illinois bail bond statutes security deposit feature in illinois state court there are essentially three ways a criminal defendant can make bail one of which involves paying ten percent meltdown in that circumstance the statute provides that upon satisfying the bond conditions the person who pays that bail is charged a ten percent fee there's a minimum involved you have to pay at least twenty five dollars there is now a maximum of one hundred dollars in mr platts case his bail was set at two million dollars he exercised the ten percent provision and paid down don't really matter here that much are challenging it's the rationality of one percent and we're charging it as applied because what makes it irrational is it has no bearing to the cost of what's being charged we allege the cost or less than one hundred dollars we don't take unless you for everybody right well it's true for people who paid let's say twenty five dollars we don't have any problem with that and that's what the skilled court decided us supreme court decision back particular plane wreck in that case wanted to ask him so the application facts didn't really matter there either correct so we really have a facial challenge or at least perhaps well they should challenge thousand dollars to process someone's will and that is what they were trying to recoup we would be hard pressed to say it's unreasonable to charge one hundred dollars so that's why i say it's not quite facial  but what we're saying is that certainly charging twenty thousand dollars we believe the coffee less than a hundred dollars is just too much across the lot for subsidy processors if it's too much across the line then that's a facial challenge with respect not an ass appl challenge because it doesn't matter how much it costs to process your client's bail or bond i should say excuse me ok so it's really a facial challenge no i disagree with that par because there are those who don't want a remedy just for him i don't really just for him but i don't want to me for everybody you want a remedy for everybody who's the bail was set at more than ten thousand dollars correct but not for those less than that so it's not so it's not  if you don't accept that and we don't we argue that because of the way the bail system works and because the two different things are and all the bail was set to assure that you choose shows at the trial the bail bond fee is supposedly there just to deal with the processing cost and there's no way to challenge that other than through a lawsuit right i think you're right about that the focus is on the analysis is wrong it has to be on the administrative fee not not the setting of the amount of  bail which is an entirely different question but that it's not going to advance your procedural due process argument very far because you're not asking for more process this is just a ministerial act there's nothing for anybody at the county level to do any county actor to do to calculate or determine whether the fee applies or doesn't apply it applies across the board yes sure and that and that realm is simply a matter of balancing the other two factors which is the private interest and the privateers twenty thousand dollars the government interested to recoup costs that we allege are less than a hundred ok all it that all it shows is that you're not asking for more process because a hearing will get you nowhere because the legal standard there's no legal determination or factual determination to be made at a hearing everybody gets assessed the fee yes so that's just a real fatal flaw in the procedural claim here what you're really complaining about is substance rational to have some people pay twenty thousand dollars and have some people pay twenty five dollars when there's no basis to distinguish the allegations in the case or that the cost of processing the billabong fees are same for everybody while charging a fee it's rational right that's which the supreme court found it did not buy you can protection the way they found that there was example people who were released on personal cognizance don't pay any fees and people who paid who put out ten percent do pay a fee what makes that clear why can you charge one group and not the other in the interest the people worst released on personal cognizance don't have any property they have to give to the perps off the hole for safekeeping they don't create the expense by doing that whereas someone who puts down can percent creates an expense by the clerk's office to do that and that's where the cream ranked that case didn't have anything to do with the amount of correct and then it also was a challenge that the classifications the broader classifications within the bail system and other merits personal recognizance bonding out with ten percent are paying the full cash why anybody would do the last thing i don't know that doesn't make any sense to me but so it's really a classification as between the other two and the court didn't say much about the substance of the fee cordin say administering the system and some merrily rejected that claim on that basis to the extent that shield had anything to do with a substantive claim it was very limited i grew that your hon and i think that sort of ties into the market to turn this case which this court had twice last time and or want decision i'm sorry which case marketed morcha market in it's not a recipe we all recognize we can't have that it's a booking fee and we kind of move the wall and that's what's happened in some of the other challenges that are cited in the briefs to be sort of bond type  of having gone fishing train results as we have here where you have an uncapped statute based on a percentage and that's what we did it was old back in the shield days the fee at issue there was seven and a half dollars so there wasn't much of a subsidy process are going to be made what an equal protection claim what is the classification that you're complaining about the statutory classification it's just a rational it's just a rational basis challenge but it's  not that they're not misclassifying people but it has an irrational result because the way it works there's no basis to charge that group of people anything any differently disparate impact claim and equal protection doctrine doesn't recognize discrete impact us well i think you're really again complaining about the substance of this it's a substantive different grounds even though he just only mentioned three ounce of ground on substantive and procedural due process as well as equal protection under the uniformity clause of the illinois constitution i'd like to get to each of those  individual leave but before that i'd like to just discuss a few things that i think are important in analyzing this case can textually so the first thing to consider which is talked about extensively in the illinois supreme court decision in children v q will is that this legislation was actually a progressive reform in one thousand sixty three when it was passed the idea of this legislation was to dispose of the bail bonds system where and individual in plaintive situation would likely have been responsible for giving the bail bondsman up to two hundred thousand dollars which would have been nonrefundable in exchange for that bail bondsman putting down the entire two million dollars in an effort to make the bail bond system less onerous on individuals pending trial the illinois legislature determined that it would be best for the court to administer that system the question here is not whether the government