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Laos_Macen wrote:If there are arrest charges in the wanted it's a warrant and yes, they must be arrested.Bladeraven wrote:This is fine and well for people who have unpaid overdue fines and haven't had a charge added to their record yet.(4)02. Failure To Pay A Fine ↑
A person who fails to pay a fine or court ordered fee within clearly stated and allotted time period.
A person CAN be given the opportunity to pay all fines in lieu of being arrested when being approached.
- Penal Code (4)02 is a misdemeanor punishable by 15 minutes imprisonment. This falls under Officer Discretion.
However...
How does this relate to arrest warrants that have already been filed and 402 charges that have been applied to the MDC for the arrest of the subject? Does the officer serving the warrant HAVE to arrest them at that point (as it IS a warrant, not just an unpaid fine) or can the officer serving the warrant offer them the chance to pay the fines? Serving an arrest warrant that someone else made for 402 is different than just pulling someone over and seeing that they have an unpaid overdue fine with no charge added yet. If someone else wrote the arrest warrant, I am not comfortable giving them the option to pay the fine, as the person making the warrant may have intended for their arrest. Conversely, if I have to make an arrest warrant for someone who failed to pay a fine, I am not comfortable with some other officer letting them pay the fine and not arresting them (essentially cancelling my warrant...) on the charge that -I- filed. It says 'officer discretion' but if there is an arrest warrant, it doesn't clarify which officer's discretion it is... the one that made the warrant, or the one that is serving the warrant.
This should be clarified before the code is effective or it -will- cause confusion for currently existing warrants.
Bladeraven wrote:Not to bring up a dead issue, but there is another problem which has recently surfaced regarding this.
If a deputy or officer issues a citation, is another deputy or officer legally allowed to make an active outstanding warrant (not an arrest, a warrant FOR arrest) on a citation that THEY did not originally issue? This is popping up lately and is important. They were allowed to do it before the officer discretion change, but now that the officer discretion and option to pay is in play, it complicates the issue of people filing warrants on someone else's issued tickets.
Example:
1. I issue a ticket to Bob Dole.
2. Another deputy sees that he failed to pay his fine on time but he has not actually encountered the guy.
3. That deputy (not me) issues a warrant for failure to pay a fine referencing the fine that I issued, not him.
4. Now people are obligated to arrest him without consulting with me, the fine issuer, to see if I wanted a warrant posted or not.
If not, I would recommend a formal change to the charge stating something like "While any law enforcement officer may arrest an individual who has overdue fines when they encounter them, an outstanding warrant/charge demanding that individual's arrest may only be filed by the person that issued the original citation at their discretion. If an arrest warrant/charge has been filed for an overdue fine by the person that issued the fine, the individual must be arrested and the option to pay the fine to avoid arrest no longer applies unless the person that filed the warrant/charge agrees to cancel the warrant/charge to allow the individual to pay the fine in lieu of arrest." This can obviously be shortened/simplified, but I wanted to make sure I get what I'm saying across.
This would clarify the issue on Failure to Pay warrants. It would prevent people from letting someone go on someone else's warrant and it would stop people from filing a bunch of arrest warrants on citations they had nothing to do with, under letter of IC law. It basically puts what you and I discussed, and what I just suggested in this post, into IC law. This is something that is currently relevant because people are issuing warrants on citations they had nothing to do with in the first place and there is nothing currently written in the Penal Code to prevent that. Further, there is nothing formally written in the Penal Code clarifying that officer discretion on Failure to Pay no longer applies when there is an active warrant for that charge and some people have used that to cancel warrants that they didn't file in the first place just because the suspect paid their fine when the warrant was being served. It may be implied, but people aren't seeing that and it needs to be clarified under letter of law in my opinion because people keep doing the wrong thing without realizing it.
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