Seattle Criminal Attorney | The Idea of Corpus Delicti
December 31, 2009No one wishes to be acquainted with or speak to a criminal defense attorney until they are in danger. There is a specific plague or hex that individuals seem to think trail those seeking out criminal defense guidance before they need it. But, when you are charged with a misdemeanor, you immediately understand how critical a good Seattle criminal attorney is.
And part of the need for a Seattle DUI attorney is the need to decipher all of the legal gibberish that is tossed back and forth between the judge and the attorneys. Here are just a couple of expressions you might hear during your criminal process, some you might be on familiar terms with, some you may not: hearsay, nunc pro tunc; arraignment; omnibus; voir dire; res ipsa loquitor; and on and on.
Well, I’m here today to help you comprehend what one of those legal terms means – corpus delicti. This is a word you may well not hear spouted in court a lot, but it is an vital term for your defense attorney to know, particularly if you have confessed to a crime and he or she desires to try to get that confession suppressed. So that you better know the word, I’ve broken it down for you below.
As I mentioned above, corpus delicti arises most regularly in the circumstance of confessions, and particularly in the situation of confessions where not a lot of supplementary support exists against the defendant. glimpse, judges and courts, while more than eager to admit a confession if one is given, don’t necessarily like confessions, particularly if they are the only thing the proseuctor has on a defendant. The reason is, we know false confessions are given from time to time. And we be on familiar terms with that juries place in extremely high regard confessions of defendants. So, judges and courts are hesitant to allow confessions in unless there is some extra separate evidence of the criminal act.
And that other unrelated support of a criminal act is what corpus delicti represents. If there is no corpus delicti, or other unconnected support of a crime, the court will not allow in a confession because there is the possibility (whether sensible or otherwise) that the confession was falsely provided. Still a little bit mystified as to what it means? How about an example.
Let’s say there is a gentleman. He is standing out in a parking lot with some supplementary individuals around some trucks. Let’s say the citizens in the sedan and the people out of the vehicle get into a shouting match, for whatever rationale. In the end, the gentlemen in the auto choose to depart. As they are pulling away, the driver hears a racket on his sedan and turns around. He doesn’t witness anybody touching his car or necessarily by his van, but there is only one person in the region. The chap in the sedan doesn’t check his auto out until later, when he glimpses a dent in the side of his car. He surmises it was the male he saw around his automobile before.
The police go and pick up the chap they suspect of hurting the auto and take him down to the police station. After some talking and interrogating, they get the gentleman to allow in to kicking the automobile. He is detained and charged with malicious mischief.
In this situation, do you sense the rule of corpus delicti exists here? With no the admission, all the cops have for facts is the chap hearing something happen to his vehicle, turn around, and witness the gentleman near the automobile. What is missing is any support that the guy hit the van, and that he did it with an intention to hurt the sedan. It is possible (theoretically, if no confession had been given) that he was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time when the man turned around. For a state of affairs like that a corpus delicti line of reasoning might be a way to get the confession suppressed.
Corpus delicti, like most additional Latin legal expressions, are not hard to understand as soon as they are clarified. But getting that description can be a very difficult process at times. So why chance misunderstanding a question or a direction for the reason that you don’t have the legal teaching of the prosecutors? The minute you are placed under arrest or deem like you can’t abscond is the moment you should demand to converse with a Seattle criminal attorney. A criminal lawyer can not singly assist you through the confusion of legal nonsense, but facilitate you to keep your mouth shut and the cops off your back.
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