Court / DOJ¶

The Court module turns PulseCAD into a full judicial system: warrants, criminal cases, a hearing docket, sentencing tied to your penal code, a custody roster, and even an AI judge you can talk to. It plugs into the tools your community already uses: arrest reports open cases, warrant reports become signable warrants, convictions build a defendant's rap sheet, and rulings notify the defendant in the portal, on Discord, and in game.

Court is optional and fully per-community. All capabilities are on/off toggles, and the whole thing runs in one of three modes: off, a human bench, or a hands-off AI courtroom. Open it from Court under Other areas on your community home. It only appears there when Court is enabled and your plan includes it.

This is a paid module (Pulse Pro and up)

Court is available on Pulse Pro and Pulse Max plans. The Off mode is always available at no cost; you only need the entitlement to run one of the active modes. Your first community gets a 72-hour free trial with everything unlocked, including Court, so you can try the active modes before you choose a plan.

The three modes¶

The mode decides who makes the decisions: nobody, a person, or the AI. Set it in Admin → Court.

Mode	Who runs the court	What it does
AI judge (default)	The AI judge	The AI judge reviews reports, converses over warrants, presides over contested cases, and pronounces sentences. Everything stays inside your penal-code limits (see below).
Human judge	Human judges	The classic bench. Staff sign/deny warrants, mark charge dispositions, run report reviews, and pronounce sentences by hand. No AI is ever called.
Off	Nobody	Court is completely hidden. No Court entry on the community home and no cases. Warrants still work as a field tool: an approved warrant report makes an Active warrant straight away (no judge signs it), it shows on plate and person checks, and an arrest serves it. Civilians cannot plead: a citation's fine is owed as soon as it is issued and can be paid straight away from Court & Citations in the Civilian Portal.

Plans without court

Court is included with Pulse Pro and Pulse Max (Pulse Max ER:LC on ER:LC). On a plan without it, citations work as if the mode were Off, whatever Admin → Court shows: civilians are not asked for a plea, and a citation's fine can be paid straight away from Court & Citations in the Civilian Portal. The court's deadlines don't run either: no citation is defaulted to guilty and no failure-to-appear or failure-to-pay warrant is issued. When the court comes back (switched on, or the plan gains it), all citations get a full response window from that moment, and an arrest approved in the last 30 days while it was off is arraigned then. The mode you picked is kept, and applies again as soon as the plan includes court.

AI judge needs AI Assist enabled

AI judge requires AI Assist to be switched on in Admin → AI Assist (PulseCAD supplies the AI; there's no key to configure). If AI Assist is off, or your plan has no AI allowance, Court runs as a Human judge court until the AI judge can sit: cases wait in the queue for someone on your staff, and Admin → Court says why. Your choice of AI judge is kept, so the AI takes over again on its own once AI Assist is on. If only this month's allowance is used up, the judge can't be reached until it resets: proceedings say the judge is unavailable, and a human can take the case from the bench.

If your community was on Automatic or AI drafts, you approve

Those two modes have been retired — five modes meant studying a matrix before you could turn court on, and those were the least used and the hardest to explain. A community on either now runs as a Human judge court: nothing decides on its own that wasn't already, and nobody was switched to an AI bench without asking. Turn AI judge on whenever you want it.

Even in Off, one setting still applies: warrant approval (court / supervisor / auto) governs how warrant reports are handled, so a community that doesn't want a courthouse can still route warrants sensibly.

Capability toggles (modules)¶

Beyond the mode, a few parts of the court are their own switch, under Modules in Admin → Court. Turn one off and that part stops happening.

Module	Default	What it enables
Warrants	On	Search / arrest / bench warrants, the warrant queue, and signing. An arrest report files and clears them.
Cases	On	Criminal cases, the docket, and the case file. An arrest opens the case.
Hearings / Docket	On	Scheduled hearings and arraignments on the docket.
Report sufficiency review	On	Judicial legal-sufficiency review of the underlying report before a case proceeds.
Self-bail	On	Civilians post bail from the portal to clear a hold.
Civil cases (player v. player)	Off	Civil cases: one player suing another.

