Brother of California murder victim opposes zero-dollar bail

The brother of a California woman who was killed along with her two dogs by a career criminal called on the state to reject any more proposals for a zero-dollar bail policy.

Dan Tibbitts’ sister, Mary Kate, was killed in her Sacramento home in 2021, allegedly by Troy Davis, 57, a parolee at the time with a violent history, police said.

Davis was arrested and charged with murder, assault, intent to commit rape and arson for allegedly setting Mary Kate’s home on fire.

Tibbitts said his sister was the victim of a “perfect storm” of his state’s soft-on-crime laws, citing California’s Prop 57, which allowed for the early release for nonviolent felons and Prop 47, which reduced low-level drug and property crimes to misdemeanors.

“My sister is, I’m sad to say, a statistic of all this bad legislation and policy and political agendas,” Tibbitts told Fox News.

Tibbitts said Davis was released on zero-bail “well short” of his sentence for a violent offense in 2018 under Prop 57, and that Prop 47 decriminalized his offenses after he was freed.

But when he was arrested in 2021 again for an auto theft charge, Davis was released under the state’s emergency “zero-bail” policy, which was enacted during the pandemic.

“Go figure he didn’t show up for his arraignment in June and had a warrant out for his arrest at the time he murdered my sister,” Tibbitts said.

Although lawmakers have since rescinded the emergency zero-dollar bail order, several counties kept the policy in place.

Yolo County’s district attorney’s office, which oversees Sacramento, found that the policy resulted in hundreds of criminals being sent back to the streets who went on to commit more crimes.

The study found that between 2020 and 2021, 70 percent of defendants released on zero bail reoffended and were twice as likely to commit new crimes compared to those who had posted bail.

It also found suspects released under zero bail were also three times as likely to be arrested again for violent offenses than those required to post bond.

The study was recently cited on the California Senate floor and was likely the death knell to the latest state-wide zero-bail proposal.

The Bail Project, a nonprofit organization advocating for the policy, had condemned the Yolo County study, arguing that it contained “many sampling and methodological errors.”

Tara Watford, Chief Data Officer at The Bail Project, told Fox: “The form of administrative release that the Yolo study examines – where people were released automatically, without any individualized assessment, and without any mechanisms to ensure that they are connected to valuable and critical supportive services that can keep them safe and free from harm during the pretrial period – does not resemble the type of successful bail reform measures that we have seen instituted across the country without impact on public safety.”