Vanderburgh County Courts

Vanderburgh County’s courts sit in the Civic Center Courts Building at 825 Sycamore Street in downtown Evansville — both the Vanderburgh Circuit Court and the Vanderburgh Superior Court. The Indiana Judicial Branch places Vanderburgh County in Judicial District 26. The county describes the Superior Court as hearing traffic, misdemeanor, felony, domestic relations, juvenile paternity, civil, small claims, protective order, probate, adoption and juvenile delinquency cases, and as operating several specialty courts alongside them: the Vanderburgh County Treatment Court, the Mental Health Court, and the Juvenile CHINS Drug Court.

If you are reading this because you have a date at one of those courts, the sections below are the parts that matter most in the first few weeks — and the ones people most often get wrong.

What happens at an initial hearing

The initial hearing is where the court puts the case on the record and tells you your rights. Indiana Code 35-33-7-5 sets out what the judicial officer must inform you of, orally or in writing:

that you have a right to retain counsel, and a deadline for doing so; that you have a right to assigned counsel at no expense if you are indigent; that you have a right to a speedy trial; the amount and conditions of bail; your privilege against self-incrimination; the nature of the charge against you; and that a preliminary plea of not guilty is being entered on your behalf.

That preliminary plea becomes a formal plea of not guilty 20 days after the initial hearing is completed, or 10 days if you are charged only with misdemeanors, unless you enter a different plea in the meantime. The judge also directs the prosecuting attorney to hand you or your attorney a copy of any formal felony charges that have been filed or are ready to be filed — and, if you ask, any misdemeanor charges.

If the offense involves operating a motor vehicle, the court must also tell you that you may request to petition for a specialized driving privileges hearing.

The deadline that starts at your initial hearing

This is the single most time-sensitive thing on this page. Under Indiana Code 35-33-7-5, the court must tell you that if you intend to retain counsel you must do so within 20 days if you are charged with a felony, or 10 days if you are charged only with one or more misdemeanors.

The statute states the reason in its own text: there are deadlines for filing motions and raising defenses, and if those deadlines are missed, the legal issues and defenses that could have been raised will be waived. A defense that is waived is not a defense you can revive later by hiring someone good. That is why the days immediately after an initial hearing are worth more than almost any other stretch of a criminal case.

On timing of the hearing itself, Indiana Code 35-33-7-1 requires that a person arrested without a warrant be taken promptly before a judicial officer. If you make bail before the initial hearing, that hearing occurs within 20 calendar days of arrest — within 10 calendar days if the arrest was under IC 9-30-5, Indiana’s operating-while-intoxicated chapter. Where the arrest was made on a warrant and you were released under the warrant’s own terms, Indiana Code 35-33-7-4 sets the initial hearing within 20 days of arrest.

What a continuance actually is

A continuance moves a setting. It is a motion the judge rules on, and Indiana Code 35-36-7-1 is specific about what a defendant has to show.

If you are asking to postpone a trial because evidence is missing, the request must be made on affidavit showing that the evidence is material, that due diligence has been used to obtain it, and where it is. If the missing item is a witness, the affidavit has more to carry: the witness’s name and address if known, the probability of getting their testimony within a reasonable time, that you did not cause the absence yourself, the facts you believe the witness will testify to along with a statement that you believe those facts to be true, and that no other equally available witness can prove them.

Two practical limits are worth knowing before you count on a delay. First, the trial may not be postponed at all if the prosecuting attorney simply admits the absent witness would testify to the facts your affidavit alleges, or admits the documentary evidence exists — the admission substitutes for the evidence and the case goes forward. Second, an affidavit for a continuance must be filed no later than five days before the date set for trial; file later and you must satisfy the court that you were not at fault for the delay. Where illness is the reason, the motion has to come with a physician’s or hospital official’s testimony in open court or a sworn written statement describing the illness and the probable duration of the incapacity.

None of that describes simply not showing up. A continuance is granted in advance, by a judge, on a record. Failing to appear is a separate problem with its own consequences.

Getting to the right building

Two addresses matter, and they are not the same place.

Hearings are at 825 Sycamore Street, Civic Center Courts Building, Evansville, IN 47708.

Filings and case records go through the Clerk of the Courts, whose office is at 1 NW Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Evansville, IN 47708 — a different building in the Civic Center Complex. If you are filing something or asking about your case record, that is the Clerk; if you have a hearing, you want the Courts Building on Sycamore Street.

We deliberately do not publish office hours, room numbers, direct phone extensions or parking directions on this page. Those details change without notice, and a stale one on a page someone reads the night before a hearing is worse than no detail at all — the court’s own site is current and ours could not promise to be. The Indiana Judicial Branch page for Vanderburgh County, linked above, is where to check them. Allow yourself extra time downtown, and confirm your courtroom against your own charging paperwork before the day. Indiana’s public case portal at mycase.in.gov is the official place to look your case up.

How Jerry L. Garner works these courts

Jerry L. Garner is a former FBI Special Agent who has spent more than 36 years in the law, and criminal defense in Southern Indiana is the whole of the practice. The firm keeps its principal office at 223 Main Street in Rockport and a second office at 123 NW 4th Street, Suite 521, in downtown Evansville, minutes from the Civic Center Courts Building.

The FBI background matters in a specific and unglamorous way here. Most of what decides a Vanderburgh County case is built long before anyone stands up in the Courts Building: how the stop was made, how the search was conducted, how the interview was run, what the report says versus what the recording shows. Someone who spent a career assembling that kind of file knows where it tends to be weak.

If you have an initial hearing coming up in Vanderburgh County — or you have just had one and the retention clock in Indiana Code 35-33-7-5 is already running — call (812) 301-6221. The consultation is free, and the earliest conversations are the ones that change outcomes.