Legal Question in Criminal Law in California

If you were given a ticket (citation), you received it. Your assertion "The ticket never arrived," therefore, is nonsense. You would have signed the ticket, which is a promise to appear in court on the date listed on the ticket. If you blew off court, there's a warrant for your arrest out there. You could have an attorney or bail bond agent check this for you. You can run your own "background check" from any of a number of commercial vendors to see what information, if any, is coming up. I would go to lexisnexis.com and search on how to obtain your own report, they are a specialty credit reporting agency and they operate databases such as Remiss, a database of people who are convicted of, or who admit to, committing retail theft. Under the law you have a right to receive the data a CRA has on you once a year. It is also possible that there is no adverse information about you in the various databases, and the reason you can't get a job is because the economy stinks. Best of luck.

I agree with Mr. Stone. The ticket "arrived" when it was handed to you. That ticket should have provided the information of where and when you were supposed to go to court.

You now get to go to court and confirm whether or not you have an arrest warrant for failure to appear.

To properly handle a warrant, you must turn yourself into the court issuing the warrant, with or without an attorney, and try to negotiate a recall of the warrant and a plea bargain on the new �Failure to Appear� charge, negotiate bail or OR release, and then negotiate or take to trial any outstanding charges that caused the warrant. Doing so voluntarily will result in a better outcome than being brought in cuffs to court after arrest on the warrant.

If serious about hiring counsel to help in this, and if this is in SoCal courts, feel free to contact me.