We have been very busy this year advocating on behalf of the California bail industry and we need your help to continue our mission of protecting and promoting the bail industry.
Legislation we are supporting:
Probation Bond Legislation: We have been working closely with the American Bail Coalition and ALEC to craft language for probation bond legislation. The language is done and we are looking for a legislator to carry the bill. This legislation is very important because it will help address California’s prison overcrowding crisis at no cost to the tax payers and will provide bail agents with a new product.
Safe Neighborhoods Act: We are supporting this ballot measure. This comprehensive act enhances public safety by providing sustainable law enforcement funding and targeting criminal street gangs, felons with guns, and drug dealers with focused penalties. It also requires a judicial hearing before a person charged with a serious felony may be released on OR, prohibits bail for violent felonies or gang violations if the defendant is in the US illegally, and helps to reduce jail overcrowding by authorizing counties under a court-ordered cap on jail population, to use temporary jail facilities that meet residential occupancy standards.
Domestic Violence Legislation: We were shocked and saddened upon reading that Curtis Harris, a convicted felon, murdered his wife Monica Thomas-Harris in Los Angeles County after being released on O.R. to “take care of his affairs”, despite the fact that he had just plead guilty to two felony counts of abusing Monica Thomas-Harris and was facing a 16 month prison term.
We are trying to introduce legislation to prevent Thomas-Harris tragedy from occurring again by requiring defendants who have been convicted of any crime involving domestic violence to immediately be remanded into custody to await the judgment of the court unless the count makes findings, supported by good cause, on the record that: (1) the defendant is not a flight risk; (2) the defendant is not a danger to public safety; and (3) the defendant is not a danger to the victim.
The rational for this legislation is straight forward, defendants who are convicted are a greater danger to public safety and a greater flight risk than they were prior to conviction. Prior to conviction, punishment was a mere possibility, after conviction it is a certainty.
Furthermore, domestic violence perpetrators are more likely to seek revenge against their victims after they are convicted and are facing prison.
AB 1133 (Dymally) Bail Extradition: We are supporting this bill which provides for a tolling of the 180-day forfeiture period if the district attorney elects to extradite the defendant. This will reduce the risks associated with writing bail bonds on residents of other states and foreign nationals which means that more of these defendants will be released through bail rather than due to jail overcrowding.
According to the California Board of Corrections, an average of 8,552 inmates were released per month in 2006 before trial due to jail overcrowding. This works out to 102,624 defendants released before trial due to overcrowding in the whole of 2006. Furthermore, whopping 45 percent of the defendants who are released due to overcrowding fail to appear for trial versus the 17 percent failure to appear rate for those defendants released on bond. (Eric Helland and Alexander Tabarrok, (2004), The Fugitive: Evidence on Public versus Private Enforcement from Bail Jumping.” Journal of Law and Economics 47(1): 93-122.) Thus, due to California’s chronic jail overcrowding problem, it is better for public safety to have defendants released on bail.
Furthermore, this bill provides the bail agent or surety shall reimburse the people for costs of extradition if relief from forfeiture is granted.
Finally, the bill provides the prosecuting agency 30 days after receiving the law enforcement officer’s affidavit to elect to seek extradition. The 180-day forfeiture period shall be tolled during this 30-day period.
AB 498 (Galgiani) Warrant Information: This bill has passed the Assembly but is hung up in the Senate due to some concerns by the sheriffs’ association. They want to make sure that the bill does not give bail agents direct access to the warrant databases. Unfortunately, the amendments they have proposed are overly broad and would prevent bail agents from accessing all law enforcement databases, even publicly available ones such as public jail inmate information systems. We have proposed an amendment that addresses the sheriff’s concerns without prohibiting our access to public databases but these amendments have been rejected by the California State Sheriff’s Association.
It is very important that you contact your local sheriff and ask them to support our amendments to this legislation.
