LOOSE BONDS

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2004 by Ellis, Randy

Bail agents skip on forfeitures, revoked licenses; judicial practices called into question

When a criminal defendant fails to show up in court, a judge will issue an arrest warrant and order that the defendant's bond be forfeited.

The assumption of people in the courtroom is that the bondsman who posted the hail is going to have to pay some money.

That assumption was wrong in Oklahoma County - at least as it pertained to bonds posted by a couple of bondsmen with powerful connections.

Behind the scenes, judges and court clerk employees were issuing orders and making "mistakes" that resulted in these bondsmen almost never having to pay their forfeitures. Much more than $1 million was involved.

The first real clue that something was wrong came last March when Oklahoma's insurance commissioner created momentary chaos by canceling - then reinstating - the ability of the state's largest hail bond insurer to write bail bonds in the slate.

The insurance company's general agent in Oklahoma tried to dismiss the situation as a "screw up" that would be quickly resolved.

But was it?

The Oklahoman received a tip from a competing bondsman that Ranger Insurance Co. had for years received special treatment in Oklahoma County and almost never had to pay its bond forfeitures.

The source claimed that one Ranger agent had brazenly boasted she had never had to pay bond forfeitures. The source suspected bribery and said millions of dollars were involved.

Extensive extensions

The newspaper decided to have court reporter Diana Baldwin and me investigate. Database editor John Perry and senior reporter Nolan Clay later joined the investigation.

One of our first stops was the Oklahoma Insurance Department, which has the legal authority to line and revoke the licenses of bail bondsmen who fail to pay their forfeitures on time.

Oklahoma's insurance commissioner previously had been indicted and reprimanded for unethical conduct, and reporters suspected he might also be engaged in unethical conduct involving bondsmen.

Instead, we found something different.

Insurance Department employees readily acknowledged there was a problem with hail bond forfeitures in Oklahoma County, but said they weren't the ones causing the problem.

The officials said they tried to revoke the licenses of bondsmen who failed to pay forfeitures in Oklahoma County, just as they did when bondsmen failed to pay in other counties.

Whenever licenses of Ranger agents in Oklahoma County were about to be revoked, however, the agents would go to judges and gel them to issue stays (deadline extensions), Insurance Department officials complained. Sometimes judges would grant a half dozen or more stays in a single case, extending the payment deadline for years, they said.

Using Oklahoma's Open Records Act, we obtained a lengthy list of cases in which Oklahoma County judges had thwarted forfeiture collection efforts by issuing stays.

An examination of the cases showed that several judges had issued stays that benefited Ranger and professional bondsman Howard McClanahan. Most of the judges had issued just one or two stays in cases assigned to them. However, two judges - District Judge Virgil Black and Special Judge Charles Hill - were found to have repeatedly intervened in other judges' cases to issue stays.

Interviews with judges revealed that many of these interventions were done without the knowledge or permission of the judges assigned to the cases. Those interventions violated a local court rule.

One district judge, Twyla Mason Gray, said she had asked Hill and Black to keep out of her cases, but they continued to intervene anyway. Gray said she thought these actions might be illegal.

While reviewing court cases, we discovered numerous irregularities in actions by court clerk employees, as well. Many cases were found in which court clerk employees had exonerated bond forfeitures without judicial orders and under circumstances in which they had no apparent legal authority to do so.

The clerk's office failed to send out forfeiture notices or sent them to the wrong bondsmen in several large bond cases, forcing judges to exonerate the bonds because of due-process violations.

We also found numerous cases in which court clerk employees had electronically deleted docket entries, destroying official court records in the process.

The improper actions by judges and court clerk employees not only have cost the court fund significantly more than $1 million, but also have resulted in accused drug dealers, child molesters and other fugitives running free, with bondsmen no longer having financial incentives to track them down.

Our reports drew the public's attention to the seriousness of the matter with a story about a fugitive who allegedly killed a man shortly after his bond was exonerated because the clerk had failed to mail out a required forfeiture notice.

Reporters were able to identify dozens of examples of serious bond forfeiture abuses through interviews with competing bondsmen and random reviews of court docket entries.