From Towson Or Timbuktu

The Maryland Court of Special Appeals upheld the bond forfeiture against a professional surety that resulted from a defendant’s failure to appear for trial. The bondsman hired a bounty hunter (“the very term… evokes a quaint nostalgia for a more robust era of American legal history”) who was able to locate the defendant in his native Honduras. The defendant respectfully declined the bounty hunter’s importunings to return to Howard County and is not subject to extradition.

The court concluded that “the [bonding company] is very slippery with its use of language” when it claimed to have fulfilled its obligation by locating the defendant: “The…obligation was not to locate the defendant. Nor was it to make a good faith effort to bring the defendant back to Maryland. Its obligation was to produce the defendant at the Howard County Courthouse to stand trial and nothing less than that…It was a matter of sublime unconcern to the State where the defendant is located. That was the [bonding company’s] problem. As long as the appellant produced the defendant, the State could not have cared less whether he had been located and brought back from Towson or from Timbuktu.”

The court also noted that the bonding company had improperly characterized the prosecutor’s indifference as support for their request to set aside the collateral forfeiture. (Mike Frisch)