We all experience rough sailing from time to time. For some of us, this will just mean a re-evaluation of our lives and a determination to move forward. For others, however, there may be some legal wrangling that becomes involved, and for whatever reasons, we may find ourselves or a member of our families faced with jail time and court appearances. Knowing what their options may be in terms of being able to get out of jail while awaiting a court appearance will involve becoming knowledgeable about bail, how to post it and what it all means.

Quite simply, bail is a guarantee to the court, usually monetarily, that someone will appear at all of his or her scheduled court dates and will remain in the specified area until the completion of all legal proceedings which surround the case. If you are arrested and booked, you may post bail yourself at the jail at which you are detained by having a family member pay the bail for you. This can typically be done with cash or cashier’s check for the full amount of the bail that was set. However, to make this happen, you may need to have a lot of money just lying around, and unfortunately, most of us do not. So, in order to complete this task, you or your family may have to seek the help of a bail bondsman.

A bail bond company, or bail bondsman, can help your family or other loved ones make arrangements to post bail in the form of a surety bond or bail bond. The way that this works is that if you cannot afford to post all of your bail, then your family may choose to go through one of the many bail bond companies available. It is this bail bond company which will then post your bail, This will be at the cost of, on average, ten percent of the amount for which your bail is set. For example, if your bail is set at $10,000, then the person who is posting bail for you will need to pay the bail bond company $1000. This fee is known as the bail bond premium and is not refundable once the bail is paid by the bail agency. Of course, coming up with this kind of money can often be difficult for families, so many bail bond companies will accept credit cards or may can even work out special payment arrangements for you or your family members, one such national bail company is BailYes.com.

Let’s take Los Angeles County, as an example: Upon being booked in at one of the many Los Angeles County Sheriff’s police stations or jails, like the men’s central jail or Twin Towers Jail located in downtown the defendant will automatically have a bail amount set for each of the charges he or she has been arrested for, so long as the charges he or she is accused of are bail-able offenses. Once bail has been posted either in cash or through a bail bondsman, that money will remain within the court system until the time that the legal process has been completed. However, the ten percent fee that was paid to the bail bond company will be lost, as that was for their fee to post the entire bail.

If you are choosing to post bail for someone, please note that you should know this person very well and have little doubt that this person will run and be equally certain that he or she will show up for all legal matters. If she does not then you will be responsible for the entire bail amount if he or she skips bail and decides that the legal proceedings are not important enough for which to show up.

Hopefully, you will never have to find out all of the intricacies of posting bail for either yourself or for someone that you know. However, bad things do happen to good people and at any point in time we can find ourselves, either personally or peripherally, involved in a tough situation. The ability to recognize the ways that jails and bail bond companies operate may indeed be helpful to us at that point in time, and may help to make things just a little bit easier when the going gets tough.

About Bail Yes bonding agencies. BailYes is a National provider of bail bonds with regional home offices located in Miami, Florida, and New York, NY. With have over 400 bail agents Nationwide they can handle city, county, state, federal and immigration bail postings 24 hours a day. For more information contact Bail Yes 24 hours a day at 1-800-Bail-Yes (1-800-224-5937).

Joe Mastrapa is a bail bondsman with over thirty years in the bail bond business. He is the senior bond underwriter for BailYes.com a National general agency with over 400 bail agents throughout the United States. He is an avid sport fisherman who enjoys cruising the Florida keys and the Islands of the Bahamas with his two boys.

We Always Say YES! @ Bail Yes.Com

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