Gentlemen, we must protect our phoney-baloney jobs.

At least that is the takeaway I get from my wife's recent brush with the law in $COUNTY, which shall remain nameless for the protection of the innocent.  It is, in any case, NOT the county we live in...nor has my wife ever lived in $COUNTY, although she did work there briefly a long time ago.

Last week, my wife received an officious...er, make that "official"-looking letter from the $COUNTY Prosecutor, informing her that she was a deadbeat check-passer and that the $COUNTY Prosecutor was requesting that the state refile a warrant for her arrest for same.

Now, my wife used to be one of those folks who thinks that if they have checks left in the checkbook, they must have money left in the bank.  This has not been the case since we married and she was introduced to modern methods of accountancy.¹  She also had a somewhat laissez-faire attitude toward bills that she found herself unable to pay.  So this has meant, over the years, that we have occasionally received officious, er, sorry, "official" notices of back taxes not paid, or old utility bills not paid and sold to bill collectors for pennies on the dollar, etc.  One back tax notice was for failure to file in $STATE, where she lived for about three years, and where she would never have failed to file because she would have gotten a full refund...but I digress (and I think I may have opined about this particular idiocy before anyway).

But this is the first time she's been served with a warrant for passing a bad check.

Upon reading the particulars, we found that the alleged bad check was written CLEAR BACK IN 1998.  That is, well over a year before I met her.  Then, early the next year, the case was refiled and a warrant for her arrest issued, one assumes because they added "failure to appear".  In neither case did my wife receive service of the complaint, probably because she lived in $OTHERCOUNTY at the time (again, not the one we live in now) and it was probably served by mail...and who knows what address they sent it to.  If they sent it to her work address, the idiots she worked for at the time probably threw it away.  In any case, that's where matters sat for over 14 years.

Note that $BIGBOX, the retailer who accepted the check in the first place, also appears never to have tried to contact her directly.  I have heard in the past that $BIGBOX doesn't generally bother with that, they simply go to court immediately because it's not worth their trouble to collect on their own.  Again, I don't know if that's true, it's just what I've heard.

Comes now $COUNTY Prosecutor, who is apparently running for re-election according to $ATTORNEY, and has decided to clean out the courthouse attic so he can claim to his constituents to be Mr. Law and Order.  So my wife, who wrote a check for $MISDEMEANORAMOUNT, has sat here chewing her nails for the past few days whilst her lawyers contacted the court and found out what she had to do to avoid being perp-walked in $COUNTY² (and probably losing her job in the process).  This all concluded satisfactorily this morning when she went to court and paid for the check, the court costs, and the lawyer's fee, and promised the judge that she would be a good girl henceforward.

My question, though, kind of goes like this.

If a prosecutor timely issues a subpoena or a warrant for an infraction that has a statute of limitations, and then timely executes the subpoena or warrant, I have no problem.  But I do have a problem when 14 years elapses between the paperwork being filed and anyone in the prosecutor's office arsing themselves to do anything about it.  It seems to me that if you have a 10 year statute of limitations on the crime, then a like statute of limitations should apply to any subpoenas or warrants that are related to it that are not executed within that time (I mean, the statute would run for x number of years after the filings, not concurrently with the statute for the crime itself).  And it doesn't seem to me that service by mail is appropriate, either, because mail can become lost or misdelivered through no fault of the court or the defendant.  At some level the state needs to be prodded to do its job, not leave things hanging for years and then be able to, for little more than political reasons, revive them.  Perhaps I need to bring this to the attention of my state representative and senator.

And by the way, you may be wondering how she managed to never got picked up on an outstanding warrant.  She's been stopped a couple of times for things like her taillight being out.  (Not for speeding, she doesn't speed.)  She had an accident a couple of years ago when some idiot kid hit her in the ass at a red light.  She's had background checks run for her job.  Nothing ever came up about an outstanding warrant.  The prosecutor had to ask the state to refile the warrant because the copy they had was unreadable.  That's how fucked up this whole thing is.

The fact is that $BIGBOX is not getting their money, because they were paid what the original court filing demanded 14 years ago.  So inflation alone has destroyed any value inherent in the amount they will receive from the Clerk of $COUNTY.  Pretty stupid all around, and they upset my wife for no particularly good reason, since all they would have had to do was CALL US and we would have made it right.  This was never a case of they "couldn't" find her, either -- she has always had a current drivers license, and has filed taxes, and had bank accounts where the bank knew where she lived.  They could have found her at any time.  They just never tried.

But I did get to call her "my little Miss Demeanor" all week.  :)

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¹ I have always paid the monthly household bills, because I want the bills to be, like, paid.  I like having a roof over my head and heat and light and water and all those decadent modern comforts.  Sue me.  Well, don't.  I can't afford it right now.

² They did, in fact, threaten this when her lawyer contacted them.