Criminal defense lawyers who write attorney bonds in Comal County are circling the wagons these days because of newly proposed financial disclosure requirements pending before the Comal County Bail Bond Board. The Board has proposed requiring attorneys who bond clients out of jail to disclose the same financial information to the County as a regular bail bondsman, namely, that the attorneys really do have the financial ability to cover the cost of a bail bond if the client skips court. And attorneys who write bonds in Comal County are currently organizing to oppose these requirements because they view it as a threat to their business.
This controversy in Comal County brings to a head some of the problems with attorney bonds. The main problem, as far as the County is concerned, is that the County faces difficult hurdles in trying to collect money from attorneys whose bonds have been forfeited because a client has failed to appear in court. Before a regular bail bondsman is allowed to write bonds in a county, he is required by law to show the local county bail bond board that, if a bond is forfeited, that he has non-exempt property that could be seized to satisfy a judgment against the bond. In the past, attorneys in Comal County have not been held to this same requirement.
As a result, if a judgment is rendered against an attorney for a forfeited bond, it's difficult for the county to enforce the judgment since the attorney has never listed his nonexempt property that may be subject to seizure. As a result, bail bond boards, including the one in Comal County, are increasingly reluctant to let attorneys write bail bonds and are trying to adopt rules to crack down. My prediction is that, in the next couple of years, attorneys playing pretend bondsmen will become an endangered species around here.
A dismissal of a Felony Deadly Conduct with a Firearm case five minutes before jury selection, that's how to start off the new year. My client and I were in Comal County District Court in front of Judge Dib Waldrip this morning, getting ready to select a jury, when the prosecutor asked to approach the bench and told the judge that he had to dismiss the case. Apparently, it didn't hurt our cause that the so-called "victim" picked up an arrest warrant out of Utah, decided to flee the jurisdiction, and is now a fugitive from justice. Like Woody Allen once said, 95 percent of life is just showing up. Sometimes, that's 100 percent of a jury trial, too. That makes our record a perfect 1-0 for 2009.
Time to hoist the Skull and Crossbones and sing defense lawyer pirate songs. And just to further prove the existence of a God, and that he has both a sense of humor and of justice, my alma mater, Rice University, won its first college football bowl game in 54 years over the holidays. My deepest sympathies to those schools who were forced to play their bowl games on New Year's Day because they didn't get selected by the Texas Bowl. This year, on to the BCS national championship...
It's nice to know that people are reading the blog. I was approached in a conference room in the Guadalupe County Courthouse this morning by Heather Hollub, the District Attorney-elect for Guadalupe County. As you may recall, a couple of posts ago, I related an article from the Seguin Gazette Enterprise which had to do with the local commissioner's court approving a new lease agreement for the DA's office that involved paying Hollub's husband a nice chunk of rent. Heather Hollub first stated to me how much she loved the blog. Then she mentioned that she intended to post a comment to the blog in order to "clarify" some issues.
Namely, she mentioned that she and her husband were not present in Commissioner's Court for the meeting at which the lease agreement was approved in order to push for the agreement. If my post left the impression that Heather Hollub was personally at the Commissioner's Court meeting, that's only because that's the impression I got from the Seguin Gazette article. A thousand apologies if that, in fact, was not the case. Apparently, the lease agreement was promoting itself at Commissioner's Court and the people who are to benefit from it had nothing to do with its existence.
Incidentally, in my brief encounter with Ms. Hollub, she did not mention that her husband would be turning down the money. Nevertheless, I look forward to the clarifying comments. We can always use some additional traffic here at the blog. In a related matter, check out Guadalupe County Attorney Elizabeth Murray-Kolb's guest column in the Sunday, December 14th edition of the Seguin Gazette Enterprise, in which she spells out her reasons for opposing the deal. *It is easy to comment on this Blog, just simply start typing below.