit advocacy group Unchained at Last. Because the age of consent for sexual activity is 18, advocates say marriages between children under 18 and adults implicitly legalize a sexual relationship that would otherwise be considered statutory rape under state law.

The organization has worked for the past decade to push for bans in New York, Oklahoma, Washington and a dozen other states.

But their efforts have repeatedly failed in California, where Planned Parenthood and the ACLU have lobbied hard against restricting child marriage, although those groups have largely stayed silent on the issue in other Democratic-controlled states.

That can partially be explained by their outsize influence in California politics. Planned Parenthood advocates on behalf of some of the most cherished liberal causes and has donated at least $2.7 million to Democratic lawmakers since 2002, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database.

This year, Democrats faced different circumstances with the organization, prompting Democratic lawmakers in June to introduce Assembly Bill 1267 to finally bar children from marrying.

Assemblymember Gail Pellerin authored the bill through what’s called a “gut-and-amend” when lawmakers strip the language of an unrelated bill to fast-track a new one after the deadline to introduce bills the typical way had passed. Democrats missed the deadline because they wanted to make sure Planned Parenthood wouldn’t get in the way, according to advocates.

While the ACLU again opposed the legislation this year, there were no lobbyists to be found advocating for minors’ right to marry in committee hearings this summer, and Planned Parenthood stayed “neutral” on the bill, declining to take a position.

And even as some Democrats expressed hesitation about not allowing two teenagers in love to tie the knot, the ban passed the Legislature with near-unanimous support in August.

“We need to make it clear that girls, despite their perceived maturity, are children,” Pellerin said in an interview. “Children don’t have unprotected freedom.”

After nearly a decade of failed attempts to outlaw child marriage, the bill now awaits Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature or veto. He has until Sept. 30.

ACLU spokesperson Carmen King declined to respond to questions about why the group opposes the bill and did not make anyone available for an interview with CalMatters for this story.

In a June opposition letter, the organization wrote, “Prohibiting minors from marrying in every case is a departure from California’s longstanding commitment to honoring minors’ ability to make important personal decisions for themselves, particularly in the realm of reproductive autonomy.”

Planned Parenthood did not say anything official about the bill and spokesperson Shelby McMichael declined to make anyone available for an interview with CalMatters.

In an emailed statement, McMichael said the group “takes positions on a bill-by-bill basis each session. Given the ‘defund’ of Planned Parenthood health centers this past year, we made the decision to prioritize issues related to the Trump administration and congressional Republicans’ ongoing attacks on health care.”

‘Planned Parenthood’s voice matters’

Its abortion care services at more than 100 clinics across the state have made Planned Parenthood a symbol of reproductive freedom in California for decades, though the group notes that abortion services make up only a fraction of its services. Its enmeshment with Democrats politics has only accelerated during the first and second Trump administrations as party leaders worked overtime to stave off federal defunding efforts.

In February, California lawmakers approved $140 million in emergency funding for the group to offset federal cuts. And on its website, Planned Parenthood keeps a scorecard of how often legislators vote in agreement with it.

On its 2025 scorecard, all but one Democrat had a score of 100%.

Two years ago, Irvine Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat, introduced Assembly Bill 2924 to ban minors from marrying.

Assemblymember Ash Kalra told advocates that Planned Parenthood had to drop its opposition before lawmakers could consider voting on the legislation.

The San Jose Democrat, who chairs the Assembly Judiciary Committee, said banning minors from marriage would threaten their right to an abortion, which he said California hadn’t yet codified into law. Voters enshrined the right to an abortion in 2022, two years before the 2024 bill was introduced.

Some lawmakers were also skeptical about whether the data on child marriages was accurate, Kalra said.

He never gave the bill a hearing.

“I think that absolutely was one of the factors, certainly," Kalra said of Planned Parenthood’s opposition and his decision to kill the legislation. “Planned Parenthood’s voice matters in that, and in other issues that come before us in the Capitol.”

This reasoning harkened to earlier failed attempts, including in 2017 when Democrats killed another bill to change the state’s child marriage laws over similar reasons.

Then-Sen. Jerry Hill said he sought an outright ban on the practice after he learned of a 13-year-old girl in his district who was engaged to a 38-year-old man from another country.

“I thought, ‘Who could oppose that? Who could say that it was wrong?’” Hill said of the bill he introduced to ban child marriage. But he was left perplexed that what he thought was a commonsense policy proposal evolved into a larger debate about cultural differences, childhood freedom and bodily autonomy.

