I'd like to highlight a comment from Groton Town Justice A. D. Dawson, who wrote about a question I had a long time ago on Town Courts and their jurisdiction:
According to the Criminal Procedure Law of NYS, if a town court is not available to arraign a subject arrested for an offense in its jurisdiction, the court of an adjoining town may perform the arraignment and return the matter to the original court of jurisdiction. (However, they have to be within the same county.)
What's interesting in the case cited here is that the offense of the theft of the meat occurred in the Town of Lansing, the subject was arrested in the Town of Dryden and subsequently arraigned in the Town of Groton.
To complicate matters a little more, the individual arrested can face charges in both Lansing and Dryden as the theft took place in Lansing and the possession of the stolen meat occurred in Dryden. Groton was just being nice and helped out with the arraignment.
It sounds like Town Courts can help each other out on arraignments within the county, but the actual place the defendant faces charges has to do with where the crime took place. I'm not sure what happened in the end in this case, but this nicely explains some of the flexibility in the system.
Posted by simon at January 10, 2007 8:27 AM in crime