Vanderburgh County Courts

The Vanderburgh Circuit Court and the Vanderburgh Superior Court both list 825 Sycamore Street in downtown Evansville, the Civic Center Courts Building, as their address. The Indiana Judicial Branch places Vanderburgh County in Judicial District 26. Under the local rules the Superior Court has seven divisions, and the state certifies five problem-solving courts here: an Adult Drug Court, Mental Health Court, Reentry Court and Family Recovery Court under the Superior Court, and a Veterans Court under the Circuit Court.

Felonies are assigned by random draw, two to the Circuit Court for every one to the Superior Court, except that a case whose top charge is a Level 6 felony and that includes a drug or alcohol count goes to Superior Court Division II. A case whose top charge is a misdemeanor is heard in the Superior Court’s misdemeanor and traffic docket, which rotates among Divisions I, V, VI and VII.

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.

Circuit Court and felony hearings are at 825 Sycamore Street, Civic Center Courts Building, Evansville, IN 47708.

A misdemeanor or traffic case is heard in the Superior Court’s Misdemeanor & Traffic Court, which the county lists at 1 NW Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Evansville, IN 47708, in the Civic Center Complex.

Filings and case records go through the Clerk of the Courts, whose office the county lists at that same address. If you are filing something or asking about your case record, that is the Clerk. Both addresses are part of the downtown Civic Center, so if you have a hearing, go by the address and courtroom on your notice.

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. You can look your case up on Indiana’s public case portal, mycase.in.gov.

The Civic Center Courts Building is not the Old Courthouse

Search for the Vanderburgh County courthouse and you can land on a domed limestone building downtown, on the block bounded by Vine, Fourth, Court and Fifth Streets. That is the Old Vanderburgh County Courthouse. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but Vanderburgh Circuit and Superior Court hearings are held at the Civic Center.

Its National Register file gives the history. The building served as the seat of county government for 78 years, until May 1969. That year the new City-County complex was finished, and the file on the sheriff’s residence across Fourth Street records that the former County Court House was abandoned and rented to a preservation group.

The state’s court directory lists both Vanderburgh courts at 825 Sycamore Street, which the county calls the Civic Center Courts Building. The Old Courthouse’s own website offers it for weddings and private parties and says a couple of county offices and private businesses have space there. If a search result shows you a ballroom, you have the wrong building. Go by the address on your notice.

Reading your case number

Every Indiana trial court case number follows the same pattern, set by Administrative Rule 8, and once you can read it, it tells you which court has your case. It has four groups of characters. Here is a made-up example. It is not a real case: a real number never ends in 000000, because each year’s count starts at 000001.

82D05-2610-CM-000000

82D05 is the county and the court. The first two digits are the county, and 82 is Vanderburgh. The last three are the court: C01 is the Vanderburgh Circuit Court, and D01 through D07 are the Superior Court’s seven divisions. So 82D05 is Vanderburgh Superior Court, Division V.

2610 is the year and month of filing, here October 2026.

CM is the type of case, here a criminal misdemeanor.

000000 is the filing sequence. A real number has six digits here, assigned in order as cases are filed.

The third group is worth learning. F1 through F6 are Level 1 through Level 6 felonies, used for crimes committed on or after July 1, 2014. FA through FD are Class A through Class D felonies, used for crimes committed on or before June 30, 2014. MR is murder, IF is an infraction, MC is miscellaneous criminal, JD is juvenile delinquency, PC is a post-conviction relief petition, and XP is an expungement petition.

If your paperwork says Superior Court 5, that means the same thing as D05: Division V. A misdemeanor number will usually start 82D01, 82D05, 82D06 or 82D07, because those are the divisions the misdemeanor and traffic docket rotates among. A felony number will usually start 82C01, 82D02 or 82D03. The number names the court. It does not give you a room or a time, and your notice does.

If a case moves between courts in the county, Rule 8 changes only the first group. A new court on the same number means the case moved, not that a second case was filed.

To look a case up, go to mycase.in.gov, the state’s free public case search, and enter the number in the format shown above: MyCase’s terms warn that a search can miss a case depending on the exact format entered. Confidential, sealed and expunged cases cannot be searched, and some documents, including those in older cases, are not online. So a search that finds nothing does not prove nothing was filed. MyCase also says that what it shows is not an official court record and may contain errors. Official records come directly from the court that keeps them.

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.