Everything else the court does is always on

This list used to run to eighteen switches. Twelve of them were wired to nothing, and four named features that were never built, so they were removed in BETA 1.30.1. The rest of the court is not separately switchable: the rap sheet, the custody roster, civilian pleas, court notifications, evidence, appeals, contested trials and the legal assistant are all available whenever Court is on. The AI parts of those run only in AI judge, and only while AI Assist is enabled.

Some advanced modules are ahead of their dedicated UI

The core modules plus civil court, appeals and the AI trial-style proceedings are live end-to-end today. The remaining advanced toggles (parole, bail bonds, bounty, pardons, evidence, legal assistant, roles) exist as server switches so they can light up incrementally; full dedicated screens for these are still being built out. Enabling them won't break anything; they simply don't all have a finished front end yet.

Choosing the judge¶

Under Admin → Court you configure the judge's identity and behavior. This colors all AI rulings and appears on the DOJ terminal, judgments, and notifications.

Name / title / jurisdiction: e.g. "The Honorable A. Vance," "Superior Court of San Andreas." The jurisdiction is shown under the page titles in the Court.
Temperament: a consistent judicial personality that shapes tone and sentencing severity (never lawfulness):
- Lenient: merciful; favors warnings, fines, probation, and the low end of each range (or below the minimum) for minor or first-time offenders.
- Balanced: even-handed; sentences around the middle, adjusting for aggravating/mitigating factors.
- Strict: firm; leans to the high end and jails where the code allows, especially for repeat offenders.
Tone: rp (in-character, formal courtroom voice) or plain (procedural language).
Auto-bail: set a bail figure automatically so a number always exists.

The AI behind the judge¶

PulseCAD supplies and runs the AI judge: there is no key to bring, no provider account, and no model to pick. Turn on AI Assist in Admin → AI Assist and choose an AI court mode; usage counts against your community's monthly AI allowance, and when that runs out the court degrades gracefully to sentencing straight from your penal code instead of breaking a trial.

The AI never overrides your rules

Whatever the provider or temperament, the AI only chooses within the penal-code ranges you set. The server hard-clamps all numbers it produces, so the judge can never invent a charge, exceed your maximums, or contradict your configuration.

Sentencing and the penal code¶

Your penal code is the source of truth and the hard ceiling. Each offense carries a jail range in days (jailMin / jailMax), a fine, and a bail figure, edited in Admin → Penal Code. The base sentence is pure penal-code math; the judge (human or AI) only picks within the range, and the server re-clamps the result.

For each guilty charge:

Jail = a pick inside [jailMin, jailMax] × counts. Where the discretion lives.
Fine = the code fine × counts (a judge may reduce, never exceed).
Bail = the charge's bail figure.
License action = whatever the penal code prescribes (suspend / revoke), wired to the enforcement engine.

Then your sentencing rules apply (all in Admin → Court):

Setting	Effect
Stacking	`consecutive` (sum all charges), `concurrent` (longest charge only), or `capped` (sum, capped at a max).
Max jail days	The overall ceiling when stacking is `capped`.
Priors rule	`none`, `percent` (add a % per prior case), or `strikes` (three-strikes → the ceiling on a felony).
Include shared priors	Count convictions from your data-sharing partners toward priors and strikes.
Time-served credit	Subtract pretrial detention days from the jail term.
Minutes per day	Optional in-game conversion for timed auto-release (see Custody).

jailMin == jailMax = zero AI wiggle room

Set an offense's min and max equal and the sentence for it is fully deterministic; even in AI mode, the judge has nothing to decide.

Automatic-mode mechanics¶

These are the limits the AI judge clamps to, and what a human judge is working within. They stack:

Where in the penal range to sentence: land at the low end, the middle, or the high end of each penal range.
Sentencing grid: an optional guidelines matrix (offense class × prior-count bucket → jail days / fine) that overrides the bare anchor.
Sufficiency checklist: a deterministic report gate (minimum narrative length, charge support, evidence-for-felony, signature) that can flag or kick back a weak report.
Weighted scoring and a jury-roll RNG (a seedable, reproducible dismissal chance) are optional extras for communities that want a tunable or unpredictable element.

How cases and warrants begin¶

Court hooks into the records workflow; officers rarely "open a case" by hand.

