The Excessive Bail Clause of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that a defendant should not be required to pay an excessively high bail amount during the pretrial process.
The idea is that bail should not be used:
to raise money for the government;
as a punitive measure to keep a suspect in jail due to their perceived dangerousness.
Bail is meant to give the arrested person the possibility to remain free up to the point where they are summoned to court, because during the pretrial process, they have not yet been convicted of a crime.
