Crime records as a minor, does it affect sentencing as an adult? Are crimes as minor, especially felonies, kept in your records? And would they affect your sentencing as an adult? I am not asking about a specific jurisdiction, I just want to have a general idea.
As pointed out in comments, the exact answer depends on the jurisdiction, and on the nature of the crime(s). As a general statement: In many jurisdictions, old criminal records are sealed (=made less available), or even completely deleted after some time. The timespan will depend on many factors, particularly (but not only) on the number and severity of the crimes. Extremely serious crimes may never be sealed/deleted. Sometimes the sealing/deletion may be automatic, sometimes only at the request of the perpetrator, and there may be additional conditions. As an extension of the above, some jurisdictions have special rules for criminal records created while the perpetrator was a minor. Some time spans may be shortened, or minor crimes may be excluded. So, to directly answer the question: Yes, crimes as minor may be kept in your records and influence sentencing as an adult, or they may not - it depends. That is about all you can say in general.
As has already been said, as far as the vehicle registration, the officer likely already knows who the vehicle is registered to and whether it's expired or not before he walks up to your car, or at the least, he can easily find that information out. The proof of insurance is a different matter. The officer will need to see it to know if you have insurance or not. To him, it doesn't matter what the reason is that you don't provide it to him. Left it at home, misplaced it, lost it, destroyed it, or just refuse to provide it because you feel you have the right to refuse. He can't "force" you to provide it (unless he is able to search your car and happens to find it there). He can only issue you a ticket for not providing it. But your attitude could play a part in what happens next. Being upfront and letting the officer know you have left your documents at home could help your situation. In my experience... one time that this sort of thing happened to me, the officer agreed to hold my drivers license and allowed me to bring the documents to the police station and retrieve my license. Another time, in a parking related matter, I was issued a ticket, but I was allowed to bring the required documents to the police station where they then "invalidated" (cancelled) the ticket. Of course this won't always work, and is not at all likely to work if you are far from home. Keep in mind, (as far as I know, in most states) the real infraction is that you "don't have insurance"... that you failed to provide proof when asked, is secondary. In many cases (likely nearly all cases), if you show up in court and provide documents that your insurance is current, and was current at the time the ticket was issued, the judge (or the prosecutor) will likely dismiss the case with no penalties. But, what the officer has written down on the ticket about your attitude and what you told him at the time, may have an effect on how this all plays out.
Are there any legal constraints on the number of times that a defendant can be retried following mistrials due to hung juries? No. A fairly recent case in Louisiana, for example, involved someone who had been tried perhaps half a dozen times resulting in a mix of hung juries and reversals of convictions on appeal. Or is the only practical constraint the willingness of the prosecutor to expend government resources (and perhaps political capital) pursuing a conviction? Yes. This is the only practical limitation.
The Fifth Amendment, in pertinent part, reads: "nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb;" which suggests that Crime B is still fair game under double jeopardy. However, if B is a lesser included offense under Blockburger, i.e. A is Aggravated Robbery and B is Robbery, then a prosecution could be barred by Double Jeopardy. Barring that, and jurisdiction specific law, the State isn't barred by the Double Jeopardy clause of the 5th (and 14th) amendment. That does not foreclose Person C from finding an ethical, equitable, statutory remedy or controlling case enforcing a plea bargain. As far as I can tell, commutation is the equivalent of a conviction while a pardon is equivalent to an acquittal. I also imagine if the prosecution isn't barred and tried C for B, the Executive may just pardon/commute C again. Edit to add: Under Santobello, it would appear C may have an additional remedy enforcing a plea bargain. Santobello didn't involve a case dismissed in a plea bargain, nor commutation or pardon. A court might find that commutation or pardon are essentially a breach of the agreement.
If you are convicted you can be retried (indeed, on appeal, you asked for a retrial). Double jeopardy prevents retrials in cases of acquittals and some mistrials, not convictions.