In some cultures it’s acceptable for girls to be wedded to older men or be placed into arranged marriages, according to a United Nations report.

Lawmakers in recent years have proposed measures to clamp down on forced marriages, which are already a crime. Kalra is among them, this year authoring Assembly Bill 2534 which would allow victims to file a restraining order against anyone coercing them into a marriage. Kalra and women’s rights groups say it would be the first policy of its kind in the country if enacted into law. Planned Parenthood supports it.

On the 2017 child marriage legislation, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood were staunch opponents, and then-Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, a Democratic labor leader who chaired the Assembly Appropriations Committee at the time, told Hill she wouldn’t let a ban move forward unless it was amended to lower the minimum age to 16- or 17-year-olds instead of 18.

That bill was eventually weakened to become current law: Any young person can get married if a parent and the courts sign off.

Hill said his attempt and others were killed by special interest groups.

“They’re so powerful, these interest groups in Sacramento. They have a lot of say and sway over what comes out of the Legislature,” said Hill, who represented Silicon Valley for 12 years. “Politics trumps policy about 80% of the time.”

Gonzalez recalled it differently. While it’s true she refused to let an outright ban pass, she said, she doesn’t remember Planned Parenthood opposing the bill or considering it in her decision-making.

She said when older teenage girls in her district got pregnant, it was common for some Latino families to encourage them to marry the father if he was the same or of similar age.

“I had girls where they were telling me this is the best choice,” Gonzalez told CalMatters. She said the difference in age between partners seemed to matter more than the marriage itself. “At the time, it seemed very classist” to impose an outright ban, she said.

‘At least we’re here now’

President Donald Trump’s push to defund Planned Parenthood clinics put more political pressure on the group than usual in recent years and made the organization more reliant on state funding.

Things were made worse last November, when a New York Times opinion piece criticized the ACLU and Planned Parenthood for their roles in blocking legislation against child marriage while Republican-controlled states such as Arkansas and Louisiana imposed tighter restrictions.

For survivor and advocate Sara Tasneem, California’s failure to act for several decades allowed her to be forcibly married at 15 to a 28-year-old man by her father, who she said was part of a Northern California “Sufi cult” that orchestrated it. When her father learned Tasneem was dating a high school classmate, he found someone for her to marry, she said.

“I was handed over to this complete stranger who I just met,” she said. She dropped out of school and was repeatedly raped, feeling trapped and unable to leave before she turned 18 because she couldn’t hire an attorney as a minor. Tasneem said she had two kids with her rapist, who she left in 2003, at age 23, taking her children.

Looking back and realizing she “didn’t grow up with a lot of power,” Tasneem turned to advocacy more than a decade later.

Most advocates are hopeful Newsom will sign the bill.

“Should it have happened a decade earlier? Yes, it should have,” said Unchained at Last executive director Fraidy Reiss, who at 19 was forced to marry an older man in her New York Orthodox Jewish community. “But at least we’re here now.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A nonprofit watchdog group is asking the State Bar of California to investigate two assistant U.S. attorneys who handle immigration cases. That push comes as a number of state bar agencies, including California’s, argue the federal government is attempting to shield its lawyers from accountability.

The Legal Accountability Center on Thursday sent two letters to the State Bar of California alleging Christopher Jones, in California’s Central District, and Jonathan Yu, in the Eastern District, violated rules that govern the conduct of lawyers practicing law in the state.

According to those letters, Jones violated professional conduct rules in the prosecution of a man accused of assaulting a federal officer. The Department of Justice charged the man, who had been shot by an ICE officer, in a case that a judge later dismissed with prejudice while finding the federal government violated the man’s rights to due process.

Another letter accuses Yu of missing several deadlines while handling an immigration case against a man who’d been detained after failing to appear on a traffic ticket. A federal judge levied sanctions against Yu for his repeated violations of court orders.

The State Bar has the power to investigate attorneys licensed in California and impose disciplinary actions if violations are found. More serious penalties such as disbarment and suspending a license need approval by the California Supreme Court.

The California State Bar said in an emailed statement that it cannot disclose pending complaints or investigations into attorneys, and that it doesn’t track disciplinary actions against federal prosecutors, specifically.

The U.S. Attorney’s Offices for the Eastern and Central districts have not yet responded to requests for comment.

Michael Teter, the executive director of the Legal Accountability Center, said these allegations “represent a greater concern, which is the administration’s disregard for the rule of law.”

