Waukesha Suspect’s Previous Release Agitates Efforts to Reduce Bail

Darrell Brooks, accused of plowing his S.U.V. through a Wisconsin parade, had been freed on $1,000 bail for a different charge in Milwaukee County, where there is a backlog of cases.

In early November, prosecutors in the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office made a fast, fateful decision, asking that bond for a 39-year-old repeat offender accused of brutalizing his girlfriend, then running over her with an S.U.V., be set at only $1,000.

That call, one of many made in the city’s bustling criminal court that day, initiated a succession of events that ended, according to the police, with that man, Darrell E. Brooks Jr., ramming his maroon Ford Escape through the barricades of a Christmas parade in nearby Waukesha, killing six people and injuring dozens more.

The bail decision has brought criticism raining down on Milwaukee County’s district attorney, John T. Chisholm, a Democrat who has tried to reduce high rates of incarceration and racial disparities in the justice system. Longtime critics, led by Wisconsin’s previous governor, Scott Walker, blamed Mr. Brooks’s release on Mr. Chisholm’s “radical” liberal ideology.