A Big Week

A few weeks ago, the insurance company dudes trumpeted their brief in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. This week about seven groups filed briefs for the other side basically saying that the ABC brief was full of it. No slouch groups, either. The United States Department of Justice, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Pretrial Justice Institute and NAPSA, and the American Bar Association. And that's in addition to the appellee brief, which blows the City's brief out of the water. I used to write court opinions for the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, so I'm sort of used to assessing briefs.  

Oh, yeah, and I filed one too. I did mine for free, by the way, and I took great care to point out to the court how ABC was intentionally misleading it. That's something it probably didn't mention to Paul Clement when it asked him to be their lawyer.

Also this week the state of Arizona issued it's report about bail, fines, fees, and costs. The Chief Justice is running that show, and everyone is on board. Of course, PBUS says, "don't believe this bunk." Really? Did you see who signed off on that report?

Well, you better believe it. I can't even keep up anymore. The insurance companies only tell you about the two things that they do (including interviews on 10 watt talk radio stations), and they leave out the 50 things everyone else is doing, like big time state reports led by a Chief Justice.

When you're in as deep as me, you occasionally have time to talk to others about sort of tangential things. Like the other day. I was with a friend of mine who's also neck deep in bail, and we both started talking about what we would do if we "switched sides." You know, if we decided to cash the big check and go work for the insurance companies. It turns out we actually know at lot that would help the industry stay afloat. The weird thing is that the insurance companies have never even tried any of our ideas.

One particular idea, though, really got my attention. It was what I would call a "pure genius" move, and simply by doing it, it would keep commercial bail flowing in America for another 20 years. I hadn't really thought about it before, and the bail insurance companies certainly haven't thought about it. Their strategy is to fight everything. Call everything bunk, like that'll make it go away.

Tell you what. I'm not going to say what the genius move is, but I'll write about it if I ever see it. Here's a hint. If you were at the 2011 Conference on Pretrial Justice, someone mentioned it in passing. Does that help?

Overall, I'd say this has been a pretty big week.

Two States in One Week!

Last week two different states asked me about things a bail insurance lobbyist said. It was the usual shtick for this lobbyist: surety bonds are more effective than anything else, and Jefferson County, Colorado (where I’m from) is a failure.

I explained to both states how the lobbyist is intentionally misleading them on both issues. I’ve written about this before, so there’s no need to explain it now. By now this lobbyist should know what he can and can’t say. He knows and he simply doesn’t care.

But think about it for a minute, because it appears he doesn’t care much about bail agents, either. I mean, really – intentional misrepresentation. By the time I get done explaining it, people get pretty mad. And they can’t distinguish between the lobbyist and a bail agent. To them, the industry lied to them, and so that’s a couple more people – big, important people with a lot of say about how pretrial release and detention will be done – who’d rather not even bother with commercial sureties.  

But I don’t stop there, because then I tell them about all the stuff the bail lobbyist isn’t telling them. Like why the so-called “Dallas Study” is so messed up ( I have a really great story about that one), how other states are issuing reports about pretrial justice that don’t include the industry and that the industry ignores, and all the slippery things they did in New Jersey to try (yes, they failed) to reverse course over there. And, by the way, I’m not the only person these states ask. There are hundreds of us, and we all have the same big knowledge base that makes these lobbyists look like they’re basically making it all up as they go along.  

Bail agents, I know you probably think these guys are acting in your interest, but they’re flailing, and in the process they’re taking you down.