Legislation we are opposing:
AB 1762 (Salas) Bail Premium Financing: This bill would restrict premium financing for defendants charged with serious felonies by requiring half of the bail premium to be paid when the bond is posted. The premium balance could only be financed for six months for bonds unsecured by a recorded deed of trust and twelve months for bonds secured by a recorded deed of trust. California is in the midst of a jail overcrowding crisis and this bill will exacerbate this crisis and harm public safety by making bail unaffordable to all but the wealthiest defendants. This bill would do this without any evidence that defendants released through premium financing are less likely to appear in court or are more likely to commit crimes. Additionally, this bill is unconstitutional because it contradicts the voters intent, as expressed in the passage of Proposition 103, to reduce insurance rates.
This bill is also unfair because it restricts bail financing without doing anything to reduce California’s excessively high bail schedules or to address the disparity among the county bail schedules. Each county has developed it’s bail schedule in a arbitrary manner based on political pressure rather than a rational analysis of how much bail is needed to insure the appearance of defendants in court. This has resulted in disparities in bail which are so egregious that defendants charged with identical crimes can see their bail vary by as much as 100% depending on which county they were arrested in.
We need your help to stop this bill. Please contact your local legislators, send them a copy of this form letter and ask them to vote no on AB 1762. If you don’t know who they are you can find them by going to http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/yourleg.html and entering your zip code to reveal your local legislators.
Please also send a copy of the form letter to Jose Solorio, Chair of the Assembly Public Safety Committee. It is vital that you complete this letter, by signing and printing your name and address at the bottom, then print and fax to the Assembly Public Safety Committee at (916) 319-3745. Your name and address is required because it shows which district you live in and how broad our opposition is. Please also fax a copy to Kathy Lynch, our legislative advocate, at (916) 443-7353.
California Research Bureau Report on Bounty Hunters: This report was published by the California Research Bureau in November, 2007 as required by Penal Code Section 1299.14. The report was not due until January 1, 2009 and it appears rushed and unfinished.
The survey upon which the report was based was only sent to 160 “bounty hunters” when it should have been sent to all 2,200 bail agents in California because many bail agents do their own bounty hunting. Additionally, only 21 of the 160 bounty hunters bothered to return the survey.
We were disappointed that the public safety benefits of bounty hunting were not adequately discussed.
However, the recommendations for licensure, additional training, and better oversight are not necessarily objectionable provided that they are implemented in a manner that gives bounty hunters more credibility while preserving their effectiveness of bounty hunters and does not unnecessarily burden them with bureaucratic red tape.
A copy of the report is available at http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/07/07-010.pdf
Appellate Jurisdiction of Bail Forfeitures: The California Law Review Commission has recommended legislation to “clarify” appellate jurisdiction of bail forfeitures. Since court unification, the municipal courts have been eliminated and the superior court has been divided into limited divisions and unlimited divisions. If a case is classified as a limited civil case it can only be appealed to the appellate department of the superior court in which the case originated and that court is the final arbiter of the case. If the case is classified as an unlimited civil case it can be appealed to the district court of appeal and even the California Supreme Court. Currently, most California Counties classify bail forfeiture cases in the same way they classify ordinary civil cases, i.e. based on the amount of money at issue. If the forfeiture is for $25,000 or less it is classified as a limited civil case and if the forfeiture is for more than $25,000 that case is classified as an unlimited civil case.
This recommendation would base the classification of the forfeiture on the division of the superior court where the forfeiture was entered. Usually, criminal cases are heard by the limited civil division up to preliminary hearing. Therefore, even in the case of a $1 million dollar bond, if the defendant forfeited the bond prior to the preliminary hearing, the law review commission’s recommendation would classify the case as a limited civil case and would limit appeals to the appellate department of the superior court which issued the forfeiture. It is rare for the appellate department to overrule the decision of the limited civil division because the appellate department is comprised of the same judges that sit on the superior court and they know and work with the judge that issued the decision in the limited civil division.
We are watching this situation closely because we expect that a bill will be introduced in 2008 or 2009 to change the appellate jurisdiction of bail forfeitures.
As you can see, GSBAA has been very busy promoting the interests of the California bail industry. We are not a social club. We are a nose to the grind stone, get things done organization. Please join us and become a part of GSBAA and help us in our mission to protect and promote the California bail industry. Our dues are modest, but our goals are not! Please fill out the membership application and send your check ASAP.