If you are officially charged with a crime and you are awaiting your hearing, the judge may grant you early release if you have a bail bondsperson bail you out. The amount of bail that the judge sets is not the only amount you will eventually pay, however, and you may think that additional charges are illegal. Unfortunately, (for you) extra charges on the bail bondsperson's end are quite legal. Here are some other things a bail bond service and its owner can and cannot do.
Track You down If You Run
Your bail is a guarantee by the bond service that you will appear in court. The money put up for your bail comes out of the bondsperson's business account. That means he or she has a vested interest in bringing you into court or he/she may not get his/her money back. If you run, the bondsperson has every right to track you down by whatever means necessary. That also means that if you flee the country, the bondsperson can inform the courts what country, flight, and border crossings you have made, in case the courts are interested in an extradition procedure or want to make you "public enemy #1" by plastering wanted posters of you everywhere.
Place a Bounty on Your Head
A bondsperson cannot officially place a bounty on your head. There are other organizations that can legally do that. However, the bondsperson can chase after you, capture you and collect the bounty offered. He or she needs a bounty hunter's license to do this, otherwise the capture and payment falls to someone else who does have a bounty hunter's license. Quite often, though, a bondsperson has a bounty hunter's license as well, since "runners" equal lost money and it motivates the bondsperson to capture the suspect and regain some or all of the lost bail money via the bounty on the suspect's head.
Use Excessive Force to Capture You
This differs by state and is often a case-by-case situation. If you were charged with serial counts of violent murder, the courts may allow excessive force to apprehend you. If there is a warrant for your arrest because of a stack of unpaid traffic tickets and you are not carrying a weapon at the time of your apprehension, then the bounty hunter/ bail bondsperson may not use excessive force because you do not pose a threat or danger to the public or the person apprehending you. (You can actually sue for excessive force if the courts did not allow it and you were unarmed and non-threatening at the time of your recapture.)
