Can we have an accessory while a principal is acquitted? Can someone be convicted of being an accessory to a crime while a principal is acquitted? By definition an accessory helps conceal evidence or persons involved in a felony. If a principal is not charged as a felon, but the crime is still a felony, then doesn't that require there being another principal who is the felon, or can we have a felony without a felon?
Of course The prosecution just needs to prove that the crime happened (or the defendant believed it to have happened) and you helped (in brief, there will be specific elements of the crime that each need to be proved). This would be easier if the primary crime had a convicted perpetrator but it’s not impossible without. Allow me to illustrate with an example. I will set out facts which are somewhat contrived and would not be so clear cut in a real case but for the purposes of the example please take them as undisputed and fully supported by evidence. John and Jill are in a relationship. This relationship is well known to be argumentative with frequent shouting matches and one or the other storming out. This does not amount to domestic violence by either party. John's friend Alan believes (wrongly) that there is domestic violence. During an argument Jill drops dead of a heart attack. John rings Alan distraught and says "I've killed her." Alan assumes (wrongly) that John has murdered Jill. Alan says "i'll take care of it. You go to your dad's". Alan (alone) disposes of the body. John is not guilty of murder (or indeed, anything). Alan is guilty of accessory to murder even though the actual crime never happened. The fact that Alan believed it happened is enough.
Can be tried as first-degree murder, actually. See below. felony murder doctrine n. a rule of criminal statutes that any death which occurs during the commission of a felony is first degree murder, and all participants in that felony or attempted felony can be charged with and found guilty of murder. A typical example is a robbery involving more than one criminal, in which one of them shoots, beats to death or runs over a store clerk, killing the clerk. Even if the death were accidental, all of the participants can be found guilty of felony murder, including those who did no harm, had no gun, and/or did not intend to hurt anyone. In a bizarre situation, if one of the holdup men or women is killed, his/her fellow robbers can be charged with murder.
Yes The rule against prosecuting a sitting President is not a law, it is a Justice Department opinion and policy. The justification for it is that dealing with a criminal case would be severely distracting to the President, and thus harmful to the nation. Besides, the opinion goes on, any serious issue can be dealt with by impeachment. That reasoning obviously does not apply to a former President. Article I, section 3, paragraph 7 of the US constitution says: Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law. (emphasis added) This clearly contemplates the criminal prosecution of a former office holder, after such a person was removed by an impeachment. There is no exception for a President. Therefor a President can be criminally charged and prosecuted for actions during the presidency, provided that the evidence to establish probable cause is there, and that a Grand Jury indicts said former President. So far as I know there has never been a case where such a thing was done. President Ford's pardon of President Nixon stopped any Federal prosecution of him. I think there have been cases were former US Judges, after impeachment, were criminally prosecuted. But that is not quite the same thing -- no one claims that sitting judges are immune to criminal charges. To be clear this would not apply just to issues that a President had been impeached for. A former President is no different from anyone else in this respect. Any such person can be prosecuted if there is probable cause, and convicted if there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt of criminal violation of some law, even if the violation occurred while the president was in office.
Theoretically you could, but that's highly unlikely if what you say is all there is to it. The prosecutor would have to have good evidence that you had a criminal intent, for example intended to make off with the goods. You could even attach a note of explanation to overcome any suspicion of criminal intent.
