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What is an open warrant?

On Behalf of | Mar 5, 2020 | Criminal Defense |

You could get an open warrant for a lot of things, whether it is committing a new crime or maybe you failed to appear for court. Those are the main ways you can get a warrant. According to Legal Beagle, once you have an open warrant, it means that law enforcement has the ability to bring you into custody and bring you to court. That could be a really big inconvenience, as you might imagine, especially for something as simple as a speeding ticket. You got a speeding ticket and did not appear for a court because maybe you did not even know about it, and now there is an open warrant to arrest you for a speeding ticket.

If you have an open warrant, the easiest thing to do is to call a lawyer in the jurisdiction that has the warrant against you. Why? Because having an open warrant is really going to open you up for problems. Even if the warrant is from another state, we are in a time where every county, every reach of the globe has a lot of Internet access. So you can assume that a warrant, even from a town somewhere across the country, is going to go into a national database. And so if you have got a warrant for a traffic ticket out of New York and you are in California minding your business, but you do blow a stop sign, they are going to see a warrant. They are going to arrest you on it, and you are going to be held up to 90 days.