The phrase “bounty hunter” conjures images of “wanted” posters and gunslinging cowboys hunting fugitives in the Wild West — but the controversial profession is very much alive in modern-day America.
The industry, almost unique to the US, came under a renewed spotlight this week as the US Supreme Court refused to block a Texas law giving ordinary citizens the green light to sue anyone helping women access abortions.
Activists and politicians from street level campaigns to the White House have voiced alarm at the court’s break with 50 years of precedent in protecting nationwide access to abortion.
Photo: AFP
“In effect, [Texas] has deputized the state’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote.
Activists who fear the reform will metastasize saw the writing on the wall when the Texas Right to Life campaign, which has tip lines for people to anonymously report people, said it hoped to “replicate our success across the nation.”
Their concerns were confirmed when South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Republican, was among the first to suggest adopting the idea in her own state.
Bounty hunting spread across the globe from the Middle Ages, but is found almost exclusively today in the US and the Philippines.
Tristan Cabello, a historian specializing in US culture and politics, said that bounty hunting is a profession “deeply embedded in the American psyche ... that speaks to the most conservative of US citizens.”
The vast majority of bounty hunters make their living by rounding up fugitives who have skipped town in return for a share of the bail.
They say they provide a public service at no public expense.
However, the Texas abortion law has reignited debate on a job that can unleash freelance law enforcement personnel whose methods are often protected from local oversight.
US President Joe Biden on Friday told reporters at the White House that the Texas law amounted to “vigilante” justice that “sounds ridiculous, almost un-American.”
In one of the most high-profile recent incidents of citizen law enforcement gone wrong in 2017, two bounty hunters died in a shootout in a Greenville, Texas, auto dealership, along with the fugitive they were hired to apprehend.
Neither was wearing a bullet proof vest and they had not telephoned ahead to warn the business they were coming.
Reliable figures for the number of US bounty hunters are hard to come by, but the Professional Bail Agents of the US puts the number at 15,000, while the National Association of Fugitive Recovery Agents says the industry apprehends 30,000 fugitives a year.
Bounty hunters, their relationships with police and the rules they play by are something of a gray area — regulated by a patchwork of bewildering requirements that vary widely by state.
There is no how-to guide and most of the literature around the topic is made up of the self-promoting memoirs of its most high-profile practitioners, such as 68-year-old US reality TV star Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman.
Bounty hunters’ rights are still defined by an 1872 Supreme Court ruling that citizens chasing fugitives are not bound by constitutional norms that apply to “state actors” such as police officers.
In some states there is almost no regulation. Others allow “necessary” use of force for bounty hunters who drive imposing SUVs with blacked-out windows, armed to the teeth with guns, batons, pepper spray and handcuffs.
In a few states there is a complete ban or requirements for various levels of experience and training, as well as background checks.
Former assistant US attorney Ken White, who litigated civil and criminal cases for decades, sees the danger of the Texas law not in its tendency to expose people to reckless bounty hunters — but in the opportunity it presents for sanctimonious curtain-twitchers to harass their neighbors.
“Cops have a saying: ‘You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.’ Put another way, we may not be able to convict you, but we can arrest you and detain you, and put you through the system and make your life hell until your case is dismissed or you’re acquitted,” he said.
“It’s the same spirit here — the deluge of small harassing bogus civil cases may eventually lead to dismissals or defense verdicts, but the law is deliberately calculated to overwhelm anyone the Right thinks is connected to abortion with expensive, overwhelming litigation in which the mere process is destructive,” White said.
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