Posting Bail: The Ticket to Freedom
Video Transcript: How do you bond somebody out of jail? My name is Brian L. Jackson. I’m a lawyer in Oklahoma with Wirth Law Office and I want to talk about how to bond somebody out of jail.
So generally speaking, if you get arrested for a crime in Oklahoma, you will be held pursuant posting of some kind of a bond. It’s usually a monetary bond and usually a surety is fine. Now the process we’re getting somebody out of jail if there’s a bail, bailing somebody out of jail, the simplest is usually you call a professional bondsman and have them go to the jail with you and they can go in, sign the appropriate paperwork to post the bond and then the person is going to be released.
Now, the typical rule with that is you have to pay 10% down on the bond. So for example, if there’s a thousand dollar bond, you need about a hundred bucks to make that work. Now, some bondsmen will work with you on that and it’s sort of a business decision on their part how they want to deal with that, but that’s pretty typical is you have to have 10%.
If you are bonding somebody out and it’s a cash only bond, then you cannot work with a bondsman, you have to actually have the cash. Cash bonds, or cash or property just means exactly what it says. You have to have the cash or you have to post property as collateral for appearance. Where you see cash bonds more is like with a property or with a body attachment, which is basically a type of bench warrant if you fail to show up for an asset hearing or things like that.
Cash bonds are not as common in criminal practice, although they do happen. But that’s the essentials about how you bond somebody out. Most bondsmen, by the way, are open 24 hours so even if you get arrested at some weird ass hour, assuming that a bond is available on the warrant or they issue a bond on the probable cause affidavit, then you can bond the person out immediately, even on if the courthouse is closed.
But there’s some types of offenses where there will not be an initial bond, like, for example, domestic violence offenses and you have to wait until there’s a bail hearing and then you can post bond. Also, another thing to be aware of is when you bond someone out, there will be a court date given, that’s the date for the initial arraignment and that person needs to make sure that they keep track of that date because if you don’t show up, you’re going to get another warrant. You wind up back in jail again, they yank your bond.
So you want to pay attention to that and you want to pay attention to if there’s any conditions of bond, like for example, a no-contact order where you can’t contact a victim. Sometimes they’ll tell you you can’t be in possession of any weapons. They may tell you you can’t drink if say you get busted for DUI. So you got to pay attention to those conditions ’cause if you violate a condition of your bond, you go back to jail.
That’s kind of how bond works and if you are needing to bond somebody out or you are dealing with a criminal matter, you need good counsel and one place you can find a good Tulsa criminal defense attorney is at makelaweasy.com.
