2025 Court Watch LA: Year in Review
LA Superior Court | Summer 2026
Every data point in this report represents a person: someone’s parent, child, sibling, or neighbor.
For a full year, trained community volunteers sat in Los Angeles County courtrooms and documented what actually happens to people navigating the pretrial system. The result is 140 closed cases analyzed, dozens of judges evaluated, and a clear picture of how bail, delay, and discretion combine to keep people detained before they’ve ever been convicted of anything.
Why This Report Matters
Courts are not neutral spaces. The decisions made at arraignment, bail hearings, and pretrial conferences shape whether someone keeps their job, their housing, their custody of their kids, and their freedom, long before a jury or judge ever rules on guilt or innocence.
Court Watch LA exists because those decisions happen mostly out of public view. This report puts them on the record.
What We Found
- Wealth decides who stays free. Nearly 77% of people with bail set could not afford to pay it. The median bail amount, $50,000, is out of reach for most working families.
- Race shapes bail amounts. Latine defendants faced an average bail of $157,700, nearly three times higher than Black defendants and more than fifteen times higher than White defendants in the cases observed.
- The speedy trial right is routinely waived away. More than a third of misdemeanor cases exceeded the six-month benchmark, some stretching past a year, a few past two.
- Judges rarely do the ability-to-pay analysis the law requires. Among documented cases, courts considered a defendant’s ability to pay only 26.3% of the time, despite the California Supreme Court’s clear directive in In re Humphrey.
- Judicial practice varies enormously. Our accountability report cards show that some judges resolve cases quickly with minimal bail and high diversion rates. Others rely heavily on bail, high custody, and prolonged timelines. The disparity shows that a different approach is possible right now, within the system as it exists today.
Get Involved
Court Watch LA is powered by trained community volunteers who sit in courtrooms across Los Angeles County and record what they observe. No legal background required, just a commitment to showing up and paying attention.
Special thanks to the LA Cares Grant for making this report possible.
Canary in the Coal Mine
2025 Court Watch LA Year in Review: Immigration Courts | Spring 2026
June 6th, 2025 marked the first day of ICE’s siege on Los Angeles as masked federal agents terrorized community members in the fashion district, in Home Depots, and across Downtown Los Angeles. Almost a year later, more than 10,000 members of our community have been arrested and funneled into the immigration system. Los Angeles was a testing ground for ICE’s enforcement tactics and we’ve only seen them get more violent with the death of Keith Porter Jr. here in Los Angeles and Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The heartbreaking videos we’ve seen of loved ones being taken from their families are only a glimpse of what happens to our community members when they are taken by ICE. What follows is a long and drawn out immigration process as folks try to survive conditions in detention centers and move through the immigration court proceedings for the slightest chance of being reunited with their family.
In 2025, Court Watch Los Angeles expanded its efforts into immigration courts to gear up for the Trump administration’s heightened immigration enforcement. We trained over 60 volunteers on how to access, navigate, and observe immigration court hearings. Our volunteers focused their observations on a defendant’s ability to access translation accommodations, securing legal representation, and the overall environment of immigration court with a mass influx of cases. Check out the full report for key findings from Court Watch volunteers.
Presumed Guilty
The Pretrial Incarceration Crisis in Los Angeles County | 2024
California’s $0 bail order mandates that judges must consider a defendant’s ability to pay before setting bail, aiming to prevent pretrial incarceration based on financial status…
That’s not what we’ve seen.
During the month of October 2023, UCLA Law students partnered with La Defensa to develop this report based on court watcher feedback around two courthouses in Los Angeles: Airport Courthouse and Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center (CCB). Court watchers focused on pretrial release decisions to better understand how judges are implementing pretrial release standards.