perience has been, on the whole, that very few persons admitted to bail fail to appear for trail. In the United States, however, this close relationship has generallyyielded to a distant impersonal connection the more obligation has become in the main afinancial one. More often than not the sureties on a bail bond are surety companies andprofessional bail bondsmen who operate on a broad scale and charge fees for theirservices which may not only be large but also irretrievable regardless of whether theaccused appears. Under the traditional view taken in England, bail is not a mere contract of suretyship and the accused is not allowed to indemnify the bail. In fact it has been held that any arrangement between the accused and his sureties to the effect that he will indemnify if he absconds is so contrary to public policy that it is void as an agreement and, moreover, is indictable as a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. This viewcontrasts with that taken in the United States where an express agreement by the principal to indemnify the surety on forfeiture of a bail bond is not so regarded. Thus, in a Supreme Court case, where the argument was made that it was contrary to public policy to authorize a principal to contract to indemnify his sureties in a criminal case sinceit would destroy the effective safeguards provided by the interested watchfulness of thebail, Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated: "The ground for declaring the contract invalid rests rather on tradition than on substantial realities of the present day. It is said that...nothing should be done to diminish the interest of the bail in producing the body of his principal. But bail no longer is the "medium" although a trace of the oldrelation remains in the right to arrest. The distinction between bail and suretyship is pretty nearly forgotten. The interest to produce the body of the principal in c...
