Immigrant Languishes in Athens Jail, Unable to Make Bond or Stand Trial

We who courtwatch in Athens-Clarke County can attest that virtually everyone trapped in our criminal legal system’s expansive web is either a person of color or poor—likely both. There can be no doubt that skin color and the size of one’s pocketbook determine just how innocent a defendant is presumed. One’s race and income level will likely affect how much due process defendants receive and whether they’ll be able to gain their pretrial liberty or obtain effective and zealous legal representation. 

Last summer Mario Noel was new to town. No one seems to know how he got to Athens. He says he walked—maybe from Atlanta or New York or Louisiana. 

Noel is from Honduras. He speaks no English. He had just turned 22 years old on Aug. 28, 2023 when Athens police arrested him along Atlanta Highway on charges of public indecency and loitering, both misdemeanors. He went to jail that night, and 12 days later left the jailhouse on an unsecured judicial release (no cash) bond. 

Then on Sept. 18, Noel was found walking around the Bulldog Inn parking lot off Commerce Road. He was arrested and charged with felony entering auto and returned to jail. His bond was set at $2,500. This time he stayed in jail. 

At a hearing in early November, the felony charge was reduced to misdemeanor loitering and trespassing. Still locked up a few weeks later, his bond was lowered to $1,000. No matter—the homeless Noel was unable to purchase his pretrial liberty.

Noel has languished in our jail since Sept. 18, 2023. That’s more than nine months, almost 300 days. During most of this time he’s been isolated from other prisoners, held in a restrictive pod in the jail and rarely allowed outside of his cell. He was booked into the jail weighing 122 pounds. He weighs in at 100 pounds today.

Had he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charges last September and received the maximum sentence allowed of 12 months confinement, Noel would be a free person today. (County prisoners generally receive two days credit for every one day served.) 

Athens Area Courtwatch Project volunteers have been in Clarke County State Court each and every time Noel has appeared in front of Judge Ryan Hope. The young immigrant always looks frightened, and out of fear resists interacting with either his public defender, Ryan Ignatius, or the court’s Spanish-speaking interpreter. Mostly he remains mute, wrists and ankles cuffed, and wrapped with a belly chain. It is evident Noel simply doesn’t understand what is going on. 

At his arraignment last November, Hope appeared poised to reduce Noel’s bond so that he could live with an uncle in Louisiana. 

“Where in Louisiana does your uncle live?” inquired Hope. 

“He’s not sure,” Ignatius answered through the interpreter.

“How would you get to Louisiana?” the judge asked.

“Caminar,” Noel muttered. “Walk.” 

Hope kept the bond at $1,000, and continued Noel’s case to yet another, and then another, and then another day. All along, our criminal punishment system seemed purposely stuck in neutral while this 22-year-old immigrant wastes away in Athens-Clarke County’s “Misdemeanorland.”

During the nine months Noel has been incarcerated, he’s been visited by the Honduran Consul General from Atlanta, which reached out to his mother in Honduras and father in New York (who doesn’t want his son to live with him); undergone a mental health evaluation by a private Spanish-speaking psychologist; entered a plea of mental incompetency; had a bench trial in absentia where Hope determined Noel to be incompetent; after which the judge ordered that Noel be “restored to competency.” 

In January, Judge Hope ordered that the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities provide him with an update on Noel’s progress and status no later than Apr. 27 at 11 a.m. That date came and went with no update from DBHDD. So did May, and now has most of June. This is no surprise. In-patient mental competency restoration treatment—usually handled at the Augusta State Medical Prison—now takes between eight months and a year, sometimes longer, to complete. When I last checked with the Clarke County Sheriff’s Office, there were 12 inmates locked in our jail—pretrial—awaiting competency restoration treatment. Half of this number of pretrial inmates, most accused of misdemeanor offenses, had been confined for longer than one year. 

Longtime prison abolitionist Ruth Gilmore’s mantra is, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” She defines the abolition movement as “politics of care, anti-violence and optimism.” Gilmore believes our criminal legal system—prisons, jails, courts, police— contribute to the “organized abandonment of vulnerable communities.” Our jails, she says, “exist to absorb folks abandoned by our community.”   

Judge Hope has refused to reduce Noel’s $1,000 bond. The solicitor’s office is not interested in dismissing the misdemeanor case altogether. Jail is not the answer for someone like Noel, Hope said several months ago, at one of Noel’s status hearings, but then in the same breath, added, “But I’m not comfortable letting him out without a place to go.”

So Mario Noel, accused of loitering and trespassing, unable to post bond and deemed incompetent to stand trial, remains in jail tonight, nine months and counting. It is cruel. It is shameful. “Simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight— ensures that they remain broken and we do, too,” Bryan Stevenson tells us in his book Just Mercy. “There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”

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