What happens if you are charged with theft in Texas?

Gary Churak’s Answer

You will get a court date. Once again, it depends on the amount that you’re charged with is where you’ll be. You could be in municipal or JP court, you could be in county court, or you could be in district court charged with a felony. You will have usually a number of court dates. The first court date would be your arraignment. That’s where you’d come in and enter your plea of guilty or not guilty. You could have some pretrial dates and eventually a trial date. You can decide to take the case to trial. Often on shoplifting cases, we set those for trial because a lot of the stores just simply do not send their people down, spend all day in court to testify in shoplifting cases. They’re more valuable working in the store than they are in the courtroom. As a matter of course, they basically don’t send a witness down to testify. After a couple of times, you make a speedy trial motion and if you’re lucky, your case gets dismissed. Once again, if the case is dismissed, you are eligible for an expunction to seal the case from your criminal record.