People are required to come to court when they are sent a summons or when they have received a subpoena or are ordered by the court to appear.  If they do not come, several things can happen.  The court can issue a bench warrant for the arrest of the person or the court can order that they be summoned again. If they are the defendant and a bond has already been set,    the Failure to Appear will stop the speedy trial clock from running until the defendant comes before the court again.  It is possible that a new charge can be filed if a person fails to come and is out on bail.  The charge is Bail Jumping.   Yes, several things can happen and usually none of them good.

Last week there were a couple of cases in the Appellate Courts that involved the question of what can happen when people fail to show up as required.

In the first case, the first time the witness did not show up without a good reason for being absent, the trial was rescheduled.  The next time the same witness did not show up for the rescheduled trial, the judge dismissed the case.  The appeals court decided that the court did not abuse it’s discretion in deciding to dismiss the case.  In the second case, the Appeals court also ruled the court did not abuse its discretion when the court granted the third continuance after a witness failed to show up in response to a subpoena.  These were similar situations, but the court did different things.  Both of these decisions were found to be correct, because there was a basis for the decisions.

People sometimes have the notion that everyone is treated by the court in the same way.  While usually true, these cases stand for the proposition that courts have discretion to decide things in different ways. When faced with similar situations, the facts of one situation may lead a court to do one thing and different facts may lead a court to do something else at another time. The situations may be similar, but the right thing may vary from one situation to another. This is the discretion.

When a court’s decision is questioned by an appeal from one side or the other, the Appellate courts look at the record to see whether the trial judge was giving consideration to the situation.  The Appeals court is not so much looking to see if the actual result was correct, but whether the court considered the situation and then decided. It is not so much about what decision the court made, but how the court reached the decision.