Failure To Appear Fees
When you miss your court day for minor traffic violations, often times you may be reminded of your oversight by a letter sent by NC Division of Motor Vehicles. This letter typically warns you of a pending date for which your NC driving privilege will be revoked if you don't handle the issue. Or maybe you just remember all of sudden, I forgot my court date! When this happens more than 20 days after the missed court date, the Clerk of Court enters a failure to appear fee on the file, and it adds a healthy $200 fine on top of court costs and any other fine the citation would require.
Often times people will find out that they won't get arrested and they try to go get the citation reset to a new court date. What they don't realize is that the $200 fee stays, even after a district attorney resets and gives you a new court date. There is only three ways to clear that failure to appear:
1. get a dismissal (least likely unless its a really old ticket or some other odd circumstance)
2. Pay the extra $200 on top of the ticket itself
3. Have a judge sign a strike order to waive the FTA fee
Number three is the solution we use most of the time, and it saves you a lot of headache, probably justifying the attorney fee in and of itself. However, this solution may not always work. Whether or not you can get this failure to appear fee stricken depends on the district you are in (most counties it's possible, but some absolutely will not do it unless there is a showing of court personnel error that caused the missed date), and what the circumstances surrounding the missed date are.
Each county in Western NC handles failures to appear differently, and you would be best served in this situation to contact a knowledgeable traffic attorney in Asheville to handle saving you the time expenditure, effort, and dollars that failure to appear fees can cause. Let me see if I can get your failure to appear fee waived, and save you the time and headaches as well!
Call an experienced Asheville Speeding Ticket Lawyer Today: