Legal Question in Criminal Law in Texas
If I was not arrested, given a ticket or citation how can I be charged with a crime?
2 Answers from Attorneys
Charges can be filed after the alleged incident. The officer presumably has your contact information.
Ms. Henley's correct. This isn't done very often, but sometimes circumstances arise where it's not really clear initially what should be done--perhaps it's a grey area of the law (or confusing to the officer), or there is additional information to be obtained before making the decision whether to prosecute. If it's a situation where a decision needs to be made by a prosecutor or grand jury after some additional investigation, sometimes it just works better to get everything looked into that needs to be, get the case filed, and have the court the case is actually filed in issue the warrant. Doing it that way actually can benefit the potential defendant--sometimes the practice can end up weeding out bad cases early on, before there's ever any arrest or criminal case filed, rather than dismissing them later. That ends up being kind of a no harm, no foul situation, instead of the more common practice of arresting first and asking questions later (which leads to a criminal record where, even on a quick dismissal, you'd have to deal with the hassle and expense of getting the case expunged later). The only reason you'd be in any worse shape doing it this way is that if you have some plausible defense, if some time has passed, your witnesses and evidence don't usually improve with time. Hopefully that's not an issue with your case--good luck.
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