You are misinformed. In fact, approximately the reverse is true: in a typical jurisdiction in the United States today in excess of 95 percent of criminal cases that begin never reach a verdict. (The exact number varies a little, depending on which exact court system we're talking about.) Or never reach a trial at all, in fact. Or never even come close to making it to the trial date. Now, in some of those instances the charges wind up being dismissed. In some others defendants are diverted outside of the traditional criminal justice system when the circumstances seem better suited to other resolutions (examples: a petty criminal who steals to feed a drug addiction is diverted into a process where he or she will get drug treatment, a non-violent mentally ill person is put into a process where he or she will get mental health treatment); if they complete the diversion program the criminal charges are dropped. But in the vast majority of cases a defendant winds up pleading guilty, in court, to something. Sometimes in exchange for the prosecutor dropping certain other charges. Sometimes in return for the prosecutor downgrading a charge he or she would otherwise pursue in court to a charge for a lesser offense. Sometimes just in return for perhaps getting some credit in the eyes of the judge for "acceptance of responsibility" when sentencing rolls around. But make no mistake: there are few elements more central to the way modern American criminal justice works than plea bargaining. But don't feel too bad: for what it's worth you are certainly not alone in thinking otherwise. In fact, in my personal experience almost everyone outside the legal profession and the court system/s holds at least a few large misconceptions about the way criminal justice in the U.S. actually works. General news media outlets contribute quite a bit to helping those misconceptions form by typically focusing solely on the rare, high-profile, controversial (and thus ratings-grabbing) cases rather than the vast, vast number that end in a whimper instead of a bang. Law drama shows and movies almost invariably bear little relation to reality. (And that's is totally fine, BTW, as long as you realize they bear almost no relation to reality.) Which makes sense: Law &amp; Order: SVU probably wouldn't have stayed on the air year after year if most episodes just consisted of an endless stream of one rote, dull plea hearing after another, each featuring some otherwise-unremarkable sleezeball who's been caught dead-to-rights downloading and re-distributing child pornography. (And, BTW, the misconceptions aren't limited to criminal law &amp; justice, by any means. In fact, in my view other high-profile legal arenas like civil litigation, intellectual property disputes, constitutional law battles, and many others are even more misunderstood. But I digress...) Anyway, to sum up: very frequent plea bargaining = one of the foundations of how modern American criminal justice operates at a practical level. For tons more stats, background info, and analysis corroborating and analyzing that fact, see the links commenters have already posted and/or any of the many, many good items on the topic indexed via our friend Google.
See the answer to this question. It is remotely possible that it will show up, but the new S.C. law also says that an employer cannot use that information. On the other hand, that law is not yet effective (it becomes effective Dec. 27 2018), so for the rest of the year, the information could be used, if an employer obtains is. There is a law-enforcement exception that arrests can always be used against you if you apply for a law-enforcement related job. Under the current law (has been in effect for a while), the record is "under seal", so revealing the record in the course of a background check would be a violation of the relevant court order. The law specifies a punishment for illegal disclosure: A person who intentionally violates this subsection is guilty of a misdemeanor, and, upon conviction, must be fined not more than one hundred dollars or imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both. however, accidental disclosure is not a crime. You might think that you could at least sue them for accidental disclosure, but the law also says Unless there is an act of gross negligence or intentional misconduct, nothing in this section gives rise to a claim for damages against the State, a state employee, a political subdivision of the State, an employee of a political subdivision of the State, a public officer, or other persons. If the government person who releases the information intentionally does so, you can sue. Perhaps an accidental release could be found to be grossly negligent: that would depend on the circumstances.
Was This An Egregiously Lenient Sentence? Yes. Did he get lighter punishment than he &quot;should have&quot; (in some sense)? Yes. A six month sentence for a non-negligent homicide was virtually unprecedented then and remains extremely low. Even a six month sentence for the rape of an adult woman (which is generally a comparable or less serious offense than manslaughter) by a privileged white offender generates immense controversy today as it did in the case of the sentencing of Brock Turner for that offense in 2016 (something that ultimately cost the judge imposing that sentence his job). There is no way that intentionally hitting someone is negligent homicide. It is at a minimum reckless, and honestly, is hard to see as anything other than intentional conduct. While it wasn't premeditated and hence wouldn't qualify as first degree murder eligible for the death penalty, this would be a fairly straightforward case for a second degree murder charge and a sentence of a decade or more. The intentional part apples to the act of hitting someone, not the result of causing their death. This intent was present here. Where Did The System Fail? in what way did the legal process fail? Or do you think that there was any failure at all in the legal process? Was the substantive law at fault? No. The substantive criminal law in 1963 was very similar to what it is now and would have authorized a much more severe sentence on the crime of conviction and would have made a more serious charge of murder viable. Arguably the substantive law should have had a mandatory minimum sentence for homicide, but since