Bounty hunters provide critical service to justice system

U of Ideas of General Interest ó April 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Contact:
Mark Reutter, Business & Law Editor (217) 333-0568; [email protected]

CATCHING FUGITIVES
Bounty hunters provide critical service to justice system, scholar says

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. ó Bounty hunters, sometimes depicted as reckless criminals themselves, provide an essential public service and ought not to be outlawed, a scholar argues in the current issue of the University of Illinois Law Review.

The mistaken attack on an Arizona family by masked bounty hunters, which resulted in four deaths in 1997, renewed demands by critics to do away with the practice of bounty hunting and place responsibility for finding and capturing fugitives to the police.

"For all the negatives, bounty hunters provide a great service to the criminal justice system," wrote John A. Chamberlin, the comments editor of the review. "They are a tax-free force that tracks down fugitives, saving police departments the time and the expense of having to do it themselves."

The bail industry employs about 7,000 bounty hunters nationwide to bring back fugitives who have "skipped out" on surety bonds paid by bondsmen to insure that defendants return to court to stand trial. An estimated 35,000 defendants jump bail annually and an astonishing 87 percent are brought back to justice by bounty hunters.

Examining statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice, Chamberlin found that commercial bondsmen are significantly better at finding, capturing and returning fugitives than are law-enforcement officers. In some jurisdictions, police departments captured only one in two defendants who had failed to appear in court after being released on their own recognizance or on bail not secured from commercial sources.

"Simply because there are bounty hunters, defendants released on surety bonds are less likely to flee" than defendants posting other types of bail.

Bounty hunters enjoy broad rights in tracking down fugitives. They can search a property without a warrant and avoid the extradition requirements that police must follow. These powers are based on the legal view that a commercial bond is an extension of jail, thus the bondsman has the same powers as a jailer to control the movements of a defendant.

While it would be counterproductive to subject bounty hunters to the same constitutional restrictions as the police, some reforms of the system are in order given the abuses shown in the Arizona case, according to Chamberlin.

Bounty hunters should be registered by state licensing boards and required to complete basic courses in criminal justice procedures. So far the only really effective state regulations have been enacted in Florida.

Another useful reform would be to require bail bondsmen to carry liability insurance to provide a civil remedy for private individuals harmed by incompetent or violent bounty hunters.

-mr-