should operate such a system and whether there's a rational basis for the government to operate such a system and displace the private market that's that was part of the issue in the shell case and perhaps before the illinois supreme court in the shell case that's  seventy one although we're talking about now is the amount of the fee ok so your honor i suppose the reason i bring that up is because i do think that that plays into why there's a rational basis as for the fee i think that although that decision  first degree murder probable cause was found that the that he was could have committed first degree murder based on a bar fight and a two million dollars bond was assessed he was given the privilege of being released from jail and only having to put down two hundred thousand dollars in which case the government was taking on a rescue the risk of flight having only put down two hundred thousand dollars rather than two million dollars and if he were to flee there would be no way to recoup that i think it would open the floodgates to litigation and it may have a chilling effect on the legislature not wanting to invite those kinds of challenges so i would just keep that in mind as we go through the different claims  both there was a very limited due process claim yes and anika short shrift i think that and didn't deal with the amount of the fee sure and i'm not arguing that the reasoning of chilled implicate the fact that there's there's no fundamental right involved doesn't mean that the law can be irrational right the rational basis test which applies to all legislation doesn't apply to this statute i'm definitely not ar extent the supreme court has consistently held that rational basis is a differential test and if any any support can be conceived of that would provide a rational basis that has to be  is the percentage basis to not arbitrary in this context when you have bailed ranging from i don't know what the minimum bail in illinois is one hundred dollars may i don't know you know as high as many millions check and i think that the illinois court in show did discuss this ultimately the interest in the percentage based fee was to be able to recoup the costs that were lost in transitioning from the bail bond system that's forty years ago we're talking about now right and you now are well not and what i'll enjoy supreme court said on the matter of a federal constitutional claim really is irrelevant speak in positive terms to us so there's why is this not arbitrary right and this is going to be ministering the and then there's the necessity to recoup why wouldn't it be simple to assess one hundred dollars per person it is simple to administer to to administer a one hundred dollars fee per person but it's also simple to administer a one percent fee for person that one percent fee per person helps to recoup the cost of the court system operate on its simplicity may be rational why is that not arbitrary in this context it's not arbitrary because it's based on a variety of challenging that statute your honor but it gives the court discretion to set the amount well you're talking about the one percent across the board no matter what the bail amount is short and your honor i would argue that given the amount of risk both to the community as well as to the court system that they may potentially lose money on somebody who jumps they'll the one percent that is rational in and in order to spread the amount of ground so an individual who's charged with first degree murder pays more f valuable service than an individual like the individual in shell who is only charged with minor traffic violations isn't the risk of bail jumping a factor in the bail decision it's not i mean  ministerial across the board one percent there is no discretion right here right so so that the risk that a defendant may jump bail is accounted for in the bail decision that each judge makes in each individual case yes your honor but there's some case law to support the theory that the risk that an individual will jump bail is greater when that individual is utilizing the ten percent system because ultimately they have less to lose having only put down ten percent amount of the failed rather than the entire amount of the bail so for necessity to recover the cost and the risk based on that is a rational basis for the individual would be responsible for paying the entire or up to the entire two hundred thousand dollars to the bail bondsman so in this system it's actually more fair to your rest t i understand that there's a logical component that says charging one hundred dollars seems better than charging a percentage based ultimately that's a policy decision that should be made by the legislature it's not a judicial decision here we need to decide whether or not there was a rational basis can we that it only cost one hundred dollars to administer the processing costs of the system in our brief we discussed the fact that that's not the correct test that is more akin to heightened scrutiny i think it's telling that plaintiffs brief openly admits that he was unable to find any cases on point especially when it came to the substantive due process claim i was able to find i was able to find cases on point and those cases all dealt with heightened scrutiny cases of  first amendment fees that were imposed on first amendment interests so in south suburban realty there was a fee imposed on a for sale sign which was considered a commercial interest and it was held that that fee had to explicitly match or be closely approximated to the cost to administer the system right because that's how heightened scrutiny works right and so and so i'm saying if isn't arguing that the there has to be a precise fit but plaintiff does seem to be arguing that it's irrational where there is not match mostly to the one hundred dollars plaintive seems to be saying that to the extent that the courts determined that they should be able to use his feet to fund the entire system and recoup the costs to the court for individuals who jumped bail that's not the correct test but ultimately plaintiffs can't decide what the correct test is under differential ref rational basis review so to the first he seems to be just weighing the to the government versus the private interest which is not how the test operates and then to the extent he's not saying that he seems to be saying because there's no rational basis the procedure is there for that goes over several factors that ultimately determine the amount of bail and then under one ten six of the code there is the ability at any time during the proceedings to reduce the amount of bail and therefore feet none of that really matters because this is automatically applied there is no discretionary determination there's no legal standard to be administered it's just w ministerial matter so the remedy from a lack of an improper lack of process is more process nobody wants more process here but they want money right so ultimately i think that  with respect to the substitute process claim i think that the rationale just offered was essentially simple it's easy to apply a percentage and so that makes sense just do that and the problem with that is there has to be a rationale in the in the in the breach we give examples you could charge people based on the way you could charge based on percentage how much they weigh in fact that would come great the money to keep them from happening so you get some money back if you showed up they took the money away from to be a bondsman and give it back to the person who post