Can I prosecute another way if a states attorney declines to? Is there any way to prosecute someone and bring them before a judge if the states attorney office declines to? Or can I sue the states attorney and force prosecution? The state is Maryland if that makes a difference.
Is there any way to prosecute someone and bring them before a judge if the states attorney office declines to? No Or can I sue the states attorney and force prosecution? No. You can't bring a private criminal prosecution in Maryland. There are a handful of U.S. states where you can, but Maryland is not one of them. You can bring a civil lawsuit for money damages and/or injunctive relief against someone who has caused you injury as a private individual.
The answer to this question will be almost entirely informed by the why that you've asked us not to consider. If the prosecutor or judge is a witness, the defendant should be able to call them, but that also means they would have to withdraw from the case under either Rule 3.7 or Canon 3. If the defendant believes the prosecution is tainted by some improper motive, the defendant may raise that objection under Crim. R. 12, but he must do so pretrial. I can't think of any circumstances where the defendant could question the judge or prosecutor in the jury's presence.
Does failure to present a charge to a grand jury leave that charge open for future indictment? Yes. Indeed, even if the charge is presented to a grand jury and it declines to indict, exactly the same charge that one grand jury declined to indict upon can be presented to a future grand jury and produce a valid indictment. I understand that normally when a Grand Jury declines to indict for an alleged crime, prosecutors may not present it again to a future Grand Jury. (I believe this rule is statutory, not constitutional.) While I won't rule out the possibility that such a statute exists, I am aware of no state where that is the case. A charge upon which is grand jury declines to indict is often not presented to a future grand jury as a matter of prosecutorial discretion or prosecutor's office policy, but generally this is not a mandatory rule. One reason that it is not a mandatory rule is that there is no practical way that a defendant could enforce the rule if it was a mandatory rule. Grand jury proceedings are secret (at least until an indictment is produced and then only as pertinent to the defendant indicted on the charges producing an indictment). Generally, even the judges in the court calling a grand jury have no access to its proceedings until it issues an indictment, and then has only slightly more latitude to review its proceedings than a defendant in the case.
Probably not. It appears that in the case in question, your lawyers, while they were representing you, agreed to a protective order that kept certain information including settlement offers made to them by the opposing parties' lawyers (even if those offers were rejected) confidential. You are bound by the agreements made by your lawyers if they are your lawyers at the time, even they later cease to be your lawyers. So, if you were to make the disclosure of this information subject to a protective order, the court involved could hold you in contempt of court and issue sanctions (including fines and incarceration) for failing to honor the court order to seal the case, because this protective order was binding upon you, because you agreed to it through your lawyers who were acting as your agents at the time. The fact that you are no longer represented by those lawyers doesn't vacate the protective order. CAVEAT: This is an interpretation of the facts made with incomplete information. A truly reliable answer would require review of the exact documents in the case filed with the court which is beyond the scope of Law.SE.
What exactly would a prosecutor charge? State? Federal? It depends on whether it is a state or federal prosecutor. It appears that the president has at least flirted with violating both federal and state law, in which case he may be charged by both the federal and state prosecutors, each one laying charges under the relevant body of law. Would Trump be vulnerable to Federal prosecution of the phone call after he leaves office? Yes, if the facts support such a prosecution. It's not clear to me that the conversation constituted an unambiguous violation of the federal statute, but I have no knowledge of any precedent that might inform such a determination.
While you have correctly stated the usual order of events in a trial, the judge has wide discretion to modify the order if it seems that justice will be served. Even in a serious criminal case, the judge can reopen testimony after closing arguments have started if the judge finds that there is good reason to do so. Traffic cases are generally less formal, and the judge will more freely modify procedure to bring out the facts of the case. I have often seen judges at traffic court ask significant relevant questions, and if they are in fact relevant, i don't think you will get far objecting to their begin asked. I am not a lawyewr, but I also have observed several traffic cases in Maryland and in NJ.
Collateral estoppel is inapplicable in both scenarios. The first scenario leaves no room for issues of collateral estoppel. Whether or not charges for "no-registration" proceed would strictly depend on whether the statute sanctions an offender's mere intent not to register his or her new address. If the elements of the claim require both (1) actual change of address, and (2) intent not to register it, the fact that the woman in your hypothetical scenario did not actually move precludes any claims about her failure to register what she [unavailingly] alleged to be her "new" address. In the alternative, where mere "intent not to register" meets all the prima facie elements for the new charges, her relocation (if any) as well as the prior judgment on grounds of the Fourth Amendment are irrelevant to these new charges. In the second hypothetical scenario, collateral estoppel is precluded from the standpoint that issues are not identical and therefore do not involve double jeopardy. See Ashe v. Swenson, 397 U.S. 436,, 444, 448 (1970). HHS's prior failure to produce FOIA records did not involve litigation, does not negate, and is not essential to the fact, that the physician committed fraud. VanDEVENTER v. MNB, 172 Mich.App. 456, 463 (1988) ("Collateral estoppel conclusively bars only issues "actually litigated" in the first action."). Edited to add/correct reference (see comments) Beyond these hypothetical scenarios, it should be obvious that collateral estoppel may apply to criminal cases. This is reflected, for instance, in footnote 4 of Yeager v. U.S., 129 S.Ct. 2360; 557 U.S. 110 (2009): Although the doctrine of collateral estoppel had developed in civil litigation, we had already extended it to criminal proceedings when Ashe was decided. Another treaty of interest might be Kennelly, Precluding the Accused: Offensive Collateral Estoppel in Criminal Cases (cited here).
Can the prosecutor and/or the judge be sued for dereliction of duty, and for non-uniform application of the law? No. Judges and prosecutors have absolute immunity from civil liability for their actions in the course of their duties in connection with the court process. Prosecutors have effectively absolute discretion in their charging decisions and in their decisions to reduce the charges sought against a defendant (prior to jeopardy attaching when a jury is sworn in). Can the outcome of a bench trial be appealed on grounds that the judge did not inform the defendant of his rights Yes. or that his rights were taken away by unwarranted modification of the charges? No. Incidentally, there is no federal constitutional right to a jury trial in a case where six months or less of incarceration is sought as a penalty, and there is no federal constitutional right to counsel unless incarceration is a possible penalty. The Utah State Constitution distinguishes between criminal matters and non-criminal matters in several respects mostly found in the state's bill of Rights (Article I of the State Constitution) in Sections 8, 10, 12, 13, and 19. But, it is fundamentally the right of the state through its prosecutors to decide what charges to press against someone, and they are well within their rights to change their minds. Often, this will be in your favor because reducing an offense to a civil infraction rather than a misdemeanor will have far fewer collateral consequences related to having a criminal record.