judges very rarely impose such lenient charges for homicide in cases like this one where there was no good reason for leniency, many states don't do that now and it isn't a problem that legislators would reasonably have believed that they had to worry about. Allowing leniency in some extraordinary cases that capture considerations that the law does not expressly mention is often a good thing, rather than a bad one. Did The Appellate Process Fail? No. The defendant's conviction was not wrongfully reversed on appeal, and it is generally not possible for a defendant's sentence to be increased on appeal in these circumstances. Arguably, this is not an ideal rule of law (and it is not the law in most countries in these circumstances). But this was not a major problem with the legal system that was a primary reason causing the outcome in this case to be an exceptional miscarriage of justice. The Judge's Sentence Was An Abuse Of Discretion. The judge imposed a very light sentence within the statutorily allowed range of discretion. While we can't literally read the mind of the judge and the judge doesn't acknowledge this as a basis for the sentence, given a larger pattern of similarly lenient sentences of similarly situated people given light sentences by judges, we can make a very reasonable guess about the most likely and plausible reason for the lenient sentence. The most likely and plausible reason for the sentence is the one identified by Bob Dylan. A high status white man killed a low status black woman, and the judge felt that, as a result, it didn't justify as serious of a sentence. The actual chain of reasoning in the judge's mind consciously may have involved considerations like the view that the victim was an &quot;eggshell&quot; victim, and the likelihood that the defendant was capable of reforming his conduct after a short sentence and thus didn't present a threat to the public. But the courts very rarely grant leniency to someone on the grounds that the victim was &quot;fragile&quot; - usually this justifies a more severe sentence. And the documented fact that the perpetrator routinely assaulted others with his cane casts grave doubt on the extent to which he could be rehabilitated more easily than a typical defendant. Also, even if the charge of conviction was manslaughter, this case would have been considered at the high end of the range in terms of the culpability of the offender who went around assaulting many people at a public gathering seriously enough to cause harm, and to in one case cause a death of a more fragile victim. The sentence should have been at least at the midpoint of what is allowed (currently about five years out of ten possible) in a case like this one. Further, while Maryland is not in the &quot;Deep South&quot; it is a Southern state with a history of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination, and the judge in this case would have lived under and seen enforced to his benefit, Jim Crow laws in Maryland during his lifetime. The Civil Rights movement had not succeeded to the point that racism was a completely disavowed and unacceptable form of motivation in 1963, particularly in even parts of the South outside of the &quot;Deep South&quot; at that time. As a reference point, President Biden, in nearby Delaware, was starting to make a name for himself in politics at the time as a defender of segregation in the school system and an opponent of busing to desegregate schools. This issue got him elected and re-elected. Biden reformed his views later, but racism was alive and well in Chesapeake Bay area at the time. Was Prosecutorial Discretion An Issue? Possibly To Some Extent. The prosecution's decision to press charges for manslaughter rather than murder was also questionable, but less obviously so. Today, common practice would be to bring both murder and manslaughter charges in a case like this one. The facts would have supported a second degree murder charge. The fact that the prosecution originally brought a murder charge suggests that it knew that the facts supported that charge, and was influenced by some political or tactical consideration, or by judicial pressure, to drop the more serious charge before trial. But without insight into what that reason was (which is much less obvious than the judge's motivations) it is hard to judge whether the prosecutor should have acted differently under the circumstances. The fact that the prosecution pressed charges, took the case to trial, and got a conviction at all also suggests that the prosecutor's conduct was not at the bottom of the barrel compared to more racist prosecutor exercises of discretion in 1963 elsewhere in the U.S. The prosecutor had the full legal ability to decline to press charges at all without facing any legal consequences for failing to do so. Further, while it is certainly plausible that prosecutor's racism figured into this decision, it is also important to note that the prosecutor has to consider the attitudes of a likely jury pool when bringing charges. Even if the prosecutor believes that the defendant is guilty of murder under the law, the prosecutor has to consider whether the odds of getting a conviction from a local jury that is likely to have considerable racial bias influences what charges are right to bring in order to get a maximum conviction, as opposed to what charges the prosecutor believes are legally justified. Likewise, if the judge indicated the he would be likely to dismiss the murder charge before trial in a preliminary hearing, that would also make a prosecutor's decision to comply with an implicit judicial suggestion to stay in the judge's good graces for the remainder of this case, and for future cases before the same judge, understandable. However, if electoral public pressure, or the defense counsel's pressure or influence, caused the prosecutor to give up on a murder charge that a conviction would probably have been secured upon, this is much more problematic and would suggest racial and status bias on the part of the prosecuting attorney's office. Was Jury Conduct An Issue? No. The conduct of the jury in this case was not an issue, even though the potential of jury nullification that didn't happen was a factor that may have influenced the charge brought by the prosecution. The jury convicted the defendant on the most serious charge presented to it.