In People v. The North River Insurance Company, the Supreme Court today resolves an intra-division Court of Appeal split about a statutory provision allowing a bail bond company to avoid a forfeiture when a bonded defendant doesn’t make a required court appearance because he has fled to a foreign country. The court’s interpretation is contrary to the bond company.
Penal Code section 1305(g) requires vacating a bond forfeiture if a fleeing defendant, although not in custody, has been “temporarily detained, by the bail agent, in the presence of a local law enforcement officer of the jurisdiction in which the defendant is located” and if “the prosecuting agency elects not to seek extradition after being informed of the location of the defendant.” The court today determines what happens if the prosecution hasn’t decided whether to extradite the defendant before expiration of the time for vacating the bail forfeiture.
The court’s opinion by Justice Kelli Evans is unanimous, although there is a separate concurrence. It holds “section 1305 does not authorize the trial court to compel the prosecution to make an extradition decision or require the court to continue the hearing date on the motion to vacate until the prosecution makes such a decision.” “[T]he extradition decision is in the prosecution’s sole purview,” the court states.
The court does not decide whether the statute gives a superior court the discretion to “extend the time for the prosecution to make an extradition decision by continuing the hearing on the motion to vacate.” But a concurring opinion by Justice Leondra Kruger, who signs the court’s opinion, advocates for how that issue should be decided. She writes, “The statute may not allow for indefinite tolling for prosecutors to make their decisions about whether to extradite, but when a fugitive is located during the appearance period, the statute is reasonably read to build in a limited period of time for prosecutors to decide what to do. The statute also permits (even if it does not require) the trial court to extend that time for good cause.”
The court also leaves open the issues “whether courts may rely on equitable tolling when there is evidence of error, bad faith, unreasonable delay, or other factors in the extradition decision making process” and “whether the prosecution’s failure to make an extradition decision can ever constitute a refusal to extradite.”
The court reverses the Second District, Division Eight, Court of Appeal’s published opinion, which had disagreed with an earlier Division Eight decision, People v. Tingcungco (2015) 237 Cal.App.4th 249, and with a portion of the Fourth District, Division Three, decision in People v. Ranger Ins. Co. (2007) 150 Cal.App.4th 638. The Supreme Court denied review in Tingcungco. There was no petition for review in the Ranger Ins. case.
