Utah outstanding warrants are issued when the local police go to court with a request for the release of an arrest order against a person who is a suspect in a criminal matter. Although police officers are allowed to make arrests without active warrants, such detentions come with a lot of restrictions. Also the responsibility to establish probable cause in such cases rests in the hands of the police.
The criminal procedure of Utah is no different from that of other states. It follows a strict step by step system in which the offender is processed from the point of arrest to sentencing and incarceration. Here is a look at the various sub processes that are encountered along the way:
Information on Criminal History is kept and disseminated by the Utah Department of Public Safety. However, the Utah Division of Criminal Identification which hosts the state’s CJIS database does not offer information on arrest records online. There is an internet based facility to conduct a warrant search. However, the records in this searchable repository are obtained from the judiciary as opposed to the various law enforcement units in the state.
The Utah judiciary is divided across 6 levels of which the first four rungs comprise of trial courts in which a jury or a judge decides on various criminal and civil matters based on the evidence presented by the lawyers on both sides. The last two levels of the judicial system which are actually at the top of the hierarchy are made of the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of Utah. These are revisionary tribunals with the Supreme Court being the apex judicial entity in the state. Each of these courts has its own jurisdiction
The rules for the issue of a UT arrest warrant have been laid down in Title 77, Chapter7-5 of the State Code of Criminal Procedure. Pursuant to this legal clause, arrest warrants can only be issued by a magistrate authorized to hear criminal matters upon the determination of probable cause. So, in order to facilitate the process of warrant issuance, the law enforcement agency that investigated the criminal matter has to place all information pertaining to it before the bench.