“When these lawyers are representing the administration and the government, they are doing so in a way that disregards the rules of procedure, the rules of evidence,” Teter said. “And in this instance, they weren't concerned with court orders and what courts were directing them to do with regards to the people whose lives they were trying to upend.”

Federal officials want protection from state discipline

In March, the federal government issued a proposed rule preventing current or former DOJ lawyers from participating in investigations initiated by state bar authorities until after the department reviews the allegations. The rule says the department “shall request” the state bar disciplinary authority to suspend any investigations until the department has finished its review.

Justice Department officials say in the March 2026 filing that they need the new rule because “over the past several years, political activists have weaponized the bar complaint and investigation process.” While the proposed rule acknowledges that attorneys practicing in states must meet individual states’ ethics standards, it says enforcement of those standards for federal attorneys should fall on the DOJ. Otherwise, the filing states: “This unprecedented weaponization of the State bar complaint process risks chilling the zealous advocacy by Department attorneys on behalf of the United States, its agencies, and its officers.”

The State Bar of California opposes this proposed rule, arguing in public comments that it is “unprecedented, unnecessary, inappropriate, and lacks both congressional and constitutional authority.” Federal lawyers are subject to the rules of conduct wherever they are licensed to practice, the bar wrote, and the order would “improperly intrude on the State Bar’s authority to regulate, investigate, and pursue discipline for all attorneys licensed or otherwise authorized to practice in California.” The American Bar Association also opposes the rule, as do several legal organizations including the Utah State Bar, the National Organization of Bar Counsel and a coalition of 22 state attorneys general.

What the letters say about the contested prosecutions

Jones, who was admitted to the California bar in 2022, handled the prosecution of Carlitos Ricardo Parias.

Parias, who streamed ICE arrests on social media as Richard LA, was shot by an ICE officer in South L.A. during a confrontation on Oct. 21, 2025. He’s also the man who reported finding worms in the drinking water at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center and is seen in a widely circulated video.

While Parias was recovering from the gunshot wound to the left arm, the U.S. Attorney’s office filed a criminal complaint accusing him of assaulting a federal officer with his car, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Olguin dismissed the charges against Parias last December, citing two key reasons in his decision:

• The government denied Parias access to legal counsel while he was detained at Adelanto.
• The government failed to provide the defense with key evidence, including exculpatory body camera footage, that would help Parias’ defense until court-ordered deadlines had passed.
  

The U.S. Attorney’s office challenged that decision in an appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In its request for a State Bar investigation into Jones’ handling of the case, the Legal Accountability Center called the prosecution “a sham.”

The request, addressed to the California bar’s Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona, argues Jones violated California’s rules for lawyer conduct in three ways: Jones prosecuted an assault charge against Parias that was not supported by probable cause, he failed to correct an allegedly false statement by a Homeland Security investigations special agent that was included in the initial complaint against Parias, and he failed to disclose evidence to the defense.

Details on the attorneys named in the complaints

Yu, who was admitted to the California bar in 2013, handled the immigration case against Eblis Alexander Yanez Tovar.

Tovar was pulled over on Feb. 26, 2026 for failing to appear in court for a traffic ticket and sent to a detention center in Kern County, California.

On April 2, the court ordered his release, finding that his due process rights were violated because he was detained without a notice or hearing. The court ordered Yu to file paperwork showing Tovar was released and that his documents, a passport and license, were returned to him. The April 6 deadline to comply with that order came and went without Yu filing those documents.

Without his passport or license, Tovar’s attorney argued he was “essentially stranded” in Kern County while asking the court to enforce its deadlines.

Yu missed another deadline on April 10, according to the request, so the court sanctioned him $250.

Eric Grant, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California, asked the court to reconsider the penalty and to impose the sanction on his office generally, or Grant specifically.

Yu was not at fault for missing the deadlines, Grant said, because of the extraordinary workload in the U.S. Attorney’s office in the face of a wave of habeas corpus petitions from people challenging the legality of their detention.

“The strain of the system is not keeping up with the overwhelming burden,” Grant wrote, while arguing that the entire U.S. Attorney’s office bears responsibility for missing the deadline.

Troy Nunley, the Chief United States District Judge for the Eastern District of California, granted that request, although the judge noted that Yu missed multiple deadlines in the case.

“Even in the face of significant workload pressures, counsel has an obligation to ensure that court directives are timely and fully observed,” Nunley’s response said. “Compliance with court orders is not optional and must be prioritized.”

The Legal Accountability Center wrote in its letter seeking the State Bar investigation that Yu’s caseload “does not absolve him of his responsibilities to the court” and to Tovar. They also cite previous State Bar cases that have determined a heavy caseload does not excuse or mitigate an attorney's obligations to follow the court orders.