I'll start with a list of issues presented and also note at the outset that the question correctly notes that both the school district (which is an entity distinct from the county), and the superintendent of schools, are protected from civil liability to a significant extent by the doctrine of sovereign immunity which is outlined here. Two specific provisions bear particular note: an exclusion of liability for someone who has reported a suspected child abuse case, and immunity for a school teacher who acts in good faith with regard to supervision, care and discipline of students. 1. What duty does a public school board in the U.S., or do specific employees of that school board, have to prevent a violent crime from being committed by one student against another student, when that student has no prior history of serious misconduct? Short of malice directed at a victimized student there is no liability under state law. There is also no well established constitutional right violated that could give rise to civil rights liability. Students commit crimes against each other all of the time and school officials are almost never responsible for those crimes. 2. What duty does a public school board in the U.S., or do specific employees of that school board, have to prevent a violent crime from being committed by one student against another student, when that student has a history of prior serious misconduct? The legal standard is the same but the practical analysis might be more fact intensive. Still, outright malice directed towards a victim would pretty much be the applicable legal standard and is unlikely to be present in this case, absent awareness, for example, of conditions of probation or pre-trial release after the first case that weren't enforced. 3. Is a public school in the U.S. permitted or required by law to advise parents of students at the school that student transferring into the new school has a history of violent criminal conduct? Juvenile justice law and educational privacy laws profoundly limit the extent to which a public school, or its officials are allowed to disclose that a student transferring into a school has a history of violent criminal conduct. There is no clear duty of the public school in the U.S. to disclose this fact broadly. 4. Is a statement by a superintendent to parents in a public school district that transgender girl does not pose a threat to cis-gender girls in restrooms an actionable fraud (and does it matter if there is a history of prior misconduct by a particular student in this case of which the superintendent was aware)? The statement is not, in general, false. If it was made after knowledge of this particular student, that might be a different matter, but as noted above, there are severe legal limitations on what the board is allowed to say. It isn't inconceivable that the school board or superintendent could have said more than it did to at least some people. But there isn't a clear legal duty to do so. It also isn't clear what the superintendent actually knew when he made a report to the school board even tough the information should have been shared with him. It is possible that only a lower level official in the school system had actual knowledge at that time. 5. What crime, if any, did the father of the first rape victim commit for trying to warn the parents about someone who attacked his daughter? This is partially speculation, but the father appears to have been arrested for the manner in which he acted disturbing the peace, speaking out of turn, and refusing the leave a meeting when requested, rather than sharing the information per se. 6. Did the school superintendent commit a crime somehow connected to the second rape by concealing the risk posed by the student in question? The school superintendent has a duty to report child abuse to authorities and failure to do so (if it was not done) would be minor crime. My impression of the fact is that the first rape was reported to juvenile justice system officials and resulted in action being taken. So, it does not appear that this duty was breached. According to the article: The boy was arrested and charged for the first assault in July but released from juvenile detention while prosecutors waited for DNA rape kit evidence to come back. Loudoun County Commonwealth's Attorney Buta Biberaj says at the time they had no reason to believe the boy should have stayed in juvenile detention. “If that case had gone forward and we were not able to substantiate beyond a reasonable doubt the allegations that were made by the victim, he would've been out anyway,” she said. “The best decision was made with the facts that were known.&quot; This does not, however, give him criminal liability for a subsequent rape of one student by another in which he had not involvement sufficient to constitute criminal conspiracy to commit sexual assault which was the case here. 7. Does the school board have defamation liability for calling the father of the victim of the first rape a transphobe? No. The school board has sovereign immunity from suits for money damages seeking to establish liability in relation to statements made in their official capacity, apparently in good faith. It also isn't clear that the statements made were actionable in the first place, or that such statements were even made by them. The school board also does not appear to have had actual knowledge of what happened until a decisive school board meeting after the second assault. 8. Does the public have any power to remove an appointed official such as the superintendent in this context? No. The political remedy is to elect a new school board that would select a different superintendent.
Does double jeopardy prohibit prosecution, for the same event, in both federal and state court? No. Key precedents on the question are US v. Lanza (1922) and Abbate v. US (1959). From Lanza: The defendants thus committed two different offenses by the same act, and a conviction by a court of Washington of the offense against that state is not a conviction of the different offense against the United States, and so is not double jeopardy. From Wikipedia's article on Abbate: Abbate asked that the Court overrule its prior decision, which the Court declined to do. The Court reasoned that overruling Lanza would result in serious and undesirable consequences. Particularly, the state conviction here resulted in only three months' imprisonment, while the federal conviction made up to five years of imprisonment available. The Court deemed this potential disparity to be problematic. The only way to ensure that federal law enforcement interests would be vindicated under such a regime would be to displace state power to prosecute actions that also constitute federal crimes, which would be a massive shift in the balance of criminal power as between the states and the federal government. In a comment, you raise a question about the last sentence: &quot;The only way to ensure that federal law enforcement interests would be vindicated under such a regime would be to displace state power to prosecute actions that also constitute federal crimes,&quot; seems to state that not displacing state power to prosecute, under such circumstances, would keep the law enforcement interests un-vindicated (which would mean unjustified). So the only justified thing to do would be to try under the Federal law and to not try under the state law. &quot;Vindicate&quot; here does not mean justify but rather maintain or substantiate. The point is that if double jeopardy protected against prosecution by the federal government for a crime that has already been charged under state law, then states could effectively neuter federal crimes with which they disagreed by establishing a crime with identical elements and a token punishment. Another way of avoiding this outcome without permitting separate state and federal prosecutions for the same crime would be to prohibit state prosecutions altogether for acts that are also federal crimes. In other words, this says that the court found that the prohibition against double jeopardy allows these separate prosecutions because prohibiting them would require a &quot;massive shift&quot; in the responsibility for enforcing criminal law away from the states and toward the federal government. (Of course, this works both ways; if double jeopardy applied across sovereigns then the federal government could also neuter state laws. More generally, the current approach to double jeopardy may be seen as maintaining the balance of power between the states and the federal government, more than as protecting the interests of one side over those of the other.)
