SUMMONS TO APPEAR IN COURT IN ONTARIO – WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
You’ve received a summons to attend court in Ontario. The question becomes: “what does that mean?” A summons, if you read it, it will have your name on it. It will have what you’re charged with. You will not see a fine there. It’ll just simply be a command statement that you must attend court. We know that you can attend court in person or you can elect someone else to do that for you.
That may be a lawyer, that may be a paralegal. When a charge is serious, you will be served what’s called a summons. What you would do with that at that point in time is consider consulting with someone who’s faced this before. You’re going to want to talk to someone who has some experience and knowledge on what exactly needs to be done with the charge.
The summons itself will disclose exactly what charge you are facing. It will not have any evidence of what actually happened. That will be determined by your advocate or paralegal that is attempting to help you with this charge. It’s not a charge, when they’re proceeding by summons, that I would recommend you attend court on your own.
You’re going into a higher level of court within the provincial offenses court system, one in which you usually have the crown attorney be involved and you know that the penalties, including possible period of incarceration, might be included in the discussions. These are situations when it’s generally never recommended that you try to deal with this matter on your own.
I would suggest whenever this happens, at the very least, you may want to try to deal with us on your own, but it would certainly not hurt you to go through a free consultation to know what your options are, your rights are, and how you can get some assistance in dealing with a matter such as serious as this might be.