Outstanding Warrant Appears in Court after 37 Years
A man was in court recently on an outstanding criminal warrant from a driving to endanger charge that happened in 1974, 37 years ago.
The warrant appeared when the man went to conduct some business at the Rhode Island DMV, as he lives there and has a Rhode Island driver’s license.
According to the Globe, the man, now 60, appeared in the Attleboro District Court to get the charge dismissed. Since establishing evidence of a case this old is virtually impossible, a judge dismissed the case for $100 in court costs. The judge noted that half the people in the courtroom had not been born at the time of the incident.
It is absolutely true that outstanding warrants for failure to appear in court on a criminal charge can and do show up decades later. Particularly, in cases like this, where a person has a driver’s license in a different state from that of the old warrant.
The good news is that it is often fairly easy to get these matters cleared up. Evidence in the case is gone, the police officers involved have likely long since retired, and the underlying charge simply can’t be proven.
However, that doesn’t mean it can’t still be a problem for you. Technically, this man had been a fugitive from justice for decades. If he’d been found by the police, and if they’d found the warrant in their computers as the Rhode Island registry did, he could have been arrested on the spot.
If you have an old warrant that you think could come back to haunt you (and it probably could!), it makes sense to deal with in proactively. Doing so can be relatively painless, and can save you a lot of headaches if and when the law catches up to you at an inconvenient time.
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