Summons
Functional details of Summons
Last updated
Functional details of Summons
Last updated
During a case proceeding, a summon can be issued against the respondent, to call him/her to the court on specific date (hearing date). The process is referred to as "issue of summon" and is via an Order issued by the Judge during a hearing.
A summon is a type of a task, which in turn is generated as part of an Order. More details on the Task are here.
The following JSON represents the summons schema
As per an Order to issue a summon, a Task is created, the Task.taskType is set to 'summons' and the Task.taskDetails field will contain summons details as per the schema defined above. A summon, post creation, will only be taken up for deliver after the required payments are made. Each summon has two types of payments. The first is the court related fees for issue of summons and second is the delivery channel related fees. Each delivery channel can ask for a fees. If the same delivery channel is used more than once like for example using e-Post to send summon to two different addresses, then the channel can charge for each address separately.
Payment for summons can managed as a combination of Court fees + fees for each delivery channel or each of the payments can be made separately. The court fees is recorded a part of the Task.amount and the payment for each delivery channel is recorded as part of summon details (Task.taskDetails.deliveryChannel.Fees). Once the court fees is paid, then summon can be issued i.e. sent for delivery, for all free delivery channels and for those whose payments has been processed.
For each delivery channel, there is a transaction/correlation ID that is used to track the specific summon and its status with the specific channel. The channel is expected to call back and update the Summons (i.e. Task) status.
If a summon remains undelivered, the Judge will typically issue a warrant against the respondent. Warrant is another type of Task, which is explained in the next section.