http://www.pe.com/localnews/stories/PE_ ... 4947f.htmlNewsletters Inland: Laws murky regarding bounty hunters' limits
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10:00 PM PDT on Saturday, July 16, 2011
By SARAH BURGE
The Press-Enterprise
Tony Chiz carries a gun, a Taser, handcuffs and a badge. And he wears a bullet-proof vest. But he's no cop.
The badge says, "Fugitive Recovery Agent" -- better known as a bounty hunter. His job is tracking down bail jumpers.
In the business since the mid-'90s, Chiz and other experienced bounty hunters say most fugitives are captured without a fight. But across the country, bounty hunters have arrested the wrong people and injured or killed bystanders.
Stan Lim / The Press-Enterprise
Tony Chiz Jr. has been a bounty hunter since the mid-1990s. He and others in his field say most fugitives are captured without a fight. Recently in Wildomar, the mayor's 46-year-old daughter, Jamie Scranton, was Tased and pepper-sprayed outside her home during a fight with a bail bondsman involving several family members, Riverside County sheriff's officials said. The bondsman was taking a friend of Scranton's 27-year-old son back to jail. The incident raised questions about what bail bondsmen and their bounty hunters can and can't do.
When their colleagues run amok, some bounty hunters and bondsmen cite factors such as a lack of public or police understanding about their powers of arrest, as well as a "cowboy" mentality or lack of education on the part of the fugitive recovery agent.
According to a 2007 California Research Bureau report on bounty hunters, the state has never required licensing. A law ordering minimum training and other requirements for bounty hunters passed in 1999. They had to be 18, for instance, have no felony record and complete an eight-hour power of arrest course. They also had to notify police before making an arrest. But the law expired in 2010.
Now, Chiz said, anyone can be a bounty hunter.
"If you've got the nerve to go do the job, you can go do it," said the former teacher and Hesperia resident.
On a national level, bail bondsmen and their bounty hunters have sweeping powers to make arrests under an 1872 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the state report says. Because they are enforcing a contract, courts have ruled that they are not bound by the same constitutional constraints as police. For instance, bounty hunters don't need a warrant to enter private property.
In a 1996 paper in the Houston Law Review arguing for more limits on bounty hunters, lawyer Jonathan Drimmer wrote that courts view those on bail as having the limited rights of prisoners and have given bounty hunters the power to arrest them any time or place, to break into fugitives' homes and to use force as needed to capture them.
bondsmen and the law
Bail bondsmen say they play an important role in the justice system, saving local government from the cost of housing defendants in already crowded jails while they await trial.
Jerry Gutierrez, chief deputy of corrections for the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, said that bail bondsmen provide an affordable way for a defendant to be released.
"It does help out because that's one less person in the jail," Gutierrez said. "Any release helps. We are overcrowded."
Those who cannot afford to pay their full bail amount often hire a bail bond agency that guarantees they will appear in court. The usual fee is 10 percent of the bail amount set by the court. Most defendants appear as ordered, bondsmen say. In California, if a defendant doesn't show, the bondsman is on the hook for the full bail amount after 180 days.
Tony Suggs, a bondsman and director at large for the California Bail Agents Association, said most bondsmen hire bounty hunters to track down their wayward clients, or "skips."
Suggs and Chiz both say efforts to regulate the fugitive recovery industry are a good idea.
When Chiz took up the trade in 1994, he said bounty hunters in California were a motley crew.
"There were bikers, people fresh out of jail, crazy guys that I would not even want to sit in the same living room with," he said.
Some bail bondsmen and bounty hunters criticize what they regard as questionable tactics in the bounty hunting profession.
Suggs said some bounty hunters feel they can cross the line and get away with it because those on the receiving end don't complain.
"We've got a bad enough image as it is. We don't want you to act like Dog on the TV show. We don't want to hire that person," Suggs said, referring to Duane "Dog" Chapman, the star of the reality TV show "Dog the Bounty Hunter." Chapman is known for his flowing blond mullet and rogue bounty-hunting tactics.
local troubles
In the past year, other Inland bail bondsmen or bounty hunters have gotten into scrapes.
Because a law on bounty hunters expired, Tony Chiz Jr. says anyone can try it. "If you've got the nerve to go do the job, you can go do it," he said. In April, a bounty hunter in a Canyon Lake shopping center parking lot shot himself in the leg. Deputies said it was an accident and the man was not arrested.
Last August, a Riverside bondsman was accused of kidnapping a client at gunpoint when the man failed to pay his $2,000 fee, court records say. The man said he was held captive until he and his girlfriend handed over cash, methamphetamine, marijuana and the title to a car. The bondsman, Damion Perkins, 37, of Bail Bonds United, was arrested in October and charged with kidnapping and assault, court records show. He has pleaded not guilty.
In the Wildomar incident, Fausto Atilano, owner of Fausto's Bail Bonds in French Valley, barged onto the property March 28 with Bryan Stark, a bail recovery agent, sheriff's officials said. Scranton said she, her husband and son were living at the house with her grandmother. The bondsmen were looking for a woman her son had befriended, who, according to court records, was out of jail on $5,000 bond for a theft charge and had not skipped court. But Atilano said she broke the terms of her bail bond agreement and was planning to flee to Texas.
Mayor Marsha Swanson, who lives nearby and witnessed part of the melee, said the men crossed the line. Atilano and Stark disagreed, saying the defendant they sought was in the house. Atilano said several family members attacked and injured him after he had handcuffed his client. He said he used his Taser and pepper-spray in self-defense.
Riverside County sheriff's officials accused Atilano and Stark of battery and trespassing, but more than three months later, prosecutors have not filed charges.
Atilano, a veteran bail bondsman who often does his own fugitive recovery, said the situation in Wildomar was an anomaly.
"For the past 15 years, this has never happened to me," he said. "Never, ever have I been detained or questioned for what I do."
"We're not cowboys," he said. "We don't just go and kick people's door down."
Scranton, the mayor's daughter, said she finds it hard to believe Atilano's behavior was lawful.
"I definitely know I had the right not to be Tased or Maced when I was not threatening anyone," she said. "They think they can do whatever they want. So far, it looks like they can."
Rules of the hunt
Zeke Unger, a Van Nuys-based bounty hunter who has served as an expert witness in court, said some bounty hunters are ill-trained "knuckle draggers" who abuse their power or create situations where innocent people might get hurt.
The law gives bounty hunters the power to arrest, he said, "but it does not give us the right to violate people's civil rights."
Unger said ethical bounty hunters follow a protocol, especially when they track a defendant to someone else's home, where the resident might not know the defendant is on bail. If bounty hunters don't want to wait for the defendant to come out, they should knock on the door and explain why they're there. If the resident won't cooperate, bounty hunters should call the police for assistance, he said.
"If you go into a stranger's house and your bail skip is not in there, you've got big problems," he said.
When other people's homes come into play, said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, "It is sort of a muddy area of the law."
Bounty hunters can seize people, she said, but there are limits.
"They don't have carte-blanche to do what they want," Levenson said. "It's not the Wild West."
A head count of bounty hunters and statistics on the arrests they make are hard to come by.
Bob Burton, of the Santa Barbara-based U.S. Coalition of Bail Recovery Agents, estimates that, bounty hunters make upwards of 30,000 arrests a year nationwide.
Burton said bounty hunting is, by definition, a "maverick industry," made up of adrenaline junkies drawn to the thrill of the hunt.
Even so, Burton said, bounty hunters make few false arrests and studies have shown they are very effective -- the vast majority of fugitives pursued by bounty hunters are recaptured.
"If we were really messing up," he said, "the bonding industry would have been bankrupt from lawsuits."
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