Arrest → case. When an arrest report is approved in Records, a criminal case opens automatically (numbered CR-YY-####), and in AI judge mode the judge immediately begins reviewing it. A report naming several defendants opens a case for each.
Voided report → case dismissed. Voiding the report behind a case that hasn't been decided dismisses the case, and the case log says why. The license points its charges added come off, and so do the points of any charge the court dismisses or finds not guilty (once, however many times the disposition is re-entered). Voiding an arrest report also puts back the warrants that arrest served, for when the wrong person was picked. A report whose case has been sentenced can't be voided; undoing a judgment goes through an appeal or an expungement.
Warrant report → warrant. When an officer files a Search / Arrest / Bench warrant report in Records, it becomes a linked Warrant in Requested status, with the report narrative auto-populated as the probable-cause affidavit and the report's author shown as the requesting officer. If the report's Case Number field names a court case, the warrant is linked to that case, so dismissing the case recalls it. Records is the front door; there's no separate "request warrant" step. With Court Off, the warrant is Active at once instead.
Not-guilty plea → contested case. When a civilian pleads Not Guilty on a citation, a case opens so it can be argued.
Failure to appear → bench warrant. The Process overdue action sweeps unpaid citations past their court date into active bench warrants.
A lawyer files a suit → civil case. Everything above is criminal. A civil case is one player suing another, and it is the one kind of case that starts with somebody deliberately filing it; see Civil cases below.

You can also open a case manually from the Court terminal when you need to.

An active warrant makes someone WANTED automatically

Once a warrant is Signed/Active, the subject shows as WANTED in MDT person and plate lookups, BOLOs, and in-game ALPR, with no extra step. Signing is the trigger.

The DOJ Court terminal¶

The Court is laid out like a court case-management system. A menu bar runs across the top: Bench, Caseload (Warrants, Cases, Closed Cases, Civil Docket, Docket), Corrections (Custody, Licenses, Judgments) and Notify. The list down the right side holds the actions for the screen you are on (for a case: Schedule Hearing, Run Review, its documents) above the same sections as the menu. A status bar along the bottom shows the date, time, court name and who is signed in. The court name and every caption use your community's own state and county. The sun/moon button at the top switches between light and dark; court documents stay paper-white in both.

What you see depends on the hat you're wearing. The top of the page has an "Act as" switcher because the same account can be the judge, a filing officer, counsel, or a civilian defendant:

Judge · Bench (owner / admin / court / judge role, or super-admin): full judicial powers.
Law Enforcement: the officer view of cases you filed. Its menu holds Waiting on You, My Cases, Closed Cases and Docket. This hat is offered to members who hold a role in an agency department (and to staff); a civilian player only gets their characters. A lawsuit one of your characters is part of stays under that character, never in Law Enforcement.
Counsel: shown instead of Law Enforcement for a Court-department member below supervisor rank (a lawyer). Same screens, listing the matters where you are counsel, and you speak for the defendant you represent.
Your civilian character: the defendant view of your own matters, laid out as Case Records: My Citations, My Cases, Civil Cases and My Closed Cases down the left, and each case as a stacked record (summary, charges or claim, the courtroom, financial information).

Waiting on You (Law Enforcement and Counsel) lists your matters where the court has put a question to you or it is your turn, with what the court needs. When the court asks you a question while you have the Court open, a notice also pops up in the bottom corner with an Answer button that opens the case at the question. Notices that only tell you something (a hearing was set, your complaint was filed) are headed Court notice and open the case instead. Outside the judge's hat, a case opens on its Events tab, where the reply box is.

Bench¶

The judge's landing page: the judge's name and title with the live counts (pending warrants, open cases, hearings today, in custody), two lists, and Hearings Today and Recent Rulings underneath.

Needs your ruling: warrants awaiting a signature, cases the court is holding for a judge (criminal and civil), and reports flagged deficient.
Waiting on the parties: open cases the court is waiting on someone else for, split into Law enforcement (the filing officer owes testimony or a reply) and Civilians (a defendant, plaintiff or respondent owes a plea, a statement or an answer). The oldest wait is listed first, with how long it has waited and when its time runs out. Open takes you to the case. Nothing here needs the judge to act; it shows where a case is stuck.

