Hi friends,
This forum has been extremely helpful to me for the past 1 month, and I thought of posting my experience which may help several other people who are passing through the harrowing experience and outcome of a shoplifiting arrest, and have a court date.
I am a 29 yr old Indian female living in New Jersey, and currently on H visa, and already applied for a Green card(permanent residency).

I was arrested for shoplifiting from a large retail chain on October end. The valuation of goods was $45. I was arrested with a disorderly offense, and subsequently released on bail of $750. My 1st court date(arraignment) was scheduled couple of days later. Immediately I hired a good defense attorney(you can get several references from the internet) who waived my presence on the arraignment date and pleaded not-guilty. Subsequently we were given a new court date , couple of days back from today.

So for 1 full month, I was left shocked and was terribly worried about what is going to happen. I saw several posts on this site, which helped me to get some idea. Meanwhile my defense attorney assured me, and because of my immigration status, she was shooting for a downgrade to municipal ordinance.

Now what happened in court 2days back: The court was running very late, and there were several people, mainly traffic violators in the court. From the retail store, the store personnel was there(who caught me at the store), and they had a private prosecutor. This was the 1st time I came across the concept of a private prosecutor. I never heard about one in the posts here. However, my attorney came, and started negotiating with the prosecutor. She tried to convince stating about my immigration status, and I should not really get a shoplifting conviction. It was very difficult to convince them, because the store personnel was not willing to accept. After a long series of negotiations, finally they did agree to a municipal ordinance violation with a higher fine($500 odd in my case). To those who might know what is a municipal ordinance, it is not a severe criminal conviction, it is something like an annoyance, disturbance, noise, and has almost minimal effects on immigration.

Finally the judge called us, read out the municipal ordinance and asked whether I plead guilty to that. I replied yes. The judge being very kind, granted me the ordinance violation with the fine. No probation, no community service..

I paid the fine at the court yesterday itself, and came back home with a relieved mind, and with a firm resolution of "NEVER SHOPLIFT". This is the message to all shoplifters.