Third Circuit Revives Challenge to Lancaster County Bail Hearings

The seven plaintiffs appeared at separate preliminary arraignments in Lancaster County in 2022 and 2023. Each appeared by video from a police station or Lancaster County Prison. None had counsel. The proceedings typically last only a few minutes and are not officially recorded or transcribed.

The plaintiffs allege that magisterial district judges imposed cash bail without inquiring into the Rule 523 factors, including financial condition. All seven remained detained pending trial because they could not pay.

Those Fourteenth Amendment claims will now return to the district court. In its precedential July 31, 2026 decision in Hartmann v. Chudzik, the Third Circuit vacated the district court’s abstention from the plaintiffs’ due process and equal protection claims. It did not decide whether Lancaster County’s practices were unconstitutional, and it affirmed dismissal of the Sixth Amendment claim.

The panel divided over what federal review of the remaining claims would require. Judge Patty Shwartz, joined by Judge Marjorie Rendell, concluded that a federal court could resolve a discrete constitutional question without supervising individual bail hearings. Judge Peter Phipps believed that enforcing the requested relief would force federal judges to reconstruct those hearings and review the conduct of the state judges who presided over them.

Counsel at the Preliminary Arraignment

The panel agreed that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel attached at the preliminary arraignment, when the charges were read and bail was set. But it held that the arraignment itself was not a critical stage at which counsel had to be present.

No prosecutor appeared, and the magisterial district judge could not question the accused about the charges. The judge read the charges, advised the accused of the right to counsel, and made an initial bail decision. The court found no trial-like confrontation requiring a lawyer’s presence.

Pennsylvania permits a defendant to seek review of the initial bail decision at any time, including at the preliminary hearing. That hearing must be scheduled within fourteen days, although postponements can extend the time a defendant remains in custody before review occurs. The panel held that pretrial detention, standing alone, did not make the preliminary arraignment a critical stage.

The court distinguished Betschart v. Oregon, which involved a bail hearing at which witnesses could testify, evidence and mitigating facts could be presented, alternatives to detention could be proposed, and the accused could address the court. The proceedings described in the complaint had none of those features.

The Third Circuit therefore affirmed the dismissal of the Sixth Amendment claim.

The Fourteenth Amendment Claims

The district court dismissed the Sixth Amendment claim in 2023. After later denying the defendants’ second motion to dismiss the due process and equal protection claims, it raised Younger abstention on its own. In August 2025, it declined to hear those claims because it concluded that the requested relief would intrude into Pennsylvania’s criminal proceedings.

The majority held that Younger did not apply because the requested order would run only to pretrial detention. The plaintiffs seek a declaration that the challenged practices violate the Fourteenth Amendment and an injunction barring the Lancaster County Prison warden from detaining people on cash bail unless the issuing judge conducts the required inquiry, including consideration of ability to pay.

Relying on Gerstein v. Pugh, Stewart v. Abraham, and Conover v. Montemuro, the majority treated that relief as directed at a collateral feature of the criminal cases rather than the prosecutions themselves. On abstention, the decision places the Third Circuit alongside the Ninth and Eleventh Circuits, and at odds with the Fifth and Second Circuits, in similar bail challenges.

The Dispute Over Enforcement

The harder disagreement concerned enforcement. The majority framed the requested ruling as a yes-or-no question: must initial bail decisions include consideration of the Rule 523 factors? It did not read the complaint as asking a federal judge to inspect each arraignment for subjective adequacy.

For the majority, that limited question distinguished Hartmann from O’Shea v. Littleton. The requested relief in O’Shea reached several stages of state criminal proceedings and would have required continuing federal supervision. The Hartmann plaintiffs challenge one part of the pretrial process.

Judge Phipps rejected that distinction. He read O’Shea to bar federal supervision of each challenged practice, including the setting of bail without regard to a defendant’s circumstances. The fact that the plaintiffs in O’Shea challenged additional practices did not, in his view, make its ruling any less controlling here.

He also distinguished Gerstein and Stewart. The plaintiffs in those cases had been detained without the judicial proceedings they sought. Each Hartmann plaintiff received a bail hearing. Their claim concerns what the judges did, or failed to do, during those hearings.

For Judge Phipps, that difference made recurring federal review unavoidable. If a detainee asserted that a judge had failed to consider ability to pay, a federal court might need testimony from the detainee about what occurred. The state judge might then testify in response.

Because the arraignments are not officially recorded, such a dispute would have no transcript against which to test the competing accounts. The majority declined to treat that possibility as part of the relief before it. Judge Phipps regarded it as the unavoidable consequence of an injunction.

The Remand

The due process and equal protection claims now return to the district court. The plaintiffs still must prove that the challenged practices occurred and that they violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The defendants may contest both the allegations and the scope of any relief.

The Third Circuit decided only that the federal court may hear those claims. It affirmed the dismissal of the Sixth Amendment claim and left the constitutional merits, any injunction, and the mechanics of enforcement unresolved.

If the plaintiffs ultimately obtain an injunction, the district court will have to determine how an order governing unrecorded bail hearings can be enforced. Whether that can be done without the hearing-by-hearing review Judge Phipps predicted remains the case’s central question.