Gerald Kowalczyk tried to buy a hamburger with credit cards he found on the floor. Then, while presumed innocent, he spent months in a California jail — not because a judge determined he was dangerous, not because he threatened anyone, but because the court set bail at $75,000 for a man who couldn’t afford it, then simply denied bail altogether, in defiance of the law. Last week, the California Supreme Court unanimously said no more. The court held that pretrial liberty is the norm; incarceration before conviction for any crime is the rare, carefully limited exception. If courts choose to condition freedom on a monetary payment it “must” be “an amount that is reasonable.”

For years, California courts ran an unconstitutional shadow detention system. The mechanics were straightforward: Set bail at an amount the defendant cannot pay and the result is the same as ordering detention outright. As the court explained in its Kowalczyk ruling, pretrial detention requires strong evidence of a serious charge and “clear and convincing evidence establishing a substantial likelihood that the defendant’s release would result in great bodily harm to others.” Instead, as Justice Joshua P. Groban explains in concurrence, courts have used money bail to detain poor people accused of nonviolent offenses with “devastating repercussions for their employment, education, housing, access to public benefits, immigration status, and family stability.”

This wasn’t a bug. It was the system.

Last week’s ruling closes that loophole — unambiguously and unanimously. Courts can no longer use unaffordable bail as a backdoor detention order. Where detention isn’t authorized, bail must be set at an attainable amount, based on the defendant’s actual circumstances. The ruling builds directly on the Humphrey precedent from 2021, a California Supreme Court decision that first held wealth-based detention unconstitutional and a case I helped bring.

I know how hard these victories are to win. I also know how easily they can be ignored.

Even after Humphrey was decided, across Santa Clara, San Mateo and Alameda counties, judges asked about a defendant’s financial circumstances exactly once out of nearly 250 observed cases. In more than 95% of hearings, judges cited no legal standard at all when ordering detention. More than 90% of people jailed pretrial were charged with offenses that didn’t even qualify for detention under the California Constitution: shoplifting, driving without a license, vandalism. These findings came from Silicon Valley De-Bug, a community organization whose members spent years watching what happens in arraignment courtrooms.

The system didn’t follow the rules set out in Humphrey. We must ensure the system makes good on the unanimous ruling in Kowalczyk.

Start with public defense. California is one of just two states that contributes no funding to trial-level public defense, leaving the 58 counties with no state standards or oversight. The result is a patchwork of wildly unequal and inadequate representation. Last week’s ruling requires courts to make individualized findings about flight risk, public safety, alternative release conditions and ability to pay — which means defense attorneys must be present at or before arraignment, prepared to make ability-to-pay arguments, demand findings and challenge unaffordable bail on the record. In counties where public defenders carry caseloads of 100 or more, that is not happening. It cannot happen without resources.

Then there is the question of alternatives. The ruling requires judges to consider conditions of release — drug treatment, check-ins, social services referrals, in serious cases ankle monitoring — before resorting to money bail or detention. But these options exist only where counties have invested in pretrial services outside of law enforcement, programs such as San Francisco’s Pretrial Diversion Project. Most haven’t. A constitutional right to alternatives is hollow without alternatives for judges to choose from.

Finally, the Judicial Council, which makes policy for California courts, should establish monitoring standards, reporting requirements and training protocols that ensure courts no longer impose unnecessary or unconstitutional pretrial incarceration.

Kenneth Humphrey spent 250 days in jail for $5 and a bottle of cologne. Gerald Kowalczyk spent months inside for a hamburger. Behind each of them are tens of thousands of Californians who spent similar time behind bars unjustly, who lost jobs and homes and custody of their children, because the system treated their poverty as grounds for imprisonment.

The Supreme Court has now said clearly what our Constitution has since 1849: Pretrial liberty is the norm. Pretrial detention is the carefully limited exception. There is a good reason for the presumption of innocence: 1 in 3 California arrests does not lead to any conviction, and upending people’s lives by jailing them pretrial is so destabilizing it actually increases future crime.

Let’s ensure this presumption of innocence means something in practice if you, or your loved one, need it.

Chesa Boudin is the former district attorney of San Francisco and the executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at UC Berkeley School of Law.