While felony murder was an offense originally invented to single out more culpable murders from less culpable murders, with only the former punishable by death, as opposed to imposing the death penalty on everyone convicted of murder, it has evolved into a means of convicting someone of first degree murder who otherwise would not have been guilty of the crime of murder (or even conspiracy to commit murder) at all. In a typical felony murder statute, everyone who participates in a felony designated in the felony murder statute that results in a death at the hands of any participate, without regard to premeditation or involvement in the murder itself, is guilty of felony murder, rather than merely the underlying felony crime. Typically, felony murder is one way to be guilty of first degree murder and typically the punishment for first degree murder is either life in prison without possibility of parole, or the death penalty (if the state has death penalty), as determined in a second phase of the jury trial after the guilt phase is completed. At the death penalty phase, following evidentiary presentation by the prosecution and the defense of aggravating and mitigating factors, in addition to the evidence presented in the guilty or innocence phase of the trial (at which the same death qualified jury convicted the defendant), the jury (except in Nebraska where a panel of three judges makes this decision, and in Montana where a sole judge makes this decision) must determine if the aggravating factors in the case outweigh the mitigating factors, if any. The fact that the defendant (now a convicted murderer) was a knowing participant in a felony is typically an aggravating factor. The possibility, if established, that the defendant (now a convicted murderer) was not expecting that violence would occur and did not participate in the killing would be a mitigating factor. The Supreme Court of the United States has held that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution does not prohibit imposing the death penalty for felony murder. The Supreme Court has created a two-part test to determine when the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for felony murder. Under Enmund v. Florida, 458 U.S. 782 (1982), the death penalty may not be imposed on someone who did not kill, attempt to kill, or intend that a killing take place. However, under Tison v. Arizona, 481 U.S. 137 (1987), the death penalty may be imposed on someone who was a major participant in the underlying felony and acted with reckless indifference to human life. So, the constitutional standard for imposing the death penalty for felony murder is higher than the constitutional standard for imposing the default life without possibility of parole (LWOP) sentence for felony murder. Keep in mind also that following a jury imposition of the death penalty that this decision will be upheld if any reasonable jury could have found facts sufficient to impose the death penalty by finding some evidence to be credible and other evidence to be less credible, whether or not that was the most plausible interpretation of the facts and whether or not this was actually the reason for the jury's decision. Also keep in mind that the death qualification of the jury (i.e. striking for cause from the jury pool anyone who is categorically opposed to imposing the death penalty), means that juries in cases where the death penalty is an option are systemically biased in favor of the prosecution in the process of how the judge guilty or innocence, and also, in their evaluation of aggravating and mitigating factors in a case.
To answer the first question, the answer seems to be "generally not." In federal courts, this is explicitly not allowed -- rule 6(d) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure states that the only people who can be present before a grand jury are government lawyers, the witness being questioned, interpreters, and a court reporter In state courts, the rules vary by state. However, again, private citizens are generally either completely not allowed to act as prosecutors, or are only allowed to act as prosecutors in a restricted set of situations and subject to the ultimate control of public prosecutors. For instance, in Virginia (which allows private prosecutors), the private prosecutor can't speak in front of a grand jury, initiate a criminal case, or participate in a decision to dismiss charges (page 23). In New Hampshire, private prosecution is limited to misdemeanors with no possibility of jail time, and again the state can dismiss charges (page 8). Rhode Island, like New Hampshire, allows private prosecution for misdemeanors but lets the state dismiss charges (page 11). The justification for allowing the state to dismiss charges is generally "prosecution is inherently a governmental task, so the government must retain ultimate control."