Warrants & the Chambers¶

The Warrants queue lists all warrants with their number, subject, basis, requester, and status. Click a row for the Warrant Details panel under the list (number, case, status, type, requesting officer, judge, basis and the decision reason); double-click it, or press Open Warrant, to open the warrant itself as a court document with the probable-cause affidavit. The panel beside the document holds the ruling controls, and Print prints it. A signed warrant shows the judge's signature, with your community seal beside it when one is set (Admin → Licenses → State Seal).

Warrants are numbered court-style, W-26-0041: the year, then a running count for your community that starts again each January. Warrants filed before V1.21.46 keep the short code they already had (for example #AFC784). Officers see the same number on a person's warrant check, and can type it in an arrest report's Warrants served field.

Warrants move through: Requested → Signed → Active → Served, or Denied / Recalled / Expunged. Signing, denying, recalling, and expunging are judicial acts (court staff only); serving and activating are field actions.

Human judge: the judge writes findings and clicks Sign or Deny.
AI judge: a Chambers · Judicial Inquiry panel opens: the officer converses with the AI judge, which reads the affidavit and the subject's rap sheet, asks clarifying questions, and rules with written reasoning. A grant or deny applies immediately, and a denied warrant can be re-argued (a motion to reconsider) until the court re-rules.

The court's decision (signed judge + date, or a declined stamp + reason) is stamped back onto the linked warrant report so the document always shows the real outcome.

Recalling a warrant. A signed or active warrant has a Recall panel. Recalling it takes the subject off all plate and person checks straight away; the warrant stays on file, stamped Recalled with the reason you gave. A warrant is also recalled automatically when:

the warrant report it came from is voided in Records, or
the case it belongs to is dismissed (see below).

A served warrant is never recalled: it already did its job and stays on the record as served.

Cases & the case file¶

The Cases list is row-scoped: staff see everything, supervisors see their department, officers see cases they filed, and defendants see their own. It carries a Waiting on column (the filing officer, the defendant, a judge, or nobody) so you can tell why a case hasn't moved without opening it. Opening a case gives you the file on tabs: Charges, Events, Hearings, History, Review, Sentence and Exhibits for a criminal case, and Claim, Answer, Events, Hearings and Judgment for a civil one. The case documents open from the right-hand list: the Felony or Misdemeanor Complaint, the CR-200 Judgment and Sentence, and for civil matters the CV-100 Plaintiff's Claim and CV-130 Notice of Entry of Judgment. Schedule Hearing asks for the hearing type (Arraignment, Bail, Preliminary, Motion, Trial, Sentencing or Probation), date and time, and tells both parties.

Charges & disposition: each charge with its penal-code range; judges set Guilty / Not Guilty / Dismissed / Reduced.
Case proceedings (the Events tab): a persistent, turn-based record shown as a court reporter's transcript, with numbered lines, shared by the judge, officer, and defendant. In AI mode the judge drives it: staging openings, questioning parties, and (with the trial flow) voicing a prosecutor and public defender. Officers and defendants see a read-only timeline and only get a compose box when the court is waiting on them; they can speak out of turn, but they're warned it may prejudice the case. A human judge puts a question to one side with Question for beside the Enter box (the filing officer or the defendant; on a civil matter, the plaintiff or the respondent): the case then waits on that party, and they get the corner notice in the Court and a notice in game. A civil matter can only be questioned once the respondent has answered or gone to default. The lane you speak in follows your Act as hat, and each lane belongs to one party: only the officer who filed the case testifies for law enforcement on it, and only the defendant or their appointed counsel speaks for the defence. If you hold a hat but not on that matter — a chief in the Law Enforcement hat on a case another officer filed — the panel says so and points you at the hat you do hold, rather than letting you speak in someone else's name.
Report sufficiency: the review verdict (Strong / Adequate / Weak / Deficient) with deficiencies and reasoning, plus Proceed / Kick back / Dismiss actions. These go away once the case is concluded. Kick back returns the report to the filing officer: the case reads Returned to the officer and waits on them, and they are told. When they correct and refile the report, the case comes back before the court. (A human-judge court has no trial ladder: the judge runs the trial from the case file, and a contested case reads Ready for trial until they do.)

