Keep Bailing

Santa Barbara County attorneys are attempting dismissal of a lawsuit filed by local bail bondsmen. The bondsmen’s suit alleges that Santa Barbara Sheriff Bill Brown, and others, prevented defendants in jail from making free phone calls to the Santa Barbara bail bonds companies, which resulted in a loss of business. But the attorneys’ motion contends that there is no legal basis for this suit.

Securus Technologies and Evercom Systems, companies that provide the Santa Barbara jail phone systems, have also been named in the suit. In May of 2007, Brown entered into an agreement with these two companies that allowed him to monitor, control, record, end and block phone calls made from the jail whenever he chose. Evercom paid his department a “signing bonus” of $80,000 in addition to giving it 50 percent of the money the collect calls brought in.

The bondsmen also say that the Sheriff’s Lt. Mark Mahurin willingly aided Brown in tampering with these free phone calls from the jail and that for three years, they also told new arrestees not to use the bondsmen’s services. Mahurin, according to the bondsmen, intended to increase the commissions his department received, and to increase the jail population, so that Sheriff Brown could then ask for funds to build a new jail!

Attorneys representing Brown’s office maintain that the plaintiffs’ allegations are “a scattered attempt to hold the county liable for an unsubstantiated decline in business.” They also say the bondsmen plaintiffs failed to list any actions by Brown and his cohorts that constitute a legal duty or a breach of duty.