Senator wants answers about agents bailing on bonds

Jeffrey Wolf, Deborah Sherman
http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=139678&catid=339

DENVER - The game may be over for some bail agents who have been playing the legal system to get removed from bonds so they do not have to pay the court or find fugitives, as uncovered during a 9Wants to Know investigation.
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The chairwoman of the state senate judiciary committee plans to take a close look at the law and judicial decisions about bond exonerations' to stop it from happening again unless it is legally warranted.

"You shouldn't be trying to find your way out. There's really a whole system, a function of the entire system that bail bondsmen serve, that when the motivation isn't to honestly produce people or pay up on a bond to get people there, there's a breakdown in the system overall," State Senator Morgan Carroll (D-Aurora) said. She is chair of the State Senate Judiciary Committee.

Carroll responded to a 9Wants to Know investigation Monday night where bail agents said they were playing the legal system to keep the premium fees, not spend money to look for the fugitives and to avoid paying the court when they failed to appear.

A paralegal who did not want to be identified claims to 9Wants to Know he has saved bond agents more than $400,000 in two years by getting them taken off 500 bonds using legal motions in court. If the bail agents are taken off the case, then no one is responsible for looking for the suspects or for bringing the suspects back to court to make sure justice is served for their victims.

"If someone can basically take the money for bonding people without providing the other half of the equation, which is again, either paying for forfeiture or producing the person if they show up, it sort of begs the question, 'Well, what are they getting paid for?'" Carroll said.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has oversight responsibility for the judicial department, wants to find out how often bail agents are getting removed off of bonds using legal technicalities in the law.

Carroll says the committee will ask the State Court Administrator's office if the number of bond exoneration motions can be tracked. Otherwise, Carroll says it will take a bill in the next session to mandate that they track the number of exonerations.

Several bail agents told 9Wants to Know that some agents will "scrub court cases" as soon as they get them, looking for mistakes made by the court that they can use in motions to get removed off the bail bonds.

Court records show judges have granted exonerations in cases when bail agents pleaded poverty, when legal notices were mailed late, and when fugitives fled the state or the country.

On May 1, an agent pleaded with a Douglas County judge to get taken off a $4,000 bond for defendant Shane Murray. The 22-year-old had failed to appear in court to face drug charges. The agent argued that the court had mailed a "notice of bail forfeiture" 46 days late which meant that they had run out of time and opportunity to find Murray.

"I would have had the fugitive picked up but was informed by the bond's indemnitor (co-signer) that he had left for parts unknown around the middle of March 2009," the bail agent wrote to the judge.

With that argument, the judge discharged the bond and exonerated the bail agent of spending money to find the fugitive or paying for the full bond amount.

However, if the bail agent had looked a little harder, it would have found Murray very close by. Murray was sitting in Adams County jail on a trespassing charge at the very time the bail agent was arguing to a judge that the defendant couldn't be found.

"He couldn't find me, so he asked to be off my bond?" Murray asked while sitting in jail garb. "That's an excuse, you know what I mean?"

Murray says he was not hiding or running from the bondsman because he was locked up.

Some agents claim the system is flawed because they cannot easily learn when a defendant is behind bars in a nearby county.

Carroll says that will all come under review during an annual briefing of the judicial department later this year.

"Those legal technicalities either represent a loophole in the law that allows them to do that or a vacuum in the law that allows them to do that," Carroll said.

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