What Dismiss case does

Dismissing a criminal case closes it and disposes of what it left open: all still-pending charges become Dismissed (reversing any license points it added), and the warrants that exist because of this case are recalled. Those are a warrant filed from the case's own report, a bench warrant for its citation, and any warrant report whose Case Number field names this docket. Other warrants on the same person are left alone, so an unrelated warrant never disappears because a different matter was dismissed. The case log records what was dismissed and recalled.

Sentencing: a penal-code-driven panel where the judge sets per-charge jail days (bounded by the range), a time-served credit, and pronounces the sentence. A case holds one sentence: once it's pronounced, the button becomes Replace Sentence, which asks to confirm, vacates the current sentence and enters the new one (the old one stays in the list as Vacated). A dismissed or closed case has nothing to sentence, so the panel isn't shown, and a sentenced case can't be dismissed.
Rap sheet and Hearings panels alongside.

Who is the case waiting on?

All case files open their proceedings with a line saying exactly that, in all modes: "Waiting on the filing officer", "Waiting on the defendant", "Waiting on a judge", with what that party has to do, how long it has been waiting, and, where a timeout applies, when the court stops waiting and what happens then. When the court is waiting on you, it says "Your turn" and tells you what to do.

Silence is normal here: a Human judge court never rules on its own, and even the AI judge stops to put a question to a real officer or defendant. The line tells you which of those you're looking at, so nobody is left wondering whether the court is thinking, stuck, or waiting on them.

The act as picker at the top of the terminal also badges each of your hats (the bench, law enforcement, and each of your civilian characters) with how many matters are waiting on that one, so you don't have to switch through them to find it.

Report sufficiency review¶

The judge grades whether the report's facts support the elements of each charge: substance, not grammar or length. A short but complete report passes; a long but baseless one fails. In AI judge the AI runs it; with a Human judge it's the deterministic checklist. A deficient report can be dismissed, reduced, or kicked back to the officer (tagged [COURT] so it's distinct from a supervisor kickback) to amend and refile.

Docket, Custody, Judgments¶

Docket: all scheduled hearings across cases, sorted by date.
Custody: the corrections roster.
Judgments: the permanent record of rulings and court documents (sentencing orders, dismissals, signed/served/denied warrants).

Notify¶

Rather than a passive board, a clerk or judge can push a court alert (warrant signed, verdict, court date) to a chosen audience: all on-duty officers, dispatch, need-to-know, or just me. It fans out over the live connection to people signed in to the CAD. It does not post to Discord; for that, use the court notifications under Discord integration.

Licence suspension & reinstatement¶

A charge can suspend any licence type, not just the driver licence. In Admin → Penal Code, each charge has a "Suspends these licences on conviction" picker. Tick Firearm and CCW on a weapons offence, Pilot on an aviation one, and so on.

Driver and CDL also suspend automatically once the community's points threshold is reached.
All other permits are suspended only by a charge like that, or by a court order.

All suspensions record why they happened and who ordered them, and an officer running that person reads it on the return under DL STATUS. A court suspension asks the judge for a reason and files it under their name; an automatic one records the charge or the points total that triggered it and is attributed to Automatic; a self-imposed one says so. The licence holder sees the same reason on their own card in the portal. Reinstating a licence clears it, so a valid licence never carries the last suspension's reason. - Court → Licences (Corrections): search a person by name or licence number and Suspend, Revoke or Reinstate any licence they hold. Set a duration and the suspension lifts itself; leave it at 0 for indefinite, which requires a manual reinstatement. A SELF-IMPOSED badge marks a suspension the player set themselves for roleplay rather than a real penalty. - A civilian cannot delete a suspended or revoked licence and re-add a clean one.

Petitioning the court¶

An officer doesn't suspend a licence themselves. They petition the court, the same way they apply for a warrant.

In the MDT's Records Console, file a License Suspension Petition. Name the subject, choose Suspend or Revoke, pick the licence types, set the days (0 = indefinite), and write the grounds.
Submit to Court. It lands in Warrants / Chambers as a pending petition, exactly like a warrant.
A judge reviews it and signs or denies it. Nothing is suspended while it is pending.
Signing carries the order out: the licences named in the petition are suspended immediately, and only those. A firearms petition leaves the driver licence alone.

