Bounty Hunters: The 1873 Loophole That Lets Civilians Kick In Doors

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Someone in a bullet-resistant vest kicks in a front door at night to seize a fugitive, with no police badge and no search warrant. That is bounty hunting, a real profession practiced almost exclusively in the United States. This episode explains the civil contract behind it: a defendant pays a bail bondsman a fee of about 10 percent, the bondsman guarantees the full bail to the court, and if the defendant runs, the bondsman may send a bail enforcement agent to bring that person back.

The authority traces to medieval sureties and to Taylor v. Taintor, an 1873 Supreme Court case whose famous language about breaking into houses was only a remark made in passing, never binding law. From there the episode covers the commission economics, the less-lethal gear agents favor because they have no qualified immunity, and a patchwork of state rules that ranges from outright bans to Nevada's 80 hours of required training. Cross an international border and the same job becomes kidnapping.

• Bounty hunters were once used to track down children who had run away from American Indian boarding schools.
• Industry figures from around 2003 claim roughly 31,500 bail jumpers caught each year and a 90 percent success rate, all on commission that pays nothing for a miss.
• Minnesota bars bounty hunters from driving white, black, maroon, or dark green vehicles, and Florida forbids anyone to use the title bounty hunter at all.
• A Virginia bounty hunter who seized Sidney Jaffe in Canada was extradited there in 1983 and convicted of kidnapping. Dog Chapman faced kidnapping charges in Mexico after grabbing Andrew Luster.
• After a chaotic 2001 arrest attempt in Texas, two bounty hunters saw their charges dismissed, sued the fugitive's family for malicious prosecution, and won $1.5 million.