Houston bail bonds for traffic tickets can be a little confusing.
Our clients call us and say that they have traffic tickets in Houston or sometimes they say they have traffic tickets in Harris County.
Harris County Texas has a lot of different city courts scattered throughout the county and 16 different Justice of the Peace Courts. Unfortunately the information to find open warrants in all of these specific courts is not located in one data base.
Therefore, in order to find out if a person has an open warrant for a traffic ticket we first ask if they have any idea as to where they were to appear in court. If they remember which police department issued the citation it makes it much easier to get the information. We get lucky once in a while and the person will still have the original citation so that we can determine where an open warrant might exist but most of the time we must search where we can in order to be of some help.
After a search is made we can usually find where a warrant exists, however without knowing for sure where a person was ticketed it is possible to post bail bonds and have warrants removed for a specific court only to find out later on that another warrant was in existence and a bail bond was not posted simply because we did not know that it existed in the first place.
I bring this up in this blog post because I was contacted this week by a client and she was upset because she thought that she had taken care of all of her traffic warrants with us and was surprised when she was pulled over and a police officer informed her that she had an outstanding traffic ticket warrant. Luckily the officer did not arrest her, instead he told her to take care of it or the next time she would probably not be so fortunate.
She thought that we were at fault and that we had not posted the bonds for her.
I asked her if she had taken the bonds to the court after she left our office and she indicated that she had so she shouldn’t have any open warrants. I explained to her that if she took the bonds to the court then she would be correct in assuming that those warrants had been removed and I was able to look those particular cases up for her and determined that those warrants had in fact been removed.
She then said that the officer told her that her warrants were with a Precinct in Harris County. The problem was that we had not posted any bail bonds for her for any Justice of the Peace Courts which would be a precinct warrant.
We always check for warrants where we can online and a typical search is done with the City of Houston Municipal Court and with all Harris County Justice of the Peace Courts. In order to search for warrants in all other courts we must call the court and speak directly with them, which is why it is so important for the client to have some idea of where they think they might have a warrant.
The problem was that when we had checked for her the Justice of the Peace warrant was not yet in existence. This can happen because many of the Justice of the Peace courts will not issue a warrant immediately after a person fails to appear. In fact some Justice of the Peace Courts will not issue a warrant for several months after a person fails to appear. Some Justice of the Peace Courts will go ahead and accept a bail bond even though a warrant has not been issued and others will not, so as you can see it can get very confusing.
The only obvious answer is to always be proactive and not let things sit. Most bail bond companies in Houston will work with you, (we will), so if you miss a court date make a few phone calls and find out what can be done. In many cases the warrant or the possibility of a warrant can be taken care of quickly and easily.