Criminal Justice: Unbounded Bondsmen

“A flagrant violation of Pennsylvania sovereignty,” charged Governor William Scranton. “A throwback to the days of the bounty hunters,” cried Pennsylvania’s Republican Representative Richard S. Schweiker. What caused all the outrage last week was the case of a slim, 19-year-old Negro boy who had been seized at his home in a Philadelphia suburb by two Alabama bondsmen and carted off to Mobile.

Tyrone Collins had been indicted last May in Mobile for assault with intent to kill for his part in a rumble with boys from a rival school. Freed on $500 bail, Collins later moved with his family to Philadelphia and failed to appear in the Mobile court when his case came up for trial last month. Thus he forfeited his bail, and the bonding company dispatched two freelance agents to bring him back.

Supreme Court Sanction. The two agents claim that they used no undue force on Collins, though they do admit handcuffing him. His family claims that the two men barged uninvited into the house, impersonated police officers, threatened the family with a pistol, and held Tyrone incommunicado for 72 hours while they drove to Pittsburgh and Indianapolis in search of other bail jumpers.

If the family’s charges hold up, the two Alabama bondsmen may be liable to prosecution in Pennsylvania for assault and impersonating officers. But on the more serious issues—illegal entry and kidnaping—they are unlikely to be touched. Although police must conform to established legal procedures before extraditing a prisoner from one state to another, bail bondsmen remain curiously above the law. They got there by old British common-law tradition; they stay there because of an 1872 Supreme Court ruling which declared that the rearrest of a defendant on bail “is likened to the rearrest of an escaping prisoner by the sheriff.”

Shocking & Frightening. The court gave bondsmen the right to rearrest the bailee at any time or place—even when he has no intention of jumping bail whatever. The bailee is “on a string,” and the bondsmen “may pull the string whenever they please.” The bondsmen may “pursue him into another state, may arrest him on the Sabbath; and if necessary, may break and enter his house for that purpose.” In retrieving a prisoner from another state, the bondsman needs no warrant, only a court document called a “bail piece,” which states his bail relationship to the defendant.

Some legal experts are beginning to criticize the bondsmen’s role. “These powers would be abusable enough in the hands of proper and responsible police authorities,” says Washington Lawyer Ronald Goldfarb, author of Ransom, a new study of bail problems. “The same powers in the hands of bondsmen are shocking and frightening.” Bondsmen argue that they need their special privileges in order to prevent wholesale bond jumping and to keep their fees within the grasp of the average prisoner.* But in view of the present Supreme Court’s concern for the rights of accused, the whole subject is likely to be retested.

*The average U.S. defendant pays a bondsman 10% of the value of the bail. But rates vary from place to place (5% in New York, 12% in Wisconsin) and even from defendant to defendant. Some bondsmen give lower rates to seasoned criminals on the theory that they are less likely to panic and flee.