How does a preliminary hearing differ from a full trial? Apparently "preliminary hearings" are to determine whether or not the defendant should be sent to Superior Court for a "full" trial. (My "source" for this is "Perry Mason.") What exactly is a "preliminary hearing"? Is it a "halfway house" between say, a grand jury indictment and a trial? Or given the sequence of arrest and "preliminary hearing," is it the grand jury indictment process itself?
A "preliminary hearing", of the kind depicted in the Perry Mason novels, is a procedure in California and some other states. It is an alternative to a Grand jury proceeding. It is used to determine whether there is probable cause to put the defendant on trial. Such hearing are mostly rather routine, and rarely reach the level of drama shown in "Perry Mason". But the prosecutor does present witnesses, which the defendant's lawyer can cross-examine. The defendant may, but rarely does, also present witnesses. Note that Mason stories sometimes involved a full trial, not just a preliminary hearing. Gardner, who wrote Perry Mason, was a practicing attorney in CA, and most of the law as he shows it was accurate when he wrote, but he often showed legally possible but highly unlikely events to improve the drama of his stories.
With only prosecutor(s) and a court reporter, are jurors at all instructed to not simply &quot;rubber stamp&quot; the prosecution's desire to indict? Not really. They are told their job and the legal standards that they are required to act according to, however, and the federal judicial branch does have a short handbook for grand jurors. Are the terms and concepts necessary for them to function as a jury (e.g. &quot;preponderance of evidence&quot;) explained to them? Yes. But grand juries don't operate on a preponderance of the evidence standard. The sole evidentiary standard in a grand jury proceeding is the lower &quot;probable cause&quot; standard. Likewise, lots of evidence which would not be admissible in a criminal trial is admissible in a grand jury proceeding. The main kind of evidence not admissible in a grand jury proceeding is evidence which is &quot;privileged&quot; against court disclosure (e.g. attorney-client communications). If so, by who? The prosecutor and the handbook linked above. Is there a standard &quot;script&quot; or talking points for such instruction? Prosecuting attorney's offices in jurisdictions that usually use grand juries typically have a set of forms. In federal practice, Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6 is the primary source of guidance, and the Justice Department (which handles all or virtually all federal criminal prosecutions) has detailed policies and procedures for handling grand jury practice (and a 405 page practice manual) that his a matter of public record. There is some case law on what the content of an indictment must look like and on the grand jury process. Some state and local jurisdictions with routine use of grand juries probably have standard court forms for certain parts of grand jury process, and there may be some standard forms in local rules for some federal courts. But there isn't a national judicial branch sanctioned official set of court forms for grand juries in the federal criminal justice system. The rather lax supervision of grand juries reflects the fact that they are a road bump in the criminal justice process with a pretty low threshold to meet that faces sterner tests later in the process: Is there probable cause to support the charges requested by the prosecutor against the named defendants? About half of U.S. states allow prosecutors to do this without a grand jury approval, unilaterally. Every grand jury indictment must either be consented to by the defense, or approved by the court following a trial with a much higher proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard, to result in a conviction resulting in the imposition of punishment. A judge in a separate hearing determines if there will be pre-trial detention or bail conditions prior to the criminal trial.
The court reporter keeps a contemporaneous, verbatim, shorthand record of the proceedings (and often has an audio tape to refer to as well), and the official copies of exhibits admitted into evidence are also maintained by the court. But, the final version of the official transcript takes at least a couple of days per day of testimony the court reporter heard to finalize (and, of course, a court reporter doesn't necessarily work transcribing day after day on one case, the court reporter may have other jobs to take down testimony at the same time that an official transcript based upon testimony that the court reporter previous took down in shorthand is requested, it can often take weeks or months). Sometimes drafts of official transcripts are provided to the testifying persons or counsel for review to catch errors in transcription, before being finalized. I don't know what Minnesota practice is on that fine detail in criminal trial transcripts. The official transcript is used for purposes of appeal (and usually only actually prepared in final form only if there is an appeal) and sometimes for post-trial motions, but is not prepared in time to be available to the jury, and is quite expensive (several hundred U.S. dollars to single digit thousands of U.S. dollars per typical day of testimony). Given the advances of technology, it should be easy these days to produce a printout pretty quickly. Is there a case to made to start doing this even though it might have been impractical in the past? It isn't unheard of (especially in big dollar commercial cases) to have a private court reporter making a working copy of a transcript that is available in real time or by early evening after each day of testimony, but these working copies are not done to the same standards of accuracy as official trial transcripts for purposes of appeal and are done at a high price premium by elite court reporters who can transcribe faster than the average court reporter can.