Teter told LAist that the volume of habeas corpus petitions reflects the government’s policy of holding more people in detention while their immigration cases unfolds. More often than not, judges are siding with the petitioners who claim their detention is illegal.

“It's not a defense to say, ‘I have so many cases that I just couldn't keep up with the court orders that required me to release somebody or release their passport and documents,’” Teter said “That's not an excuse.’”

“If the Department of Justice, therefore, can't handle the number of habeas petitions being filed without having lawyers disregard court orders and their ethical obligations,” he said, “then it's incumbent upon the administration to shift their policy and tactics so that they're not holding these people illegally.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The scene on the 6th Street Bridge on Sunday was hard to miss: Crowds of young people with minibikes were corralled along the bridge, some with their hands zip-tied behind their backs.

More than 70 people were cited, and dozens of minibikes were impounded during a Los Angeles Police Department enforcement operation targeting “illegal motorized mini-bike activity.” Among those cited were youth as young as 13 years old, as well as parents who were riding with their children, according to news reports.

The LAPD said the motorized minibikes were unauthorized and were blocking the bridge, performing donuts and wheelies and riding on the wrong side of the roadway.

To the LAPD, the show of force was necessary, saying pocket bikes have low visibility, high instability and no required safety equipment. “One wrong move can lead to catastrophic injury,” the LAPD said.

But others, including parents, were taken aback by the enforcement operation.

“As long as we ride together with them as a parent, it shouldn’t be a crime, and it shouldn’t be illegal for my daughter to be riding right next to her dad, riding and enjoying her minibike,” one parent told ABC 7 Eyewitness News.

Here’s what the law says about riding a minibike on L.A. streets:

What are minibikes and pocket bikes?

The California Highway Patrol defines pocket bikes as two-wheeled motorized devices with a seat or a saddle. They are not designed or manufactured for highway use, according to the CHP website.

Minibikes, while similar to pocket bikes, typically feature open-tube steel frames, upright seating, larger wheels and more engine power, delivering speeds of nearly 30 miles per hour. With modifications, minibikes can approach speeds of 70 miles per hour according to an LA City Council motion.

The terms “pocket bikes” and “minibike” are sometimes used interchangeably by law enforcement. The California Department of Motor Vehicles classifies these types of vehicles as “miniature vehicles” that cannot be registered or operated on public streets.

Unlike e-bikes, which are powered by their own electric motors and have their own classification, pocket bikes and minibikes may be powered by electric motors or small gas engines.

Are minibikes new?

While minibikes have grown in popularity in recent years, hobbyists have been scrapping together the motorized devices for decades.

Recently, local minibike groups have attracted dozens of riders from around the Los Angeles area to participate in group “rideouts,” often described by law enforcement as “takeovers.” The subculture has also inspired young tinkerers and mechanics to build up their rides or even offer mobile mechanic services.

Is it legal to ride minibikes on California public streets and highways?

No. That’s because they are not equipped with the required safety features, such as headlights, taillights, and mirrors, according to Geovana Herrera, a Department of Motor Vehicles spokesperson.

Can you legally ride a minibike anywhere in California?

Minibikes may only be operated on private property, racetracks or designated off-road areas, Herrera said. Their use is prohibited on public roads, sidewalks, bike paths, hiking trails, and other public lands, according to California Vehicle Code Section 21720.

What happens if you’re stopped or cited riding a minibike in L.A.?

Individuals can get cited for violating California Vehicle Code Section 21720.

If you get cited for violating the law, your pocket or minibike may be impounded for up to 48 hours. The rider will be responsible for all costs associated with the removal and storage of the bike.

Enforcing the law is up to local and state law enforcement agencies. Some Eastside minibike riders told Boyle Heights Beat they’ve had differing experiences depending on which agency pulls them over.

What were the violations on the 6th Street Bridge?

The LAPD said it detained 78 people at the Sixth Street Bridge, citing 49 juveniles and 17 adults for operating an illegal minibike on streets.

Police said it also issued five administrative enforcement citations for being present at a street takeover and arrested two people on suspicion of aiding and abetting.

A total of 76 vehicles were impounded, including 74 minibikes and two pickup trucks, the LAPD said.

The LAPD also said it conducted an investigative report for misdemeanor child endangerment involving a parent who admitted allowing his 13-year-old daughter to participate in the Sunday ride that police referred to as a “takeover.”