Man, those bail insurance
companies will lie about anything, and especially about Colorado. It’s a long
story, but they really hate Colorado for three big reasons, and it’s so
juvenile that it would remind you of grade school recess if I explained it to
you.
Nevertheless, in a recent
post, the insurance companies cite to a story about Boulder County (Colorado) District
Attorney Stan Garnett’s concerns over public safety in bond setting. They post
the article, and then they say, “Apparently, the so-called ‘Colorado Model’ isn’t
working so well.”
Once again, though, the
insurance companies are misleading people or likely failed to actually read the
story they posted. If they’d have read it, they’d have seen that the DA was
having a problem with judges continually letting so-called high risk people out
on bonds with money amounts that the DA thought were too low.
That’s not the “Colorado
Model” – that’s the “American Money Bail Model.”
The DA cited to a case
involving a guy named Lobato as an example”
“Lobato is a good example of
a guy who comes in, gets a bond of $10,000, which he is immediately able to
make, then turns around and allegedly commits another serious offense and then
gets a bond of only $15,000 which [he] is also able to immediately make,”
Garnett said. “In hindsight, the (first bond) was not set high enough to
protect the public.”
All the other examples he
cited were the same. People post money, get out, commit new crimes, and then
post more money.
That’s the essence of the
money bail system in general, and the commercial surety system in particular,
both of which allow high risk people to pay to get out of jail, commit new
crimes, and then pay to get out again. And, as usual, nobody ever forfeits the
money for these new crimes. That particular law – the law that says you can’t
forfeit money for public safety – is courtesy of your bail insurance lobbyists working
over the past 50 years, and it’s basically the same in every state in America.
Like I’ve said before, the
only amount of money that will keep anyone safe is an amount that detains, and
that’s unlawful when set to detain on purpose. So, for now in Colorado, we’re
stuck with a system – based on the money bail and commercial surety models –
that allows high risk people to buy their way out of jail.
So, let’s review. What model
was the judge using in the Lobato case? The money bail model. What’s not
working so well? The money bail model. What do the insurance companies want us
to continue to use? The money bail model.
Again, we here in Colorado
know all that, so the post must be designed only to make bail agents think the
bail insurance companies are making progress. They aren't.
