Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given - Duane Dog Chapman [6]
It was so crazy that for a moment, I thought I was being Punk’d.
But I wasn’t.
They had what looked like a valid warrant for my arrest but no search warrant. They only had the essential paperwork to take me into custody. My first inclination was to run. Jump. Go out the back door, down the street, head toward the beach and disappear. I was innocent. Not everyone who bolts is guilty. Some are overwhelmed by the system, others are just plain scared. The warrant they had expired in twenty-six days. I actually believed that if I could run out the clock, then everything would be fine. But then I began to worry about Leland and Tim. Had they already been taken into custody? I wasn’t about to let my son and brother from another mother take the fall alone. No, I was the leader of this gang. I had to stand tall and hold my head up with dignity. So I got dressed and let the feds take me in.
The law is very specific about setting bail in these types of situations. The bottom line is that there is no bail for a fugitive wanted on kidnapping charges who fled another country. The only way I could get out of the federal prison they put me in was to prove special circumstances, which is a phenomenally tough thing to prove. Brook Hart, my lawyer in Honolulu, never wavered. He was able to convince the judge that Leland, Tim, and I were not flight risks. We had no place to go. Somehow, he got the judge to agree. A day and a half later, I was released on a $300,000 bond while the boys each had a $100,000 bond. When I asked why mine was so much more than theirs, Beth just laughed.
“Oh, right,” I said. “I am the leader of this gang.”
We were ordered to wear electronic monitoring ankle bracelets so that we weren’t tempted to run. I hated wearing that thing around my ankle, but I detested bounty hunting with it on even more. It was hell booting in doors wearing a monitoring device that made me feel like the people I was chasing. If a fugitive caught a glimpse of it, he’d rib me for it. I took a lot of crap for having to wear that thing. And it was ironic that I was now wearing an ankle bracelet just like the one Luster broke out of when I began my hunt for him. A judge finally agreed all three of them could be removed in November so we could go back to work, doing things the way we used to. The week that bracelet came off my ankle, I caught my first jump in months. It felt good to bust out my rusty cuffs.
From the beginning in 2003, there was a lot of confusion in our case. We were referred to a lawyer named Bill Bollard, who came highly recommended to us through some friends who worked at Dateline NBC. He handled all of their Mexican-American cases. They sent me a videotape of Bollard in an interview so I could see what he was like before meeting and then making my decision about hiring him. I liked what I saw. He was a clean-cut man of Mormon faith. I thought he seemed secure, stable, and honest. I could get by with that type of guy handling my case. At least I thought I could. I hired Bollard and his Mexican co-counsel Enrique Gandara to handle the charges still pending in Mexico, while I had Brook Hart, the lawyer I knew from Hawaii, heading up the extradition case in the Hawaii federal court.
Brook Hart was set to argue our case to the federal judge in Hawaii, to prove that the only charge we faced in Mexico was “deprivation of liberty,” which was just a misdemeanor. There was a lot of confusion and rumors as to whether the court documents had been translated incorrectly somewhere in the chain between Mexico and Hawaii and interpreted “deprivation of liberty” as “kidnapping,” which is a felony and an extraditable crime. Several hearings took place from October 2006 through February 2007 and my legal team argued my case and why I should not be extradited to Mexico on the lesser charge. Despite