The court system has launched a crackdown on who qualifies to post bail for criminal defendants, shutting out at least five bail bondsmen who over the years have posted bail for hundreds of defendants. The initiative is the latest effort by the court system to get a grip on the persistent problem of defendants ducking court, leaving their sureties and the court in the lurch.

The Nassau Guardian understands that the identified bondsmen are presently sureties for close to 100 defendants, whose families reportedly pay between 10 to 20 percent of the bail sum to secure their release. A 2014 amendment to the Bail Act precluded present sureties from posting new bail. But that provision remained unenforced until now.

However, the amendment was not the first effort at shutting down the unregulated bail bondsmen industry. A 2007 practice direction forbidding people from using the same land paper to post bail for different people went ignored, allowing the bail bonds industry to mushroom.

Attorney General Allyson Maynard-Gibson revealed an immediate and long-term shake-up aimed at closing "all gaps that had previously been exploited".

She said, "The 2014 Bail Act amendment precluded abuse in terms of sureties. Through the Swift Justice Initiative we have been removing inefficiencies in the system that have been exploited to the detriment of victims and to the detriment of the accused."

The Guardian understands that some years back the Office of the Attorney General brought an action against one of the bondsmen on the list.

The judge found that the bondsman had tried to use property that had been conveyed to someone else to post bail. According to sources, investigations have revealed that certain bondsmen have used land of negligible value on the Family Islands to post bail totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There have also been reports of bondsmen revoking a suspect's bail in order to use the property to post bail for someone else. A magistrate once banned one of the people on the list from signing future bail after the bondsman was unable to pay the bail sum after a client became a fugitive.

In other jurisdictions, bondsmen are required to have insurance in the event a defendant absconds. Maynard-Gibson said, "To any extent which sureties are improper or incorrectly or untruthfully advancing their status, we want to eliminate that."

A source said that restrictions on bail signing eligibility would not necessarily penalize indigent defendants, as they can ask the court to reduce the bail if unable to post the original sum. In the long-term, cross-agency checks will verify the values of land posted as security for bail.

"As we move to access across agencies, you can check with the Registrar General's Department and even the real property tax department to see in relation to the particular piece of property, what was the sale price or purchase, and also what was the declared price for real property tax purposes.  .

So there are ways, as we integrate, to cross-check these things," the attorney general said. "Whenever there's abuse, we're making every effort to stop it with an integrated response."

Maynard-Gibson said there are imminent plans to computerize the bail system in order to ensure that defendants are abiding by their bail conditions and that one person has not posted bail for multiple defendants. According to Maynard-Gibson, a pilot project for biometric reporting should come on stream within 30 to 45 days. This would take the bail application process online and the system would automatically reject a current surety in the database.

Once the surety is approved, the defendant will be fingerprinted and photographed. Not only will this prevent criminals from having someone else sign in for them, it would allow people who have previously been turned away for having no ID to sign in.

According to sources, the system will eventually be linked to the electronic monitoring system, so if a defendant violates curfew or is in a prohibited place, the system will be notified and bail revocation proceedings commenced. It is now a criminal offense to violate the conditions of bail.

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