Expungement¶

Court staff can seal a concluded case from its case file (Expungement panel).

Sealing removes those charges from:

all officers' records checks, the CRIMINAL HISTORY block on a person return,
the conviction and dismissal lists,
and the priors used to weight a future sentence.

Nothing is deleted. The court keeps the file, along with who sealed it and why, and the seal can be lifted at any time, and the record comes straight back.

What's eligible: dismissals and acquittals always. Convictions only if your community enables it (off by default: erasing a real conviction from all records checks is a deliberate choice, not a default). A still-pending charge has no outcome to seal. Dismissing the case disposes of its pending charges, so a dismissed case can be sealed straight away.

If some charges on a case are sealed and others aren't, the case stays visible: a surviving conviction must not vanish from the docket while it still counts against the defendant everywhere else. The panel then says how many charges are sealed and still offers Lift Seal and Restore Record.

A fine the defendant has already paid stays paid when they are sentenced or re-sentenced (after an appeal): the court never bills the same count twice.

Civil cases (player v. player)¶

Everything else in this page is criminal: it starts with an officer, a charge, and a penal code. A civil case is different: one player sues another over money, and no officer is involved at any point. A player crashes into someone's parked car and drives off; a contractor takes a deposit and never does the work; a tenant stops paying rent. Those are civil, and until now they had nowhere to go in the CAD.

Turn it on with the Civil court module (Admin → Court → Modules). It is off by default.

Who can file¶

You choose, under Admin → Court → Civil cases:

Setting	Who may open a suit
Court roles only (default)	Members holding a role in your COURT department (your Lawyer, District Attorney or Public Defender roles) plus judges, owners and admins. They file on behalf of whichever two characters they name. A player who wants to sue instructs one of your lawyers in character, and the lawyer files it.
Anyone	The above, plus any member suing on their own behalf. A self-represented player must name one of their own characters as the plaintiff, so nobody can start a case between two other people. Lawyers keep the power to file for a client.

Pick Anyone if you want civil court without staffing a DOJ. Pick Court roles only if suing should go through your in-character legal system.

To make somebody a lawyer, give them a role in a COURT department under Admin → Departments. Any rank in that department makes them counsel and puts them in the appoint-counsel dropdown; supervisor or command rank makes them a judge as well.

Civil cases live on their own Civil Docket in the Court terminal and are numbered CV-YY-####, so a civil matter is never mistaken for a criminal one.

If you can't find the Civil Docket

It appears once the Civil court module is on and you are someone who may file. Note it is not on the judge's bench only: switch the Act as picker at the top of the terminal to your law-enforcement hat or to one of your own characters and it is in the sidebar there too.

How a civil case runs¶

The complaint. The plaintiff is one of your own characters — suing on your own behalf is the ordinary case, and the form offers your characters and nothing else. Counsel filing for a client picks File on behalf of a client instead. The respondent is found by searching: type at least four letters of their name and matches appear. The form deliberately will not list your community's characters, so it cannot be used to read off who exists. Then the claim type, the damages sought, and a statement of what happened. Plaintiff and respondent must be two different players. If you sue as a different one of your characters than the one you are acting as, the Act as picker switches to the plaintiff when you file, so the case opens on your side and lists under that character's cases.
Service. The respondent is served the moment it is filed: a CAD notification, an in-game notification, and the case appears under their My Cases.
The answer. The respondent files one of three answers:
- Admit the claim, and it goes straight to a judge for the amount.
- Deny it, with their account of what happened, which the judge rules on.
- Offer a settlement: a figure they will pay. The plaintiff then accepts it (the matter closes by consent, no judge needed) or rejects it and goes before the bench.
The hearing. In AI judge, the court hears the matter itself. The complaint and the answer already stand as both sides' opening statements, so it does not ask anyone to repeat them: it questions the parties directly, up to four questions put to whichever side can best resolve what is unclear, then takes a closing from each. Both parties are real people, so the court never speaks for either — it asks, addresses them by name, and waits. With a Human judge it does none of this and the bench runs the matter.
Judgment. The court finds for the plaintiff, awarding an amount, or for the respondent, in which case the plaintiff takes nothing. The award can never exceed the amount claimed, and liability and amount are separate questions: a claim that is proved but inflated is reduced, not refused.