How would this scenario play out in the legal system? Prosecutor brings charges against EQM or tries to use that conviction to enhance a subsequent conviction. Defendant EQM raises the pardon as a defense. Prosecutor responds that the pardon was intended to cover EQM Prime, not EQM. The Court holds an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the President intended to pardon EQM Prime or EQM. The Court decides who the President intended to pardon based upon the evidence presented at the hearing, and rules accordingly. The burdens of proof are tricky. Usually affirmative defenses have a preponderance of the evidence burden on the proponent of the defense, but sometimes the defense must be disproved beyond a reasonable doubt. I don't know that part of the law well enough to know without lots of research and the outcome might not be uniform across the U.S. To my knowledge, there has never been a case that got this far in which the true identity of the beneficiary of the pardon was ambiguous. It is possible, but a vanishingly rare possibility. Almost always, someone gets a pardon by asking for it and determining whether EQM or EQM Prime asked resolves it, or a reference to the crime resolves it. If the Court concludes that both asked the same President to be pardoned for the same crime (e.g. if the same crime was committed jointly by father and by son who is named after father and doesn't use Jr. day to day) and the Court concludes that the President was probably confused and didn't realize that there were two requests from different people and not one, the judge would probably give them the benefit of the doubt and treat both as pardoned as that would still reflect the President's intent.
You know that a judicial proceeding has been filed against you when you are "served" with notice. In fact, legal proceedings cannot generally proceed without somebody swearing that you were served notice. If a criminal complaint is being pursued against you then you might also learn of this fact when an investigating law enforcement agent contacts you to question you or arrest you. "Filed a case" could mean all sorts of other things. For example, it could be that they filed a police report, or filed a complaint with some company or non-law-enforcement entity. It could be that they have in fact filed a claim in a court of law and whoever is serving process just hasn't been able to find you. In any of these events I don't know of any way that you could proactively determine that without knowing exactly where and how the "case" was "filed." Actually, if a criminal complaint was filed against you and approved then a court in another state could have issued a warrant for your arrest. Contact your local police and they should be able to do a nationwide search for open warrants on you. Police will not typically release information on "open investigations." So even if you knew the exact agency where it was filed they may not tell you anything. If they decided not to investigate it then you might have a right to request the complaint under open-records laws &ndash; that depends on the state and the agency.
As you said, "serious" is a subjective description of a crime, but most lawyers would probably have the same first reaction when asked to make the distinction: Is it a felony or a misdemeanor? Felonies are objectively more serious because they come with longer sentences, as well as a variety of awful collateral consequences -- lost voting rights, disqualification from gun ownership, etc. By that standard, unlawful entry into the United States (8 U.S. Code § 1325) is not, in most cases, a serious crime. For a first offense, it's a misdemeanor punishable by at most six months in jail. For subsequent offenses, though, it's a felony punishable by up to two years. I'd agree that the sentences meted out suggest that the judges don't view this offense as a particularly serious one. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it was pointless to prosecute. For instance, the first prosecution enables a harsher sentence if the immigrant lands in front of the judge again, and I'd bet that a fair share of the harsher sentences involved repeat offenders. Also, if you think that being a nation of laws means that we should always enforce every law (or if you at least believe this when it comes to immigrants), then the prosecutions are their own reward.
It's not clear what you are asking (&quot;How can this be legal?&quot;), so I suppose it may mean that you don't understand the relationship between dismissal of a charge and admissibility of evidence. Or you think that physical evidence is required by law. You might try clarifying the question. A prosecution can be dismissed with prejudice or without prejudice. Dismissal with prejudice means that the charge cannot be pursued again, whereas dismissal without prejudice allows re-filing the charges, and is basically a temporary delay. Dismissal with prejudice can occur especially when the defendants fundamental rights were violated, for instance with illegally-obtained evidence. Dismissal without prejudice may arise because the prosecution needs to gather more evidence. The fact that a prosecution had started with an intent to use certain evidence does not mean that the evidence is itself now inaccessible. So in principle, any evidence that would have been used in an earlier prosecution can still be used. In the case of a felony, it does not legally matter how much time has elapsed since the alleged crime and the prosecution. So on the face of it, there is still a viable prosecution. Physical (forensic) evidence is not required to obtain a criminal conviction, all that is required is testimony that &quot;fully satisfies or entirely convinces [the jury] of the defendant's guilt&quot;. That can be the testimony of two witnesses. While &quot;hearsay&quot; evidence is excluded, the definition of &quot;hearsay&quot; is complicated, since hearsay is what people generally think is hearsay but certain things are excluded from the definition of hearsay (therefore are admissible). FRE 803 spells out the exceptions: 803(4) is widely used to allow testimony by the in the case of sexual assault of children. This article surveys a number of relevant cases, and see also this article – the point is that testimony from a psychologist, social worker, parent or other person as to what the child said can be admissible.
To consider obstruction of justice, it's not necessary to consider the impact of a delayed nomination on the work of the Supreme Court. 18 USC 1505 provides that a felony has been committed by Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress Since there's no suggestion of threat or force, the issue would be whether the lawyers' actions were corrupt, and whether the delay constituted an impediment. I am doubtful that either could be established. Furthermore, section 1515(c) says that This chapter does not prohibit or punish the providing of lawful, bona fide, legal representation services in connection with or anticipation of an official proceeding. Returning to your theory about preventing or delaying the confirmation of a nominated justice, there does not appear to be anything in the law that criminalizes this. The court having 8 members does not prevent it from hearing any case unless 3 of the 8 have recused themselves from the case, as the Supreme Court's quorum is six justices.