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Skipping a court date in Baxter County is about to get more expensive than a phone call from a bondsman.
At Monday’s criminal docket call in Baxter County Circuit Court, Circuit Judge Andrew Bailey kept calling names and getting no answer. He told the courtroom the number of people failing to appear had become unacceptable.
“This is getting ridiculous and we’ve got to fix this problem,” Bailey said.
He said something had to be done to convince people that showing up matters, and that from now on, not showing up would carry consequences.
Several people who missed the morning call were tracked down by representatives of bail bond companies and eventually turned up. Bailey asked each of them what had kept them away.
Some pointed to work. Some said they had no way to get there. Two said they had so many cases in so many different courts that they could not keep the dates straight.
Bailey did not accept any of it. He said the importance of appearing in court outweighed every excuse offered.
One woman apologized to the court. Bailey said he appreciated it and asked her to tell others that the way the court handles no-shows is changing, and that it will likely involve jail time.
The judge explained what a missed appearance sets in motion. A failure-to-appear warrant is issued, and it is often recalled the same day when the person turns up late.
When the warrant is not recalled, it has to be served. That pulls in deputies and staff from other agencies for what started as a missed calendar date.
“We are not doing this again; it has become a big problem,” Bailey said from the bench.
The people jailed Monday for not appearing were released after several hours.
The frustration carried into Tuesday, when Bailey took the bench in Marion County Circuit Court in Yellville. He is the circuit judge for both counties and said as much from the bench during a hearing on an unrelated case.
The Marion County docket call brought no announcement of a policy change. It did bring more names called into a quiet room with no one standing up to answer, and at one point Bailey noted a defendant with more than one failure to appear on the record.
The warning surfaced in a different form later that morning. Bailey released a Bull Shoals man on his own recognizance after learning he had been in jail since June, then told him plainly that if he did not come back in October, a warrant would issue and he would be right back where he started.
“Make sure you make that court date,” Bailey said.
Court congestion has been a running theme in both counties. During the same Marion County session, Bailey and attorneys pushed several trial dates into December and January, citing capital murder trials and the sheer volume of cases on the calendar.
Every no-show adds to that. A case that could have been resolved in a morning becomes a warrant, an arrest, another appearance and another date on a calendar that is already full.
