Welcome to Courtside, everyone, a discussion of legal issues and no Donald Trump today.

It's been a very exciting week. The Derek Chauvin trial, where I'm serving a special prosecutor,

has started. As a result, I won't really talk about it, except to say that it's been a super intense time.

We've been at all three levels of the Minnesota court system, the trial court,

the court of appeals, and the Supreme Court. And, you know, the trial will be continuing for

the next several weeks. And the trial has got me thinking about the criminal justice system more

generally. And something I want to focus on today, which is this notion of cash bail. I think some

of you have heard about it. Maybe as a civil rights issue, but you're not sure what it is or how it

works. And cash bail and the royal family have exactly two, have exactly one thing in common, which is

that John Oliver warned us about both of them, and we really should have done

something about both sooner. So assume you're accused of a crime. Can they put you in jail right

away, so-called pre-trial detention, or do you have to wait for your trial? Well, there's a long

history of mechanisms that go all the way back to medieval times to make sure that not everyone who's accused of a crime stays in jail until their trial.

You know, that's that concept of innocent till proven guilty.

And so there was always some sort of property or money that you can put up to say, let me go.

I'll come back for trial. And it's grounded in

constitutional concerns, like innocent until proven guilty, also grounded in the jury trial rights

of the Sixth Amendment and due process and the like. And, you know, even before all of that,

you know, before the Constitution and the colonies, those accused of crimes

relied on essentially a friends and family system where they put up the money to assure that

someone would come back for trial. And this kind of personal surety system was basically

the colonial equivalent of a go-fund me or something like that. But as the nation developed after the

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