Law, Justice and Society Chapter 4

Why do we have the Federal and State courts for? The states courts are for the crimes that have broken the state law. Those kind of crimes are not as large as federal crimes. The state course most of the time deals with minis offences like tickets, Petty theft, battery and so on. The federal court is designed to deal with more major crimes like kidnapping, murder and so on. That does not mean that the state court does not deal with those kinds of cases they do but the federal court gets to deal with them first. The fifth amendment does not apply to the charges that the state and the federal court can put on people. For example if someone kidnaps somebody and takes them to another state and gets caught. The federal court can charge them and if they don't get a conviction the state court can charge them to and that does not break the no double jeopardy part of the fifth amendment. The part of the chapter that was the most interesting to me was all of the different kinds of bail there is in the court system. The first kind is R.O.R. which stands for release on own recognisance which means there is no money exchanged just a signature which stands for that the criminal will come back to court or when caught will pay a large fine. The second one is cash bonds which says that you pay the money and then when you come back to court you will get it returned to you. The third kind is property bond it acts like a cash bond but you give up the ownership of property and the property is worth twice as much as the cash bond. The fourth kind is bail bonds agent in this bond the person who got arrested pays the bail bonds 10% of their bail and then once you come back they get the money back and if they don't come back the bail bond goes after them and during the trial the criminal has to pay the entire 100% of their bail. The fifth bail is signature bond which is not just a signature it is a promise to return and the criminal does not return they get to pay the bail in full. The last kind of bail is 105 bail in which the person pays 10% of their bail and gets releases. Its kind of like bail bond agent just with out the agent. If the criminal does not return and gets caught they have to pay the other 90% of their bail and if they do return they do not get the 10% that they have paid before back. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmUfMqvcq2g this link shows how bail bonds work (has some bad language in this clip). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xoLagHFEcs This clip is a funny commercial for a bail bond agency. This chapter is the chapter that i learned the most from and i was interested in.