BROOMFIELD, Colo.—Colorado’s top wildfire officials said they expect a significantly increased risk of wildfire this summer—and while they’ll partner with neighboring states as much as they can, resources for fighting the blazes will be tested. 

A dismal snowpack this winter is likely to leave a parched landscape and tinderbox conditions from Colorado’s thickly forested ski mountains to its grassy eastern plains. Officials here are anticipating an exceptionally dire next few months in their state and beyond. 

“The increased fire risk extends to the multi-state region,” Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, said during the state’s annual wildfire outlook briefing in Broomfield on April 30, where officials laid out Colorado’s 2026 Wildfire Preparedness Plan. 

The upcoming summer will be challenging across the West, he said, with an “elevated fire risk” threatening Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, alongside Colorado. 

Strained Resources Across the West

Surrounded by the state’s top fire managers on Thursday, Polis said Colorado has state-of-the-art assets to fight and prevent fires from the air and ground. 

Such resources have increased in the two terms since he took office, said the outgoing, term-limited governor in his final fire briefing. Three of the largest fires in the state’s history raged during his eight years in office, he said, including the late-December grass-fueled Marshall Fire in 2021 that burned more than 1,000 homes in a Boulder suburb. 

“We have two state-owned multimission aircraft,” Polis said. “We have single-engine tankers, we have leased large air tankers, we own type 1 and type 2 helicopters for rapid response, multiple engines, multiple hand crews and more intelligence—both satellite-based and aerial-based—than ever before. While the risks have increased, our preparedness has grown exponentially.” 

As for helping other Western states with its unique backbone of resources, Polis said he would consider it on a case-by-case basis, but the priority will be within Colorado’s own borders. 

“The advantage of being able to control the resources is that we want to be able to have rapid response here,” he said. “And we don’t want to sacrifice that.”

The state’s increased wildfire risk stems from the impacts of climate change, drought and a growing population, which has led people to move further into the Wildland Urban Interface, or WUI, where homes and communities abut flammable wild landscapes, Polis said. 

Matt McCombs, who leads Colorado’s State Forest Service, said more than half of Colorado residents live in the WUI. “Ultimately, Coloradans know—we all understand—we have to learn to live with wildland fire,” he said. 

So far this year, 24,222 fires have burned nearly two million acres across the country, significantly surpassing the 10-year average for acreage burned by this time of year. In an average year, Colorado sees between 6,000 and 7,000 wildfires. Its largest fires are human-caused and the origins of many of them are unknown.

In Colorado, during the first 117 days of 2026, the state dropped more than 200,000 gallons of water and fire retardant from the air on over 50 days of flight missions, said Stan Hilkey, the director of the state’s Department of Public Safety. 

“We are facing a very challenging fire year where our resources will be tested across not only Colorado but across the West,” said Michael Morgan, director of the state’s Division of Fire Prevention & Control. 

Federal Friction

At the federal level, the Departments of Interior and Agriculture have announced a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service. 

Inside Climate News has previously reported that layoffs, confusion and budget cuts have sparked doubts about the agency. 

Paul Hohn, the geographic area fire chief for the Rocky Mountain region of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, said on Thursday that the agency has the same amount of staffing that it had last year in what he called the “legacy” bureaus.

“I know that some federal agencies went through some deferred resignation programs and there were some positions that were not allowed to be rehired over the last couple years,” he said. “That has not applied to firefighters and fire support personnel.”

As Colorado prepares and coordinates its response for a potentially devastating summer, state officials have dealt with friction with the federal government under the new administration of Republican President Donald Trump. 

Earlier this month, Polis criticized the feds for denying his appeals to declare two wildfires as major disasters. He said such actions make the recovery process harder, slower and more difficult. 

“We hope that that federal partnership comes back with disasters that we’ve counted on for years,” he said. “If that’s going away, as it seems to be with the denial—not just of Colorado’s but a number of disaster declarations—that would fundamentally change the nature of the federal relationship with the states. And it would hurt fire preparedness and recovery across all fifty states.”

Last week, Colorado’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, introduced legislation, the “Disaster Declaration Transparency Act of 2026,” that would allow Congress to override the president’s denial of disaster declarations.

