A recent story was published on AL.com regarding the number of people being jailed over failure to register or license their pet inthe city limits. However, upon further inspection, most of these jail sentences don’t result from the underlying charge of failing to register, but instead of paying fines/fees and missing court altogether.
Regardless of the nature of the offense, missing court is a recipe for disaster because it will almost always lead to the issuance of an arrest warrant. Some of these “failure to appear” warrants do not contain a bond because the defendant has already shown that he or she cannot be trusted to show up in court when they are supposed to. Please visit our firm’s blog post regarding active warrant, including failure to appear warrants and how to address them here.