Hi, I'm Charlie Roadman, Austin criminal defense attorney. And today I want to talk about the Travis County personal bond jail release process. The timeline goes like this, so of course, you've got the arrest, the drive to the station, and then the person is entered into the system. Okay, and that can take 45 minutes or an hour or so. And once they're entered in the system they'll show up online in the Travis County jail. Now, the officer has to turn in a probable cause affidavit for even the whole release process to get started. Until then, basically, no one knows what the allegations are. So the officer actually has 24 hours to turn that in on a misdemeanor or 48 hours on a felony. Typically, they don't take that long. Typically, it's turned in within a few hours. But once that probable cause affidavit is turned in, then an attorney can actually start the jail release process, getting them out fast. Until that PC is turned in, and no one can really do anything.

Now, if an attorney doesn't start working on it for you, basically eventually pretrial services will interview the person for the personal bond. And that's where they figure out where they live, where they work, some references, things like that. And then a judge will magistrate the person and then pretrial will call the references to make sure that the person has told them accurately where they live and that kind of thing, where they work. Now, these three things can be done in a slightly different order, but they're roughly done around the same time. And then next, if the judge decides to sign the PR bond, they'll sign it. And then there's a little bit of time before the release, okay. Now, things can go wrong, the judge can decide not to sign it based on either, they can't confirm some of the information or some of the facts aren't good, or there's a requirement for the bond for some side of the GPS device that requires a company to come in.

Anyway, there's all sorts of things that can sort of be obstacles in this process, which is why an attorney is really valuable because once there's an obstacle an attorney works to overcome it. The judge and the pretrial services, once they hit an obstacle, they kind of just stop. So basically, this whole process can take anywhere from 16 hours to 30 hours. Or they don't get it out at all if there's a problem. But that's the basic general process in Travis County for a personal bond. If you have any questions, give us a call. I will say that an attorney will definitely make sure this goes smoothly and fast and they can actually sidestep some of the things that have to happen, for example, an attorney can waive magistration, which saves hours of being in jail. Anyway, give us a call. We'll explain a little bit more about it. Happy to help.