A warrant acts like a golden ticket for the authorities, issued by a state’s court, letting them arrest someone or take certain actions against the individual mentioned on it.
In case of a South Carolina outstanding warrant, this description need be changed only marginally to indicate that an outstanding order while no different from an active warrant is a judicial decree that has languished in the state criminal system for a while since it could not be executed.
Although a deliberate attempt is seldom made on the part of law enforcement to delay the execution of a warrant, sometimes, the person in question may be able to evade cops by leaving town or his whereabouts may not be known. However, these scenarios do not justify the return of a warrant that has been issued on the basis of probable cause.
For this reason, even those warrants that are several decades old but no arrest could be made under their provision are stored in the national, county and state criminal databases as outstanding warrants. There are scores of ways in which, you can gather information on South Carolina arrest warrants.
Also, it would help to understand here that because a judicial order for detention in a criminal matter is only issued after diligently studying the evidence held by the police, the existence of such a directive means that there is substantial proof to implicate the accused.
Detention directives are also issued in civil matters and cases where the defendant fails to show up for court proceedings as ordered. These directives are known as bench warrants and unlike outstanding orders for arrest they remain valid only for 90 days.
Finding information on South Carolina outstanding warrants
To find details on outstanding warrants against your subject, you can head over to the justice center, the office of the county clerk, the court of the magistrate or the sheriff’s office. However, most of these agencies will require you to file a warrant search request in person which can be decidedly arduous task.
Fortunately, there is a way to look for arrest warrants online through the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division and internet based third party sites that offer nationwide criminal history information. To initiate an inquiry through SLED, you will have to pay a fee of $25 and this provision can be availed from the official website of the agency at http://www.sled.sc.gov/.
SLED inquiries bring back details on the legal name and aliases of the offender, his/her last known addresses including those of workplaces, criminal charges filed against this person, any driving violations to his name, if this individual is a registered sex offender and has past conviction records.
To get the search done, you will need the name and the date of birth of the subject. Although inquiries can also be conducted with partial details, this will bring back results on all offenders who match the broad search criteria of your inquiry.
It will be worthwhile to know at this point, that a SLED check will not bring back results on pending warrants; only judicial orders that have already been served will be included in the response offered to such an inquiry.
In contrast, an online warrant search done through a private vendor database will be able to get you results on all the warrants issued against your subject including those that were released outside the state of South Carolina.
Once again, you will only have to offer the first and last name of the subject to request warrant related information. The added advantage to this approach is that, you will be charged a onetime fee to initiate as many searches as you need through a specified period.