Full Versus Bond Vs 10 Percent

(The content below was transcribed from an interview done with Acacia Law. We think you'll find it much easier
and more enjoyable to read this way.)

Interviewer: What, out of curiosity, what's the difference between a bond that you have to pay in full versus a bond where you can put 10 percent or some percentage down. Do they have different names and what are they?

Acacia Law: Well, one's called a cash bond and normally the terminology used is cash bond if it's to be paid in full in cash.

Acacia Law: So if you have $50,000 bond that means the judge is not going to let you use a bondsman. They want you to pay $50,000 cash. Okay? Now, what a bonds person does is that the way they make their money is that normally when somebody goes to see them, if there are any, how do I put it... I lost my train of thought.

Interviewer: Are there any assets that the family has or the person has?

Acacia Law: If they have any assets, what the bondholder will do, is he'll post the bond for the person if there is sufficient assets to cover the bond itself. But in exchange for putting up the bond for the individual, the individual has to come up with at least 10 percent of the payment of the bond as non-refundable cash reimbursement to the bond company before they in fact post the bond.

Interviewer: So if the judge says all right, your bail is $50,000 cash, the person will either have to get $50,000 cash to get out, or if their family has $5,000 in cash and let's say a house with equity on it, they could go to a bail bondsman, give the $5,000 to the bail bondsman and then post the house as collateral, they might be able to get the money to get them out?

Acacia Law: Correct. And that's called a secured bond. So those are the two different terms. There's a cash bond and there's secured bond. Secured bond is what you typically obtain from the bondsman. The cash bond is something that normally the individual has to come up with themselves or family members because bondsmen don't normally agree to put up cash, per se.

It makes it difficult. They expect the family to do that at that point. And, again, the bond person, when it comes to bonds that are fairly significant and they don't have a good read on the defendant. They may decline to post the bond for them. It really depends.

So those types of release conditions that are set up, are set up by the court based on the factors I previously mentioned, but they are solely within the discretion of the court. Now, there have been times that I have been able to modify release conditions. A lot of times I'm able to depending on the circumstances. The only ones I cannot unwind are the ones that create a case wherein an individual is non-bondable. An example of that would be if somebody is on either probation or is awaiting sentencing on another case and they pick up a new case, a new felony, that person is now going to be held in custody without bond no matter what. That's just the law. There's no getting around it.

Interviewer: So if someone, they're awaiting sentencing, they've been convicted already and then they are out on the street and they commit another crime another felony let's say, now they'll be arrested and they won't be allowed to come out. They'll be . . .

Acacia Law: They'll be non-bondable. Now what the judge will do, is that they will take the new case, because there's no way for the person to set up any release conditions, they do want them to get credit for the time that they are in custody.

So what they do is they allow the person what's called a 'nominal bond' and what that is is that they will set the new case a bond of maybe $10 to $20 and the reason they do that is so that the person will have had release conditions set, so that all the time they are serving in custody, will count towards the new case as well as the old case that they are being held on.