What happens if you don’t show up to court. In addition to being an attorney, I also do serve as the municipal judge in Chelsea. So I saw this from both sides of the fence.
In the context of criminal court, whether you’re talking district court or whether you’re talking about a municipal court, including, by the way, courts not a record.
If you fail to appear when you’re ordered to appear for a criminal matter, what will happen is that the court will issue something called a bench warrant. A bench warrant is a board for your arrest and detention pending your appearance before that court.
Now what’ll happen is, and this is what happens in my court, is that I will get a list of people who failed to appear for the last hearing together.
And the court clerk will prepare arrest warrants for each and every one of them. And then they’re presented to me for my signature. And there’s typical, there’s going to be a bond set.
Many times it’s a cash bond, which means that you can’t hire a bondsman. You have to pay in cash. That’s not always the case, but it can be. And you’ll have to either hire a bondsman or pay money, you get out of jail.
In Oklahoma, the bond is basically, exists for the purposes of securing your appearance in court. And when you fail to appear in court after being ordered, the court will order a higher bond in the hopes of either holding you in jail or at least giving you a very good incentive to show up next time. It’s routine that district court judges will triple your bond or raise it even more for a failure to appear.
So it’s very important to show up in criminal court if you’re ordered to be there unless you have an attorney and that attorney has specifically advised you that you don’t need to be there. And it’s usually a good practice to be there anyway even if they tell you, you don’t have to.
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