Why high bail amounts cost taxpayers money
The Temple Daily Telegram ran a story today about the artificially high bail amounts in Bell County. The story (“Jail statistics show bail range, averages”, by Paul A. Romer, Sunday, September 28, 2008) quotes me as saying, “By setting high bond amounts, they are keeping bond companies fully employed but are making people need court-appointed attorneys because they can’t afford to hire an attorney after paying their bond… Then the taxpayers get to pay for it.”
That is absolute, 100%, correct. However, the very next paragraph goes on to say “Attorney John Galligan said it is common for bail hearings to reduce bail amounts by 80 to 90 percent.” That I don’t know about.
Sure, the typical felony defendant’s bail gets reduced from an ungodly number down to $1,000 once they plead guilty. But, that’s usually the only way to get such a huge reduction. Otherwise, the judges usually reduce the bail from an ungodly amount down to just an unholy amount. What good does that do?
Here’s the problem, though: a good number of defendants post bond before they get a bail reduction. Then, they are paying their bond companies huge sums of money to get out of jail. That typically means that there is no money left to hire a criminal defense attorney. So, since they are charged with felonies, what happens? They get a court-appointed lawyer. Who pays for that? We, the taxpayers.
So, by setting initial bail amounts so high, a defendant has to pay what little money they have saved up over time, or what little money their families can scrape together, to get that person out of the jail.
The situation is better if the defendant hires a criminal defense lawyer first, because then the lawyer can go to the judge assigned to the case and get the bail lowered to a more reasonable amount. That only happens, though, when the defendant hires the lawyer first. Meanwhile, though, that person sits in jail and waits until the defense attorney can go to a judge and get a lowered bail amount (unless they have so much money that they can afford to hire a lawyer and hire a bondsman — and not very many people do).
So, why are we forcing people to stay in jail longer than necessary with these artificially high bail bonds? Why not just set a reasonable bail amount to begin with and save everyone (including the taxpayers) a lot of money? Well, according to the article, Judge Ted Duffield was at a conference and unavailable for comment. Where was “Million Dollar” Judge Ivey for comment?
Bell County Jail, News, Temple | jeffparker | 
September 28, 2008 9:35 am | 
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