Issue a Criminal Summons

Once a Criminal Summons is Complete, it can then be issued through the SUMMARY tab by a user with Issuing Authority. To issue a Criminal Summons, the user must set Probable Cause and enter a Date Issued. Once a Criminal Summons is submitted with these fields, and other information detailed below, the Criminal Summons is active and available for service. Below are the steps to issue a Criminal Summons.

Before you start:

Only users with the proper rights can issue a Criminal Summons. The various fields related to issuance will not display for users not possessing Issuing Authority.
To be issued, a Criminal Summons must contain a Defendant, Complainant, at least one Misdemeanor, Infraction, or Traffic Offense, and Court data. An Infraction cannot be entered on a Criminal Summons as the sole Offense.
Offense data transmitted to NCAWARE via an interface with a local system (i.e. Mecklenburg County) behaves differently than Offense data entered directly into NCAWARE. Click here for more details.
If the Defendant is a person, any offense assigned to the process must not be a Felony. If the Defendant is a business, at least one of the offenses assigned must be a Felony.

For a Criminal Summons where Probable Cause is not found by the Issuing Authority, select No from the Probable Cause dropdown. For more details on this subject, see Finding Probable Cause below.
Once a Criminal Summons is issued, certain data is protected from edits by any user besides the issuing authority, proxies thereof, or administrators. See Understanding Process Archiving for more on this subject.

1. Either search for or add a Criminal Summons that has a status of Complete.
2. Once the Criminal Summons is retrieved from the PROCESS SEARCH RESULTS screen, or added, click the SUMMARY tab.
3. The SUMMARY tab displays. Click the Edit Summary button.
4. The SUMMARY DETAIL screen displays. Enter information into the following required fields to issue the Criminal Summons:
1. Once the above fields are populated, enter any relevant information into the Process Information and Law Enforcement Information areas of the screen. For more Help on these areas, see Edit Summary of Criminal Summons.
2. Once the entry of on the SUMMARY DETAIL screen is complete, click the Edit button.

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The SUMMARY tab returns. The Criminal Summons is now issued and assigned a Criminal Record Number (CR) and a status of Unserved.

The default view of the Summons changes from the PROCESS TAB VIEW to the CASE SUMMARY TAB VIEW.

The Criminal Summons, along with any associated Subpoenas and forms, can be printed. Subpoena data can be viewed on the SUBPOENA tab of the CASE SUMMARY TAB VIEW.

Finding Probable Cause - On a Criminal Summons, Probable Cause must be found on the whole process, not on individual Offenses. To find No Probable Cause for an individual Offense, simply delete the Offenses for which No Probable Cause applies.

If all Offenses are found to have No Probable Cause, select NO in the Probable Cause dropdown and select an option from the Issued By dropdown. Once completed, select the Edit button. A Criminal Summons found to have No Probable Cause will have a status of Denied.

For a listing of associated rules for this topic, click here.