Bad Court Jurisdiction Is An Easy Dismissal In Arizona Criminal Cases – R&R Law Group

Sometimes you’ll get a traffic ticket or you’ll get a court date and you’ll just miss it, you’ll just forget about it. You’re busy with your family, you’re busy with your job, whatever it is, you happen to miss your court date. Now, the court has issued a warrant for your arrest and they’ve suspended your license.

So, what can you do? Well, some people will ask us, “Well what if I just continue to ignore it.” You can do that, you can continue to ignore it. Nothing’s going to happen to your case.

There’s no expiration date for a warrant. A warrant just puts the case on hold. It’s saying, “This case has been charged, “it’s going to be pending.” But there is no statute of limitations or anything like that on it. It’s basically saying, “We’re going to put this case on hold “until this individual makes contact with the court, “or that person is arrested “and brought in front of the judge.”

So it stops the case. Everything is done. So, we’ve had people come to us with warrants from 20 years ago, the case still exists. Just because it’s been 20 years doesn’t mean that the case gets thrown out. Now, 20 years later, that officer may not be around, anybody who was involved in the case at all may not be around or they may have moved jobs, or retired, or passed away, who knows, but the case is still there.

The court is still going to wait for that individual to make contact with the court so the case can continue to progress. The other big issue is that when you have a warrant, it suspends your license, and Arizona is a state that notifies all of the other states.

So, I can’t tell you what other states are going to do with that, but Arizona, as soon as the Arizona Motor Vehicle Department knows that you have a warrant, the court notifies the MVD. As soon as the MVD notices that, they’re going to send that information around to throughout the rest of the country. So if you’re driving in Texas or California or some of these other states, they may or may not have an issue with that, it depends on the charge, it depends on specifically what they want to do with it, but some of them, they won’t have an issue with it and you should be free to drive until you have to go to renew your license.

Then, when you do that, then they’re going to have an issue. They’re going to say, “You have to clear up that warrant “out of Arizona.” Some other states, it’s immediate. We’ve spoken with people from other places like Colorado, or Oregon, or Seattle, or Washington, and the license suspension is essentially immediate.

It just kind of depends on how the MVD’s and how the states are communicating with one another, but obviously that’s a big problem. If you miss your court date and you want to ignore it, at some point you’re going to have a licensing issue when you’re out of state.

There’s what’s called an interstate compact, the states communicate with one another and so you’re not going to be able to just leave Arizona and get around it forever.

The way that you quash a warrant, or the way that you deal with a warrant, is by quashing a warrant. It’s called a quash with a Q.

Some people say “squash”, which is not. That’s a delicious vegetable. But what we’re talking about here is quashing a warrant. You want to take that warrant and quash it. You want to revert the case back to as it would have been if you had not missed your court date.

So we want to take it back and say “this is what happened. “We’re sorry that the court date was missed, “it was an oversight. “There was a medical or family emergency. “Something happened where that court date was missed, “but now, we’re reaching back out. “We want to rectify the situation. “We want to reestablish contact with the court.” Generally, in a criminal case, it depends on the charge as to whether or not the court is going to automatically quash that warrant or if they’re going to require something of you.

Many judges and depending on the length of the time, the length of time that the warrant has been active, some judges may want you to come back and personally appear in court, or they may want you to post a bond.

So they may say “okay since you live out of state “and you have missed your court date, “we want you to post a $2000 bond “or a $5000 bond for a smaller misdemeanor case.” If this is a felony, in order to basically get that warrant quashed in a major felony case, you’re going to have to come back.

You’re going to have to post a bond. You’re going to have to post a lot of money to secure your appearance, or if it’s something that’s very basic, like the summons, the notice of your felony case was sent to the wrong address, you can just quash that warrant pretty quickly and just reset it for your initial appearance.

This happens all the time where they’ll mail a summons to somebody’s wrong address.

So there’s a lot of different variables, as to how judges will treat a warrant case and so you should definitely consult with an attorney. If you decide you have a warrant and you want to see what’s going to happen in it, but generally it’s going to require one of a couple of things.

One, you personally appear. Two, you post a bond. Or three, you have a very good cause or you have an attorney to explain that cause on your behalf. In our experience, judges like to see that you have a lawyer on it.

They generally know who we are. They know that we are reputable. They know that we’re local. They know, they’ve dealt with us before and so as soon as they see that we’re representing you, they quash the warrant.

They may not even require you to post a bond depending on the nature of the charge. So the solution to having a warrant, you need to file a motion to quash the warrant. If they’re suspending your license, which they will be, you want to ask them to lift the suspension on your license as well. It’s called a motion to quash. Quash with a Q not squash with an S. Quash the warrant, and ask the judge to revert the case back to as it would have been had you not missed that court date. So ask them to reset an arraignment for you, or vacate the arraignment and schedule it for a pretrial conference the next court date, or a status conference in a felony case.

It really depends on what is the charge that you’ve been charged with and what you want to ask the judge to do, but you have to quash the warrant in order for the case to be reopened. So I hope you found that helpful.

If you have any questions about the process, if you’re facing a warrant and you want to get it resolved quickly, We move very quickly on these cases,

So, from the time that you bring us on board to help, we can generally have a warrant, a motion to quash filed that same day, but sometimes it is, it can take ten days for the government to respond to that motion.

Sometimes it takes a while depending on the judge to actually quash the warrant and read it. Some small jurisdictions move slowly and it just sits on the judge’s desk for a little bit. That’s about as good as we can do. We can expedite the motion.

We’ve got a lot of good contacts with judicial assistants and bailiffs and other people who work in the courts to say “hey, we need you to nudge that judge a little bit “and get them to make a ruling on our motion to quash, “because this person’s coming back into the country “and they can’t get in. “Or this person needs to drive to work “and they gotta get this warrant quashed “so they can get their license back.” There are ways that we get it done quickly, but if you have a question about it, feel free to call our office on any type of a warrant case.

We’re happy to sit down with you and review your options. Thanks for watching.