FTA Ticket NC – Failure to Appear
If you miss your court date on a speeding ticket in North Carolina, you can rapidly get into way more trouble than you think.
Missing your court date is referred to by court officials as “Failure to Appear” (often shortened to FTA). When you have an FTA, a clock starts running on a veritable time bomb. You have 20 days, generally, on Chapter 20 violations to get your matter resolved or get a new court date. If you do that in that amount of time, then you’re probably OK. But if you go past that 20 day window, DMV is notified and another clock starts ticking. Shortly, you’ll receive a letter from DMV notifying you that your license will be suspended if you don’t resolve the matter by a date that DMV sets. If you fail to do that, your license is suspended, meaning you can’t legally be driving, indefinitely until you resolve the underlying offense.
Indefinitely can mean forever if you don’t ever fix it! That’s a huge deal. Driving While License Revoked is a Class 2 Misdemeanor in NC and technically can result in jail time. Granted, if you don’t have an absolutely horrible criminal record, you almost certainly wouldn’t be sentenced to jail time for a DWLR, but it is possible. Moreover, you rarely get pulled for JUST a DWLR, but often for another moving violation at the same time. Even if you somehow get out of the DWLR but are convicted of ANY moving violation while you were in a state of revocation, that conviction revokes your license for a year. So even if you resolved the FTA and get the DWLR dismissed, if you don’t handle the subsequent charges correctly, you can end up revoked again!
This stuff gets complicated. Maybe needlessly so, but here it is. This is why having an attorney is generally worthwhile. If you missed your court date on your traffic ticket in NC, call me at 919-929-2992.
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