Whenever you are arrested, you are either held until you go to trial or are bonded out to await that trial. In some cases you can just pay the bond amount, or a portion of it, yourself and be released on your own recognizance or have a bondsman post your bond for you. In any event, the bond is your promise to appear at your next hearing. When you fail to appear for that hearing, you not only break your word, you forfeit your right to your bond money (no matter what the source of the money was) and you commit a further crime.

Consult a Gainesville defense attorney, if you are being accused of failure to appear, whether you did so on purpose or it was an accidental oversight on your part. Maybe you wrote the date wrong on your calendar or you were in the hospital on that date; you will still be charged with failing to appear and must explain the reason in addition to answering to the original charges. The more serious that charge is, the more important it will be to show up for all scheduled appearances on time and be represented by a Gainesville criminal defense attorney.

If you are being charged with failure to appear it can technically be included as an obstruction of justice charge with the penalties determined by the seriousness of the original charge as well as other factors. If you called in the following day to explain why you were not in court for instance, you may not be as penalized as you would be if a month goes by and you are charged with a new and unrelated charge.

A failure to appear charge can quickly go from being a simple, finable charge to a major crime that will involve jail time if you do not take care of matters as quickly as possible. Do not compound matters by not appearing at your court hearings. Your criminal defense attorney will explain what to expect from your hearing and what can happen if you do not show up.

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