Bail Bond Rules in Marin County

I was recently in jail on a DUI in Marin and got out on my OR. I was arrested again in Marin and had to pay bail to get out. What’s the deal?

If you are arrested and taken to jail, the judge will review your case and decide whether or not to require bail in order to get you out of jail. If you have been arrested for the same crime on more than one occasion, some people would say that you are lucky to have been granted bail at all. After all, the judge probably took a look at your case and determined that you were not able to clean up your act after the first DUI arrest.

When a judge determines bail, he always has the option to deny bail, to set bail, or to let a defendant out of jail on his or her own recognizance. It sounds as if the first time you were arrested for a DUI, the judge saw that you probably had not yet had a criminal record, he determined that you would show up to court, and he decided to let you out of jail on your own recognizance.

Now, however, because you have a criminal record and repeated the same penal code violation, the judge determined that he would require you to pay bail in order to get out of jail. The bail amount is set on an assumptive bail schedule, which is a schedule that all counties in California use, including Marin.

The assumptive bail rate schedule is an approximate starting amount when it comes to establishing bail. In addition to this schedule, the judge will look at other issues of your arrest and your crime. If there was anything else that you were arrested for on this occasion, such as speeding and a DUI, the judge will increase the bail amount based on the double offense.

The judge also looks at the defendant’s criminal history (which you now have, thanks to your prior arrest), the attitude of the defendant (and whether or not the defendant appears to be a flight risk), and the nature of the crime for which the defendant has been arrested.

Any time you commit the same crime twice, even if the judge let you out of jail on your own recognizance the first time, you can expect that the judge would impose a harsher restriction on you the second time. Thus, it would make sense that the judge required you to pay bail pending your trial.