Every December, Butler County courts hold an annual event of the nonholiday variety.

Less like a holiday and more like an end-of-year cleaning, the court's Criminal Return Day could be good news for some.

Of the thousands of warrants issued each year, a number of them will never be resolved for a range of reasons, including the death of the wanted person, according to Clerk of Courts Lisa Lotz.

Rather than let the warrants gather dust, the clerk of courts office compiles a list of all eligible warrants to be reviewed by a Butler County judge and district attorney who decide if any of the warrants should be dropped.

On Tuesday, Judge William Shaffer and Assistant District Attorney Patricia McLean dismissed 16 warrants out of a list of 100 possible candidates that Becky Shimko, a clerk of courts employee, has been working on since the summer.

“The preparation is a lot of the work and then the day of, it's just a 15 minute thing,” said Shimko, who has been with the clerk of courts office for seven years. “We get a lot of warrants so we have to go through it all.”

Last year, there was a list of about 100, too, Shimko said, and 32 were dismissed.

In order for a warrant to even be considered for dismissal, it has to be at least 2 years old, according to Shimko and Lotz. This year's list included warrants that dated back to 2002, with 2016 being the cutoff.

One of the warrants was maintained at the Attorney General's request for a person who had fled the country.

Another warrant was dismissed after a court notice was responded to with news that the person had died. Along with the death of the wanted person, a warrant can be dismissed if a witness in the case dies or if the arresting police officer dies, according to McLean.

Currently, there are 1,400 active bench warrants, according to information from the Butler County Sheriff's Office. Bench warrants are issued by Butler's common pleas judges.

But Criminal Return Day is no get-out-of-jail-free holiday.

“We will rarely dismiss cases,” McLean said, explaining that warrants are dropped only in extraordinary cases that rob the prosecution's ability to pursue the case in a meaningful way.

“We will go above and beyond to pursue serious cases like assaults,” McLean said.