“If you’re in a public place, they’ve got the badge hanging from their neck, a gun hanging from their hip, three or four pairs of handcuffs hanging that everybody can see.” (Doyle’s team all had concealed-carry permits. “You can spot pretty quickly,” Doyle said. He liked former military personnel because they had the relevant training, life experience, and self-discipline that he says makes a good bail-recovery agent. “Wrong mentality.” When hiring for his team, he said he looked first for maturity. Second, a “skip” has multiple avenues to get out of a house and a single agent can’t possibly cover all of them.ĭoyle, like most of the professionals in the business, doesn’t have a lot of patience for the “Dog the Bounty Hunter”-type of agent. First, Doyle explains, going alone is foolish for obvious safety reasons. “The first thing I thought was-we don’t have the whole story, maybe he did have a partner there-but if he did go by himself, he’s an idiot,” Doyle said. Bounty hunters are considered private contractors, but they are authorized to use deadly force when making an arrest. If the bondsman fails to procure the “skip,” he or she is on the hook for the entirety of the bail to the court.Īlthough some bondsmen do their own recovery work in-house, many will contract with independent bounty hunters to apprehend skips. Under the terms of these contracts, should a defendant fail to appear at a court date, the bondsman has the right to apprehend his or her client. A bail bondsman, backed by insurance policies, then signs a civil contract with the defendant to post bail for a 10 to 15 percent fee. A judge will typically set a higher bail for defendants who are considered a flight risk or a danger to society. Bail is a security-usually money but sometimes property-paid to the court in exchange for release of an arrested person, to be returned when the defendant appears at his or her court date. There are four major players in the bail-bonding process: the person who has been arrested, the judge who sets his bail, the bail bondsman, and the bail-recovery agent. He now works for the Veterans Affairs medical center in Richmond, Virginia. At 6-foot-3, a former Division I football player and retired soldier, Doyle might look like what you expect a bounty hunter to look like but he sounds like your buddy’s father-friendly and interested. In certain states the second might be partially true-but the industry is far more sophisticated than it appears at first glance.ĭoyle is retired now, but for 14 years he worked as a bail-recovery agent-the industry’s preferred term for bounty hunters. Some areas have addressed the first with pretrial services programs that screen and release low-risk defendants. This kind of incident usually drives two separate criticisms: that America’s archaic bail system disproportionately impacts the poor, and that bounty hunters are acting as wildly unregulated quasi-police. The modern bail-recovery industry, mostly identified with Wild-West-like Hollywood depictions like Dog the Bounty Hunter or the novels by Janet Evanovich, is largely invisible to the public eye. Howard died on the scene.īounty hunters usually grab national attention only when somebody gets shot, but in many states, they’re an active part of the criminal-justice system. Shell approached Howard’s Marion County residence-apparently alone-and Howard opened fire. What happened next was straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel: His neighbor, Terry Dotson, told reporters that when he offered to drive Howard to his appearance, Howard told him he wasn’t going back to jail. When Howard failed to appear at a court hearing, the judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest. The singer had failed to appear in court on a litany of rural-route charges: a handful of DUIs, possession of a firearm while intoxicated, and driving on a revoked license. When John Doyle, a bail-recovery agent, heard the news, his first thought was: If the bounty hunter went in alone, he’s an idiot. On June 9, Jackie Shell, a Tennessee bounty hunter, killed the country musician Randy Howard during a shootout.
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