How Does a Wife Bail her Husband Out of Jail in State College, PA?

Bailing out a loved one can be stressful.  If your husband has been arrested, you might have a thousand questions about how the case will go and what you can do to help.  At the beginning, the best thing that you can do is work with a criminal defense attorney to help get your husband out of jail and get to work on the case.  State College criminal defense lawyer Andrew Shubin explains what steps you can take to get your husband released on bail and how the case will proceed from there.

How to Find Out if Your Husband Made Bail in State College

If your husband was arrested and you were his “one phone call,” you might know where he is being held and what he was arrested for.  In some cases, you might only find out that your husband was arrested after making some calls to try to locate him.  In any case, one of the first things you should do is confirm that he is indeed being held and that you were not being called as part of a scam.  You can check with the jail and local police to confirm an arrest.

When you are confirming where your husband is being held, you might also be able to determine if bail was set (or paid) yet.  Most criminal charges are low-level offenses, and the defendant might not need to go to jail.  If someone was arrested for drunk driving or drug possession, they might be arrested and held until someone can come pick them up so that the police have time to search and interrogate them, but they do not intend to hold them in jail beyond that.

Judges usually use one of four outcomes when making bail decisions in PA:

• Bail can be denied if the defendant is a danger to the community and a flight risk.
• Bail can be set at a cash value if they are a flight risk that might not return to their next court date.
• Bail can be set at a percentage of a higher cash bail amount so that the defendant is responsible for the full cash amount if they do not appear at later court dates. This can also be arranged by working with a bail bond agent to help pay for cash bail.
• The defendant can be released on their own recognizance (“ROR bail”) and trusted to return to court on their own.

ROR bail is very common for defendants with no criminal record who were arrested for a first-time offense or a low-level crime like disorderly conduct or public drunkenness.  When ROR bail is granted, the defendant might be released without a need for anyone to pick them up or pay any money.  If they were drunk or high when they were arrested, the police might require that someone comes to get them.

If bail has not been set yet, then you cannot pay bail yet.  Your husband will need to go before a judge and have an arraignment and a bail determination hearing before you can get them out on bail.

Hiring a Lawyer for Your Husband’s Bail Hearing in State College

If your husband is in jail and you want to help get him out, then you might need to hire a lawyer.  If the judge has not set bail in your husband’s case, then there is nothing you can do to pay bail or get your husband released yet.  That means you might need to hire a lawyer to intercede for your husband, request a bail hearing, and get the judge to decide how your husband will be released.

If the judge has actually denied bail, then there must be some evidence that your husband was a flight risk or a danger to the community.  If the judge determined that previous bail skipping or failure to appear in court issues make your husband unlikely to return to court, bail might be denied altogether.  Similarly, if the facts of the alleged crime show that your husband might hurt others if he were released, the judge will deny bail.  This is possible in cases involving serious violence or threats of violence, sexual assault charges in Happy Valley, or repeat DUI or reckless driving cases where letting the defendant out of jail could put others at risk.

Alternatively, a judge might have set bail too high.  Bail amounts are often based on what the defendant can afford to pay, which means that a wealthy defendant might have a high bail amount set.  This is done because wealthy defendants might not care if they lose a small amount of money by skipping bail; it needs to be high to make bail serious.  However, it might be unfair to hold a defendant with high bail if they do not have much money.

Our attorney can help fight for fair bail determinations by challenging claims that your husband is too dangerous or too much of a flight risk to release.  We can also challenge the bail amount that was set and hopefully get bail reduced so that your husband can be released.  Excessive bail and denied bail might also constitute civil and constitutional rights violations.

How to Pay the Court for Bail in State College

The actual process of paying bail is usually as simple as writing a check or making a payment to the court.  Depending on the court’s facilities, you might be able to do this via credit card or online.  Calling the facility where your husband is being held or the courthouse where the case is being handled can usually get you the information you need to actually make a bail payment.

Call Our State College Bail Lawyer for a Free Case Consultation

If your husband has been arrested in State College and you need help bailing him out, call The Law Office of Andrew Shubin.  Our criminal defense lawyer represents defendants in and around State College, helps students with academic disciplinary hearings, and fights for the rights of criminal defendants in civil rights lawsuits.  For help with your case, contact our law office today at (814) 826-3586.