Either side can speak in the proceedings thread at any time, and the respondent can appoint one of your lawyers to act for them. The plaintiff's side can withdraw the complaint at any point before judgment.

If the respondent never answers¶

They go into default, and a judge may then enter judgment without them: the ordinary consequence of ignoring a suit. The window is the defendant reply timeout in your court settings (48 hours by default).

Who then decides depends on your Court mode, exactly as it does for a criminal case:

Court mode	Who enters the judgment
AI judge	The court hears the matter and rules.
Human judge	A person enters all judgments. The court notes the default and waits.

A timeout never awards money by itself in any mode — it only decides whether the court may proceed without the party who went quiet.

What a civil case does not do¶

It is not a criminal record. A civil judgment never appears on a rap sheet or a records check, and it is not a prior at anyone's future sentencing. Nobody is charged with anything.
No jail, no licence action, no bail. The only outcome is money.
No jail and no licence action still hold: the only outcome is money.

A judgment is payable in the CAD. It appears for the losing party under My Citations (and Court & Citations in the Civilian portal) as Civil judgments against you, alongside their fines, with what is owed and a Pay button. On a community running an in-game economy it comes out of their character's money the same way a citation fine does — queued, and marked satisfied only once the deduction actually lands. On a community without one, paying records the judgment as satisfied and the rest is roleplay between the players.

Serving warrants on arrest¶

An arrest clears everything the court is holding against that person — pick someone up and all of their outstanding warrants are processed at once, which is what happens in reality.

The arrest report's Warrants served by this arrest field (under Arrest Details) lists the arrestee's outstanding warrants with their number, type and basis, all ticked. Untick anything that isn't being served today. The list appears once the arrestee has been imported into the report — without a linked person the court has no record to look their warrants up against.

Warrants are marked Served when the arrest report is approved, not when it is drafted.

Deadlines — what happens if you ignore the court¶

A ticket you ignore is not a ticket you avoided. Two clocks run automatically, both configurable per community under Admin → Court, and both can be switched off by setting them to 0.

7 days to answer a citation¶

From the moment a citation is approved (issued), the cited person has 7 days to do something about it — plead guilty, plead not guilty, or simply pay it. If they do none of those:

Charge class	What happens after 7 days
Infraction / misdemeanour	Entered Guilty at the full penalty. The fine becomes owed, exactly as a real traffic court treats a default.
Felony	Never convicted by silence. A failure-to-appear bench warrant is issued instead and the charge stays open, so the hearing is owed rather than forfeited — they still get it, once they are brought in.

Paying a ticket counts as answering it: paying is itself an admission, so a paid citation is never defaulted. Neither is one that has been pleaded or already decided.

14 days to pay a fine¶

Once you have been convicted — by plea, by verdict, or by that 7-day default — you have 14 days to pay. After that the court issues a failure-to-pay bench warrant, and officers will find it on a records check like any other warrant.

The clock runs from the conviction, never from the citation, so contesting a ticket for a month never costs you the payment window: the fourteen days start the day you lose.

When the court's warrants come down¶

The court recalls its own failure-to-pay and failure-to-appear warrants once the citation no longer owes what the warrant was for: a failure-to-pay warrant when the fine is paid (in the portal, by staff, or collected in game), a failure-to-appear warrant when the defendant enters a plea or pays, and either one when the citation is voided or the charges end in a dismissal or acquittal. The warrant shows as Recalled, with the reason, and the person stops reading as wanted. A warrant someone filed by hand is never recalled this way.

A charge the court has already decided (by default, by a sentence, or by a staff ruling) can't be pleaded any more. Court & Citations shows the ruling and, if a fine is owed, the Pay button.

Both clocks issue real warrants

These appear in Records → Court / Judicial → Warrants and on the subject's record like any other warrant, with the citation number and the amount in the basis. Only one warrant is ever issued per citation, however long it goes unpaid.

Fines that were already owed when this arrived are not treated as instantly overdue: all existing unpaid convictions were given the full fourteen days from the day the rule went live.

