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Harris County owed millions by bond companies for bail skips

In a must read story, Lise Olsen reported yesterday ("Bail bonds no bounty for Harris County") that "A Houston Chronicle review shows 500 current and former bond companies and individuals still owe taxpayers more than $26 million in default judgments, some dating back decades."The whole story is so chock-full of journalistic goodness I won't excerpt it so you'll go there and read the whole thing.Just one quibble: Olsen wrote that "various studies" show just five percent of surety bond clients fail to show up for court, but that figure sounds low to me. In Tarrant County, for example, defendants with surety bonds had a 16% no-show rate, Fort Worth Weekly reported a few years ago. A 2007 federal report (pdf) put the national failure-to-appear rate for surety bonds at 20%...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on February 24, 2010 (boomark / email).