Outstanding warrants from Iowa are detention directives that have been issued by the court to the police but these have yet to be executed. Directives that call for the search and seizure of a person or property require probable cause as the basis for their issue. It is the responsibility of the sheriff’s department or the law enforcement agency that is in charge of handling the crime to supply the information on which the probable cause determination can be made.
The criminal procedure in Iowa starts as soon as arrests are made, whether the detention is effected with an active warrant or not. When the police take an accused into custody without first seeking an arrest warrant in Iowa, the offender can be released at the discretion of the investigating officers. However, once an outstanding warrant has been issued and used to make arrests, the onus shifts onto the judiciary and only the magistrate can grant relief to the detainee through conditional release.
The Department of Public Safety supervises the Criminal History Records Dissemination Unit of the State. The unit was established in 1996 in response to the changes made to the criminal code of Iowa, which required the disclosure of information relating to criminal occurrences to the public. The Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) was set up on its heels; this is the central criminal arrest records repository for Iowa.
The courts network of Iowa is designed to serve the eight judicial districts that the state is divided into. Each district covers from five to nine counties. The state has a total of 99 counties and each of these has its own district court. Every tribunal comprises of judges and clerks of court. While the magistrates, judges and justices are in charge of actually hearing the cases, the clerk’s of court offer administrative support to the tribunal. Here is a look at the various levels in the judicial hierarchy of Iowa.
Iowa active warrants are judicial orders which are released with the express purpose of calling for the detention of a person accused in a criminal matter. These detention decrees are typically sought when the police don’t have as much information on the suspect and when arrests cannot be made immediately after a criminal act has been commissioned.