The FEMA press office declined to comment on the bill. 

“Rapid, Aggressive Initial Attack”

Days before Colorado’s annual fire briefing, two of the state’s former governors authored a provocative guest column in The Denver Post.

In it, Democrat Bill Ritter and Republican Bill Owens castigated unnamed “loud voices” opposed to forest management, such as strategic thinning, fuel reduction, clearing and prescribed burns when appropriate. 

“Colorado needs a more mature conversation, especially as we deal with prolonged drought, warming temperatures, pine and Ponderosa beetles, and other threats to forest health,” they wrote. “Stewardship is not abuse. Forest management is not the enemy of healthy ecosystems. If anything, refusing to use proven tools in fire-prone landscapes is its own kind of recklessness.” 

Coloradans, the former governors said, “deserve better than another season of hand-wringing followed by disaster. They deserve leaders willing to act before the emergency, not just speak solemnly after it.” 

Polis said in an interview on Thursday that he had not yet read the column, but stressed that his state is “light years” ahead of where it was a decade ago. “I’m very confident in saying we are better prepared with more resources than Colorado has ever had before for fires,” he said.

In recent decades, the U.S. Forest Service has backed away from the aggressive suppression tactics of its 1935 “10 a.m. policy,” which aimed to prevent catastrophes by putting out fires as quickly as possible. 

That policy continued until the early 1970s, when scientific research increasingly demonstrated the positive effects of fire in forest ecology and suggested that suppression makes wildfires that survive initial attack more severe. Allowing wildfires to burn safely has been a critical tool to address the growing crisis. 

At Thursday’s briefing, Morgan, Colorado’s fire czar, said most of the state’s strategies this year will focus on “rapid, aggressive initial attack” to keep fires from growing. 

“Every ignition we can stop, that’s one less stressed-out, overworked firefighter,” Morgan said.

Polis has declared May as Wildfire Awareness Month and urged Coloradans to do their part. 

With a demanding fire season on the horizon, officials emphasized the need to reduce pressure on firefighters where possible. Hilkey, the public safety director, asked citizens to step up by making fire awareness a part of their everyday life. 

“We want to make sure everybody starts thinking like a firefighter,” he said. 

In the meantime, McCombs, of Colorado’s State Forest Service, stressed the importance of mitigation work that reduces burnable fuel to stop fires from turning into the kinds of devastating out-of-control blazes that have turned large areas into hellscapes and burned thousands of homes.

That and other investments, such as home-hardening, might not make headlines, he said, but they pay off in prevention.

On Thursday, Polis acknowledged that in Colorado, the process of prescribed burning for mitigation can require extensive documentation, preparation and assessment of various environmental conditions. And he signaled an appetite for potentially lessening some of the bureaucracy involved, saying it “sounds like an awful lot of paperwork.”

While Colorado’s top fire officials predicted a doozie of a year, they said there is only so much the state can do in response. The real work begins at the individual level. 

“Doing your part to protect your home, protect your community, prevent fires from starting in the form of fuels treatments, resiliency of your own home, and any place you can,” Morgan said. “That’s what’s going to make the difference in the short term and the long haul for the future of Colorado and across our West.” 

Nolan Diffley, Aeva Dye, Anna Hay, Shaden Higgs, Corey Hutchins, Rowan Keller, Sol Lorio, Rachel Phillips, Josefina Rodriguez-Poggio and Amelia Vinton contributed to this report as students and staff in the Colorado College Career Catalyst Block “Burning Questions: Wildfire Journalism & Ecology at Colorado Firecamp.”

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Emergency crews responded to a medical incident offshore of Kualoa Regional Park Tuesday.

The Honolulu Ocean Safety Department said rescuers were called around 1:01 p.m. for an unresponsive adult man aboard a vessel about 10 miles offshore in Kaneohe waters.

Crews met the vessel near Mokolii, also known as Chinaman’s Hat, where a lifeguard boarded and began CPR and oxygen treatment.

The man was transported to Kualoa Regional Park, where Honolulu Emergency Medical Services took over care and continued advanced treatment.

No additional information about the man’s condition was immediately available.