Custody & corrections¶

A jail sentence adds the defendant to the Custody Roster with an INCARCERATED flag. By default release is manual: a judge clicks Release when the sentence is served. If you set minutes per day, the roster shows a live countdown and the defendant becomes eligible for release when it hits zero.

A sentence completes on its own once nothing is left to serve: jail past its release time, probation that has run out (in your in-game days when minutes per day is set), and a fine once all fined charges are paid. A sentence with community service hours waits for a judge, since hours are not tracked.

The sentence is emitted to FiveM as well. PulseCAD is the source of truth for the sentence, but each community's own jail script decides how the in-game jail actually works (see below).

What civilians do¶

From the Civilian Portal, a defendant can:

Plead on a citation or charge: Guilty or No Contest turns the fine into a bill to pay; Not Guilty opens a case to contest it. Pleas exist only while court is on, and a warning cannot be pleaded or paid: it carries no fine.
Post bail to clear a hold (deducts in-game money when your community charges for bail).
Argue their case in the proceedings chat when the court invites them, and appoint counsel: the AI public defender by default, or name a real player as their lawyer.
Appeal a closed case once, which stays the prior judgment and reopens the matter for reconsideration.
Answer a civil suit filed against them: admit it, deny it, or offer a settlement. See Civil cases. (Appeals are criminal only; a civil matter ends at judgment.)

What officers do (MDT)¶

From the Law Enforcement MDT:

Rap sheet on the person query: prior convictions, pending charges, past sentences, and outstanding warrants (including shared-partner priors when enabled).
Serve warrant: act on an active court warrant in the field.
File warrant reports and arrest reports that feed the court automatically.
Court kickbacks surface back to the filing officer (as a [COURT]-tagged returned report) to amend and refile. Once the court has decided the case, its report can't be kicked back, and refiling keeps the court's rulings: the narrative and details can still be corrected, but the charges can't be changed.

Discord integration¶

Turn the court events on in Admin → Discord → Notifications. They post to the Court alerts channel (Admin → Court) unless you give an event a channel of its own.

New warrant: a warrant waiting for a judge posts with its number, basis, requesting officer and case, and Sign and Deny buttons (Pulse Pro), so a judge can rule straight from Discord. Every warrant post also has an Open in Court button that opens that warrant in the Court. Deny asks for a reason. Only a judge can press them: an owner or admin, or a Court-department role at supervisor rank or above, with a linked Discord account.
Warrant ruling and Warrant served: posted however the ruling was made (the Court page, the AI judge, Discord, or a dismissal recalling it). The original request post updates to match.
Court case filed: a contested citation (not-guilty plea), an arraignment on an approved arrest report, a manually filed case, or a civil complaint.
Court case ruling: sentenced, dismissed, or closed, with the sentence when there is one.

FiveM integration¶

Court rulings reach the game through the FiveM resource:

Sentence: a sentence event (jail days + your minutes-per-day) is emitted so your community's own jail script puts the player away however it implements jail. PulseCAD does not force an in-game mechanic.
Notification: any ruling sends the defendant an in-game notice ("Court Ruling: …"), useful even for communities without a custom jail script.
Fines and bail: when the money economy is enabled for them, court fines and posted bail are deducted in game via the same mechanism used for citations; otherwise they're recorded in PulseCAD without touching in-game money. Court fines and bail are separate switches from citations, and all three live in Admin → FiveM → Money economy (auto-fines) - there is no longer an Economy setting on the Court page. If the player is offline or short of money the fine is kept and retried for up to 7 days, and all attempts and their outcomes are listed on that same FiveM panel. A court fine collected in game marks its charges paid, the same as a citation fine, so the portal never bills it twice; a citation fine still waiting to be collected for those charges is replaced by the court's fine rather than added to it.

These are targeted to the specific player by their license, so on a multi-server community only the server the defendant is online on acts.

Admin: enable Court, pick the mode, configure the judge, sentencing rules, penal-code ranges, the AI key, and the Discord court channel.
Civilian Portal: pleas, self-bail, appeals, and appointing counsel.
Law Enforcement (MDT): rap sheets, serving warrants, and filing the reports that open cases.
Data Sharing: how shared-partner convictions count toward priors.
Discord and FiveM: where rulings are announced and enforced.