Shelby County DUI Court Process

Security lines at the Shelby County courthouse routinely stretch outside the building onto the sidewalk for morning dockets. Arriving at 8:45 for a 9 a.m. docket is often already too late to clear screening and find the right courtroom. Give yourself real cushion.

DUI cases start in General Sessions Criminal Court and are assigned by rotation to Divisions I through IV, VII, VIII, and X. A DUI tied to a domestic violence charge goes to Division V instead; one tied to a drug charge goes to Division VI. Court date and division can be checked through the Shelby County CJS portal, though the interface takes some getting used to and creating an account is required before anything useful shows up. If a courtroom assignment changes, the Clerk's office is the place to ask — Criminal Court sits on the 4th floor, Suite 3034; General Sessions is on the lower level, Room 106.

Phones are the courthouse's biggest daily friction point. Local rules require them off, and while attorneys get access to a private Wi-Fi network for casework, defendants and the public generally can't bring devices in at all, or must have them fully silenced. That means no texting an employer about running late, no calling a ride, nothing — for however many hours the docket takes. And it can take hours: a defendant might sit for three or four hours waiting to be called, unable to read, use a phone, chew gum, or sleep. Any of that is grounds for the judge to have someone removed or pushed to the end of the docket.

Shelby County judges also enforce "Rule One" of the Local Rules of Practice on courtroom attire. Attorneys must wear professional dress; everyone else is required to dress "appropriately, in a clean and neat appearance." Casual or work clothes, like a uniform straight from a shift, tend to draw a negative reaction from the bench even without a formal ban on specific items — judges have described attire as visible evidence of respect for the rule of law.

Court costs and fines can now be paid online at payit901.com instead of standing in the clerk's line, but the system needs the Indictment Number and Booking Number in a specific combined format. Anyone who's lost their booking paperwork will likely need to dig through the CJS portal, or make the trip to the clerk's window after all.

One more thing worth planning around: the courthouse's elevators fail often enough to be a known local problem, and when they're down, moving between floors for hearings or attorney meetings slows to a crawl.

Sources

• Shelby County Local Rules of Practice
• Shelby County Criminal Court
• Shelby County Criminal Court Clerk — Local Rules