You may not go to jail for pot possession in Austin, but you can’t ignore the ticket
It’s a beautiful December day in Austin, and Sue, a student at the University of Texas, wants to celebrate the end of the semester with friends at the Greenbelt. While relaxing in the 70-degree weather near a swimming hole, one of Sue’s friends lights up a joint. Sue doesn’t usually smoke pot, but she’s cutting loose today, so she closes her eyes as she takes a long drag off of the joint, the stresses of the semester exhaling out of her with the sweet smoke of her friend’s kindbud. She then opens her eyes, and her momentary relaxation gives way to full-fledged panic as she spots a uniformed police officer on a bicycle stopped on a nearby trail. The officer calls out for her to bring him the joint. Sue’s mind and heart race, as she remembers what happened to her older brother in their small town where he was arrested for marijuana possession and spent the night in jail.
The cop sternly warns Sue about the illegality of smoking marijuana: “This isn’t Colorado, young lady.” However, to her delight, he bikes off after handing her a citation that looks almost exactly like a speeding ticket. Sue can’t believe her luck in not getting arrested! Maybe she won’t even have to tell her parents. There’s a date listed on the ticket to report to “Justice of the Peace – Precinct 5” on December 22. Sue’s going to be back home for the holidays by then, so she later tosses the ticket on a stack of old books in her apartment, figuring that she can just deal with it when she returns to school in January for the spring semester.
Given that the ticket doesn’t look a whole different than a traffic citation, it’s understandable that Sue might think it’s no big deal. In reality, Sue’s offense is a class B misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to 180 days in the county jail and a $2,000 fine. Unlike most counties in Texas, where you’ll be cuffed and carted off to jail for anything worse than a class C misdemeanor traffic offense, Travis County is different. Here, the police are authorized to issue tickets for misdemeanor marijuana possession (four ounces or less), along with a few other class B misdemeanors (driving with license invalid, theft, graffiti, criminal mischief). These tickets are called “field-release citations” because the police release the defendants without booking them into jail. The rationale behind this policy is that arresting people takes several hours, resulting in fewer police officers patrolling the streets.
However, just because Sue received a citation doesn’t mean that she’s avoiding an arrest record. Instead, the arrest occurs during what is called a “jail walkthrough” when Sue reports to the Justice of the Peace at the time designated on her ticket. Below, I’ve outlined the steps of the process:
1. Report to Justice of the Peace – Precinct 5 (located at 1000 Guadalupe Street in downtown Austin) to receive paperwork and instructions about the walkthrough process.
2. Report to Pretrial Services in order to apply for a personal bond.
3. Return to the Justice of the Peace, who will magistrate the defendant, meaning that the defendant is informed about constitutional rights and the penalty range of the offense.
4. Obtain approval of the personal bond from the Justice of the Peace.
5. Report to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office at their bonding desk in the courthouse.
Upon reporting to the sheriff, Sue is officially arrested. The sheriff’s deputy would take her fingerprints and a mugshot. Sue would then be released from custody without ever being handcuffed. She would also receive a copy of her personal bond with a court date.
Following this “arrest,” Sue’s case would be assigned to one of the county courts-at-law, and her lawyer could then begin resolving your case by requesting discovery materials (offense reports, video/audio of the incident, etc.) and negotiating with the prosecutor.
Like many people issued similar citations, Sue doesn’t immediately realize the importance of reporting to the Justice of the Peace on the date and time designated on the ticket. This is a very bad idea because failure to appear results in an arrest warrant. There is no “jail walkthrough” for Sue if she is later arrested on a warrant, and the process of getting booked in and out of jail would take 12-24 hours. Her initial fear of spending a night in jail would become a reality.
Here’s what Sue should do immediately upon receiving the citation: contact an experienced attorney, such as Chris Perri Law, to assist her with the jail walkthrough process. An attorney can waive the third step of the process (magistration by the judge) in order to ensure that Sue is one of the first people to report to the sheriff’s office for the booking procedures. Often, Chris Perri Law can get somebody through the entire process in less than an hour. Without an attorney, the process can take up to four hours because there’s often a long line of people with similar tickets, and the sheriff’s office only has two deputies (at most) working on the walkthrough process at any given time.
Chris Perri Law also would assist Sue in resolving her case in a manner that leads to an eventual expunction of her arrest record. Even though Sue might feel like she was never arrested because the jail booking procedure was so quick, information about the offense is automatically forwarded to the Department of Public Safety (DPS), who enters it into their crime records database. Background checks will reveal the incident unless Sue successfully expunges the records of the arrest. Given that she’ll be graduating from UT and on the job market in a few years, it’s very important that Sue hires an experienced attorney who knows how to ensure that her arrest record from this incident is ultimately wiped clean.
***Sue is not a real person.