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A man charged with 49 counts of child pornography, who also kept a pipe bomb, roughly 50 firearms and a stash of drugs in his home, is sitting in that home today. Michael Wamser walked out of the Baxter County jail this month on a $50,000 bond. Two months earlier, his bond was $400,000.
He is not the first dangerous defendant in this region to get a soft landing, and he will not be the last.
We are not arguing that Arkansas should jail people and throw away the key before trial. The right to bail is worth keeping. But when judges hand low bonds to dangerous people and more people get hurt, someone should have to answer for it. Right now, no one does.
Steven Michael Manson Jr. is the clearest example. A registered sex offender with a prior Illinois conviction for sexually abusing a child, Manson was charged in Marion County five times in five months. Four of those times he made bond and walked out, including on a charge of raping a child under 14.
After one of those releases, prosecutors say a second victim was raped at his home while he wore a court-ordered ankle monitor. Only then did the system hold him. He sits in jail now on a $500,000 bond.
Wamser’s release is newer but runs on the same logic. The prosecutor did not fight the reduction, and the court leaned on house arrest and an ankle monitor to protect the public. That is the same kind of condition that failed to stop the second assault in the Manson case.
Part of this is built into Arkansas law, and it is worth understanding before anyone calls for a judge’s head. The Arkansas Constitution says nearly every defendant has a right to bail before trial. Only capital crimes, such as capital murder, can be held with no bond at all.
So no judge in either case could have simply refused bail. What a judge can do is set the amount, attach conditions and weigh the danger a defendant poses to the public.
This is where Arkansas stands apart. Federal courts have been able to jail dangerous defendants without bail since 1984, a power the U.S. Supreme Court upheld. Ohio and Wisconsin voters recently gave their judges more room to weigh public safety, and lawmakers in more than a dozen states have pushed to do the same.
Arkansas has not. Along with neighbors such as Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee, it still limits no-bond detention to capital cases. Whether that should change is a fair debate for the Legislature, and one this state has not really had.
The harder problem is not the law. It is that when a judge sets a bond so low that a dangerous person walks, and that person hurts someone, nothing happens to the judge.
The state agency that disciplines judges, the Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission, cannot touch it. By its own rules, it does not review whether a judge should have been tougher or more lenient. A bond decision, standing alone, is outside what it will examine.
That leaves the ballot box. Arkansas elects its circuit judges to six-year terms in nonpartisan races that draw little attention. A single bond decision, made months or years before an election most voters tune out, is not real accountability.
There are real reasons judges set low bonds, and not all of them are careless. County jails are crowded and space is tight. The presumption of innocence is not a slogan, and people who have not been convicted should not sit in jail simply because they are poor.
None of that explains a $50,000 bond for a man with a pipe bomb and a hard drive full of child abuse. None of it explains letting a man bond out four times while his charges grew worse. Somewhere between locking everyone up and letting dangerous people walk on the cheap there is a line, and these cases land on the wrong side of it.
Arkansas should take an honest look at how bail works here. The Legislature should debate whether judges need the power to hold the most dangerous defendants before trial. And judges who keep turning dangerous people loose should have to explain themselves, in public, while the decision still matters.
When the worst happens, the victims do not get a do-over. The least we can ask is that someone answer for the decision that put them in harm’s way.
