The website “U.S. Bail Reform
News,” a pretty weak attempt by the insurance companies to provide slanted
information on bail reform, recently put up a post about a Colorado district
attorney warning Maryland about bail reform. What they left out tells you something
about whether you can ever rely on that site for anything but bogus
information.
The insurance companies’ ties
to that particular DA’s office go back a long time. I was once in the room when
five or six DA’s from that office, along with some bail insurance dudes, were
trying to convince our county commissioners to de-fund our pretrial services
unit. So back then, as the story goes, the DA in charge got pretty hammered by the rest of the
system. He liked bail the way it was – money, money, all the time – and the rest
of the system voted him down and made some changes. He was so upset – and I
mean, like, upset the way a six-year-old gets – that he never forgot it. Ever
since then, that particular DA’s office has done everything it can to try to
“go back” to the good old days with money, bail schedules, and DA’s deciding on
the amounts, and to “get back” at the people who made the changes. If I listed
all the dumb things that office did when it came to getting back at everybody
over the bail project, you’d want to barf. Or send them to Washington.
And all that childish pride,
that incredibly irrational opposition against everything that is bail reform
(including opposition to many things that would help with public safety – the DA
actually once said he “didn’t believe in research” or "didn't care about the research," which was something monumentally dumb for a lawyer to say) was just the thing to get
the insurance companies excited. So when Maryland came along, those companies got
the current DA to write a letter with a current county commissioner and the
current sheriff, saying that bail reform failed. I won’t bore you with the
details, but there were only a couple things wrong with the letter: (1) it was
factually incorrect; and (2) the people who signed it weren’t even around and
in any position to comment on it one way or another. The two are related, I
suppose. Since they weren’t around when we did stuff, they didn’t know that what
they said about it was wrong. The commissioner actually testified before the
Maryland legislature about a “10 County Pilot Project” in Colorado. Well, guess
what? There was no such thing. It simply never happened. That’s either dumb or
. . . no, it’s probably just dumb.
Anyway, a district court
judge in that same jurisdiction drafted a declaration about the letter saying:
(1) they were wrong; and (2) they weren’t even there. We gave that declaration
to Maryland and to the people in Texas, and we continue to give it out to
anyone who trots out the dumb letter.
As a side note, it may interest you to know that the bail insurance companies once requested the County to submit to them some sort of document about the bail project. You'll never see that response, though, because the County itself said the bail project was a success. Obviously, that wasn't the answer they wanted. So they went with the letter.
This whole thing follows a
trend I have written about before. The insurance companies will pay anyone to
write or do anything to help them, and they really don’t care if what comes out
is even true. Then they tell all the bail agents around the country to look at
it like it’s some sort of victory, but they never mention the fallout from
providing false information to various officials and what happens whenever I
correct the record.
All this fighting by the
insurance companies – all this desperate use of false information – is why
judges are going to simply stop using commercial surety bonds. That’s the
fallout. It won’t matter whether you leave money in or take it out. After all,
look at New Jersey. All that fighting led to money being left in the mix, but
judges simply aren’t using it. This is what’s going to happen around America.
And it’s due to the insurance companies’ inability to tell the truth about even
stupid things.
“We have a letter!”
Big deal. We have the truth.
