Hi Jacustomer,

Yes, a court appearance is required and if you are not there, a warrant will issue for your arrest, and that will be much worse as when you go to SC to address the warrant, they may see to it that you stay in jail so that you won't leave.

The only thing you can do is to contact a South Carolina lawyer and retain him to stand up on your case for you and take care of as much as he can to save you the plane fare of comng back and forth. You may have to come in for the final disposition of your case, but if you're looking for a favorable disposition and not a trial, it is possible that you may only have to come in once.

If you don't know where to start to find an SC criminal lawyer, contact the SC Bar Association's Lawyer Referral Service. They charge around $50 for the referral but that includes a free half hour consultation with the lawyer, that you can have over the telephone.FranL41067.1557131134

Hello,

Correct. Your lawyer should be able to stay a warrant for your first appearance and perhaps even work out some kind of a disposition with the prosecutor. If not, the judge will tell the lawyer when you'll be required to be in court and your lawyer will try to keep those times to a minimum.

I cannot say how likely it would be that he could negotiate something that would keep your record clean. It's not unheard of on a first possessory offense. If you must end up pleading to a misdemeanor, Soutn Carolina will expunge only certain first convictions under certain circumstances. (See link to law). You will have to look and see if your matter would into one of the 7 categories which would make you ineligible. You would appear to be eligible, but you should make it clear to your lawyer that if he cannot keep this off of your record, you want him to at least make sure that the conviction would be expungeable.

You can't pay the ticket as this is a criminal matter. But it is possible that your lawyer ccan negotiate a plea to something that would allow you to keep your driver's license. In any case, you'd want to tell him that keeping your license is important to you if it is at all possible.

Good morning,

While pre-trial internvention or a deferred adjudication is possible for first time possessory offenders, the biggest problem in your case is that you're out of state, and there is a probationary aspect of this which could require your returning for regular appointments and random drug tests.

The court would have to be willing to consent to supervision in Ohio, and Ohio would have to be willing to supervise you. Again, a lawyer would be more easily able to argue for or arrange something like this for you.

Finally, you cannot have it both ways. That is, either you want a plea or you don't. If you pass up pretrial or a deferral at or towards the beginning of your case, you lose out on them generally. If you want the plea, you'll have to waive your rights to any hearings at which you could challenge the search or any other police irregularity. But because you raise it, if you were never interrogated about the incident after you were arrested, then no Miranda warnings are required. The police have no obligation to tell a defendant what his sentence will be. They frequently don't know, as sometimes when a prosecutor goes over the police report, he sees different charges from what the police did, and he will make those changes when he files the paper with the court. Then too, charges are routinely bargained down for purposes of a disposition.

FranL41067.4949856829