failure to appear

[sharmom]

A bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Big deal what does that mean? I'll tell you what it means, hurry up and wait thats what it means. Does any body know the difference between a bench warrant and a judicial warrant? Besides the fact that it takes months to have a judicial warrant served.

[Admin]

As I stated in another thread, in my previous state, when a DBD (dead beat dad)failed support payments, the authorities, with warrant in hand, would come knocking at 4:30 am to drag their asses to jail until the payments were up to date.

As far as a "bench warrant" goes, I believe it is considered a passive warrant, where as should the person be pulled over for a traffic violation, or even a routine check point for substance or DWI checkpoints, when the license is called in the warrant will show, and he will be incarcerated even if nothing else was wrong, where as a judicial warrant allow police to impose themselves upon suspected living quarters, job locations, or actively pursue the person named in the warrant, and there also could b e the difference of taking them in for questioning, or actively searching their premises for supporting evidence to arm the DA with when he goes before the judge. I just went and checked and it is pretty much as I surmised, a standard warrant is actively pursued because enough evidence is present to bring a suspect up on charges and arrest them, also called an arrest warrant, the bench warrant is exactly as I described, no one will pursue them for failing a court date, but, should there be any other encounter with authorities of any level or department, will result in their being jailed until a bond is paid, to ensure they do not mis the next court date.

So with that in mind, all you need to do is have someone file ANY kind of complaint with the local police, and he will be arrested and detained until either the next court appearance required by him, or until the bond it met, and even then they are required to be held for twelve hours. This includes vehicle registrations, inspection stickers, even if he has a tail light or brake light out, and gets pulled over, he will be taken in.

Now I am not condoning doing anything unethical here, but as you can see, if you have another court date set, and know there has been a bench warrant issued, it shouldn't be too hard to legally get him picked up. If you happen to also have a restraining in effect, you could even take a walk or drive to inconspicuously get him with in violation of it, in the vicinity of say an officer patrolling a park or your child's school, or if he calls on the phone and you record it on your answering machine (many have remote instant memo recording features in them) you can then call that in and he will be picked up for violating it.

Hope this explains the difference!

Admin!

[sharmom]

Thank you, I understand better now and I think I made a mistake. I chose to go with the bench warrant rather than the judicial warrant. If it was explained to me better in court I would have made the choice to go with the judicial warrant. Is it possible to have a judicial warrant issued now or is it too late? He owes thousands and thousands of dollars now and I don't think a bench warrant is going to help me at this point. By the way he has another child now number 4 was born in August sometime. He hasn't called his two oldest children yet of course we don't now if it is a girl or a boy just know that the baby was born. Nice guy huh my grandkids don't know if they have another brother or a sister. It breaks my heart and I don't know what to say to them to make them feel better.