Charge: Felony Extradition
Case Result: Motion to recall process and reduce bond granted, Extradition dismissed
A Winston-Salem man was driving on a normal afternoon when he was stopped by an officer for the routine traffic stop of failure to stop at a stop sign. For our client he was expected to receive a citation and be on his way. He was shocked to find out that he had an outstanding warrant for aggravated child molestation from Georgia; a charge that can carry up to life in prison. He was charged with felony extradition and was held at the Forsyth County Detention Center with no bond. Our first task in advocating for our client was to comb through the court file and the statute to ensure that all of the paperwork was filed properly. We pulled the file from the clerk’s office and wanted to compare the paperwork in the file to the required law. When we found discrepancies between the file we pulled from the clerk’s office and the required law, we planned to use those errors to aid our client.
We filed a motion to recall the process of extradition in district court. An extradition is a process in which one state agrees to hold a suspect who is “wanted” in another state in order to be picked up. Many times, this allows a holding state to detain a person with no bond, although the statute does allow for a bond in many circumstances. We challenged whether our client could be held without bond, when the fugitive affidavit itself was fatally flawed. In North Carolina, one of the authenticating documents which can be used to ensure there is in fact a pending charge in another state is the fugitive’s affidavit. This affidavit establishes the nature of the crime in the other state, the jurisdiction of that state, and most importantly that the defendant was in the jurisdiction of that state on the alleged date of offense. In this case, the alleged date of offense in the other state listed on the fugitive warrant was the same date in which the client was arrested in North Carolina. Thus, the state could not establish that the other state did in fact have jurisdiction over the defendant. The District Court Judge agreed with our argument and issued an unsecured bond which allowed our client to be released from custody that day.