Ensuring that defendants released before trial return to court — that they “appear” for future court dates — is one of the primary goals of the pretrial process. Bail reform efforts over the last decade have intended, and sometimes achieved, increased rates of pretrial release. As reformers work to preserve these policies and advocate for still higher rates of pretrial release, understanding pretrial appearance is as important as ever. 

This intense reform focus on the pretrial system and the intervening disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted scholars’ and legislators’ reconsideration of settled assumptions about pretrial appearance, leading to efforts to better understand what causes defendants to miss court and what interventions may help them return. These interventions include those aiming to support defendants on pretrial release (and shifting away from overreliance on surveillance and penalties), as well as system-focused changes that improve appearance rates across cases. 

This Article analyzes these developments and then steps back to examine more fundamental but surprisingly undertheorized questions: (i) whether and why pretrial appearance is important, (ii) how the system evolved to penalize nonappearance, and (iii) whether the relatively severe penalties the system still imposes for nonappearance can be justified as an effective strategy to achieve system goals. The Article calls into question rigid expectations for perfect pretrial attendance that are set and enforced in ways that prize defendants’ compliance as an end in itself. Particularly when paired with courts’ notoriously inflexible scheduling practices, those perfect-appearance expectations lead to defendant failure and obscure the justice goals that justify the use of the criminal process. All of this effort tracking, counting, and punishing failures to appear comes at the expense of addressing more significant underlying criminal justice problems.