Opinion ID: 1132505
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Extraction of Attorney Fees from Bail Deposits

Text: The commission found that petitioner's general practice was to extract from a defendant's posted bail the amount of money needed to satisfy the assessed attorney's fees whether or not the defendant requested or consented to same. The findings describe seven cases in which petitioner, between June 4, 1979, and September 22, 1980, ordered attorney fees paid from posted bail. Court records of those cases, confirming the findings, are in evidence. A deputy public defender testified that petitioner ordered attorney fees taken from posted bail without giving defendants any choice in the matter. He recalled only one instance in which petitioner asked if there were objections to the order; there, the defendant responded by objecting to the amount of the fee. A defendant in one of the cases described in the findings ( Hock ) testified that he was not asked if he objected to application of his bail money to attorney fees, and that if he had been asked, he would have objected. Petitioner testified that he never ordered bail money applied to attorney fees without the defendant's consent. [5] The masters' and commission's findings to the contrary are supported by clear and convincing evidence. (5) Petitioner now contends, however, that the following sentence in section 1297 authorized him to order bail deposits applied to attorney fees even without the defendant's consent: If the money [for bail] remains on deposit at the time of a judgment for the payment of a fine, the clerk must, under the direction of the court, if the defendant be the depositor, apply the money in satisfaction thereof, and after satisfying the fine and costs, must refund the surplus, if any, to the defendant. (Italics added.) [6] Petitioner argues that the costs which section 1297 authorizes the clerk to withhold from the refund of a bail deposit include the cost of legal assistance which section 987.8 (see fn. 1, ante ) empowers the court to order the defendant to pay to the county. The provision for satisfying the fine and costs has been part of section 1297 since 1872, and we do not think it was intended to refer to costs of legal services, which first became reimbursable to the county a century later under the initial enactment, in 1971, of section 987.8. Nonetheless, petitioner's argument has enough plausibility that if in fact he had relied on it in deducting attorney fees as well as the entire fine from bail deposited by a defendant, the reliance would not have amounted to misconduct. (6) In other respects, however, orders made by petitioner for application of bail deposits to attorney fees were clearly improper in the absence of consent by interested parties. In three cases ( Hock, Chavez, Stephens ) the bail money was applied to the entire amount of the attorney fee but only part of the fine. The defendant was thereby left with a balance of a fine enforceable by criminal sanctions, whereas use of the bail money to pay all the fine would have left simply an attorney fee balance, collectible only in the manner of a civil judgment. Such orders clearly violated section 1297's command that the clerk must ... apply the money in satisfaction thereof (necessarily referring to the fine); only then, after satisfying the fine and costs, is the surplus to be refunded. Another type of impropriety is seen in three cases ( Munden, Callaway, Garcia ) in which petitioner ordered attorney fees paid out of bail deposited by persons other than the defendant. Section 1297 provides that bail deposits must be returned to a nondefendant depositor on demand and authorizes no deductions. (See Rodman v. Superior Court (1939) 13 Cal.2d 262, 267 [89 P.2d 109].) Petitioner's testimony was that he would apply bail money furnished by a nondefendant depositor to attorney fees only with the depositor's consent. But the records of those three cases contain printed forms for Assignment of Cash Bail Deposit, signed by the depositors, providing only for application of the deposit to a fine, not to attorney fees or any other costs. Disputing the commission's finding that with respect to bail deposits he usually ordered attorney fees to be paid before fines, petitioner cites two instances in which he imposed fines and ordered attorney fees but required that only the fines be taken out of bail. But even those cases are consistent with petitioner's apparent aim of avoiding, where possible, any situation that would leave a defendant with an obligation to pay attorney fees unaccompanied by any other obligation that could be enforced through criminal sanctions. In one of these cases ( Fernandez ) on January 28, 1980, petitioner ordered a fine and penalty assessment totaling $380 payable as follows: $300 forthwith from bail, with the balance of $80 due on March 10. An attorney's fee of $50, however, was made payable on February 29. In the other case ( Warner ), on Friday, January 11, 1980, petitioner ordered a $250 bail deposit applied to the fine and ordered immediate payment of $100 for legal fees; the latter was paid on Monday, January 14. Finally, there is no evidence that petitioner relied on any particular legal theory when he made the orders to apply cash bail deposits to attorney fees without the defendant's consent or, where a third party had deposited the bail, the consent of that party. He testified that he always obtained that consent, but giving weight to the masters' resolution of testimonial conflicts and examining the pertinent exhibits, we conclude that during the period in question it was petitioner's practice not to obtain the consent, and that he engaged in that practice without regard to its legal justification.