Are judges immune from prosecution of crimes committed while acting as a judge? Discussing the civil lawsuit to Hans Reiser's murder conviction, Wikipedia states: "Judges ... are immune to lawsuits regarding their official conduct." In the United States, is that true? Surely, if a judge colludes, conspires, or otherwise rigs a trial's impartiality while performing his official duty he isn't immune from prosecution for such crime.
It is true that judges in the US have absolute immunity from any lawsuit for damages arising from their performance of judicial functions. This applies even if those actions were corrupt, malicious, or illegal. The only exceptions to a judge's immunity to a lawsuit is if the conduct alleged was not a judicial action, or if the judge was acting in the complete absence of all jurisdiction. See, among others, Mireles v. Waco, 502 U.S. 9. However, the term "lawsuit" doesn't refer to criminal charges. Footnote 1 of Mireles specifically says criminal liability isn't blocked by judicial immunity. While a judge can't be sued for damages for rigging a trial, the judge can be prosecuted for doing that.
Yes it affects them. Judges are pursuing their vocation as a career and there are career paths within the judicial system just as there are in every other career. Screw up too many times and your career ends at your present level. Judges are also professionals and most take professional pride in doing their jobs well. Having a decision overturned is professionally embarrassing. As a matter of public policy, there is no sanction that is directly applied to the judge otherwise judges would be too cautious to make decisions. Anyone who makes professional decisions will get them wrong from time to time - they generally are not punished. That said there are judicial errors that stem from making the wrong judgement (so to say) call and judicial errors that stem from royally screwing up. The former are far less damaging than the latter. For an example of the former, a judge is applying a relatively new statute for which there have been no other decisions and interprets the legislation in a reasonable way but one the appeal court disagrees with. For an example of the latter, deciding the matter on a basis which neither party put before the court and which the judge did not draw to the parties attention during the trial - as a common law country, the New Zealand legal system is adversarial: the court exists to decide the dispute between the parties on the basis the parties argue, not to go on a "frolic of its own". In addition, appeal courts can only overrule a decision if the judge has made an error of law, not if they have made an error of fact. A judge is allowed to be wrong about the facts but not about the law. In practice, the distinction is not trivial. In a jury trial, the jury decides the facts, the judge decides the law - appeals can only be on the basis of what the judge did, not on the basis of what the jury did (barring egregious misconduct by the jury). In a judge only trial the judge decides both but an appeal can only be on matters of law.
You're wrong in the first sentence So I agree, that a hung jury is in fact reasonable doubt by lack of concurrence, the defendant should be acquitted. No. A hung jury just means they can't decide on any item they should decide about, for whatever reason. Maybe they all want to see the defendant guilty but can't decide if it is murder 1st or 2nd degree, or one of them is just trying to stay out of work and just is contrarian to whatever the jury deliberates, wether guilty or not guilty. In either case they can not tell the judge what they can't agree about. They can only tell the judge that they can't agree on a verdict. Since the judge can't assume anything about the deliberations, he can only reset trial and swap the jury for one that actually might be able to decide. The whole Jury is tossed out, their deliberations don't matter anymore - their hung state does not influence the re-trial.
Be careful: from the Wikipedia article, it appears that there is a state criminal trial and there will be a federal criminal trial. In addition, there is a federal civil suit which incorporates some stats law claims. The defense in each trial may be different. Have you read the complaint in the civil case? As an example, count 1 alleges, in paragraph 214, that the defendants' actions were &quot;without legal cause.&quot; An obvious defense is to show that the actions were actually justified under the law. The law under which they would have been justified would be state law. It's still possible that the state law justification isn't sufficient, but that is another point to be argued in court. If they can't prevail in showing that state law did authorize their actions then the act was certainly unlawful under both state and federal law. Do defendants have standing to invoke self-defense given the context or did they give this up at some point in time? Standing is a threshold that plaintiffs must meet. But defendants can certainly argue self defense. Whether they can prevail on that argument depends on the facts of the case as determined by the court, in particular by the &quot;finder of fact,&quot; which is the jury in a jury trial and the judge in a bench trial. The facts that I'm aware of in the public record suggest that the defendants would not prevail on such an argument, but that doesn't deprive them of the right to advance it in court. If someone claims that Arbery was grabbing for the shotgun then the defendants have a right to introduce any evidence of that fact that they may have. It is for the finder of fact to judge the credibility of the evidence.
The closest the Supreme Court has gotten to criminal liability for official acts seems to be Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731 (1982). There it addressed civil liability and held that the U.S. President &quot;is entitled to absolute immunity from damages liability predicated on his official acts.&quot; It's unclear how the Justices would decide criminal liability for official acts. (Though some might argue that non-precedential logic in Fitzgerald suggests the Court could extend immunity to the criminal context as well.) As to homicide, murder and manslaughter are federal crimes. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1111–1112. The latter involves the commission &quot;of a lawful act which might produce death&quot; &quot;without due caution and circumspection.&quot;
Judges do not decide, jurors do (however, if a judge is the fact-finder, then the judge makes such a determination). The main input that the decision-maker gets is a jury instruction. In order to unify "reasonable doubt", "reasonable price", "reasonable delay" and so on, appeal is often made a mythical being, "the reasonable man", so reasonable force would be the degree of force the reasonable man would use in a given situation. I will draw from California criminal instructions ('cuz I have them) but similar instructions can be found across jurisdictions. For example, one instructions says "A natural and probable consequence is one that a reasonable person would know is likely to happen if nothing unusual intervenes". Or from a negligence instruction "A reasonable person would have known that acting in that way would create such a risk". More detailed appeal to The Reasonable Person is found in the justified homicide instruction: Defendant’s belief must have been reasonable and (he/she) must have acted only because of that belief. The defendant is only entitled to use that amount of force that a reasonable person would believe is necessary in the same situation. If the defendant used more force than was reasonable, the [attempted] killing was not justified. When deciding whether the defendant’s beliefs were reasonable, consider all the circumstances as they were known to and appeared to the defendant and consider what a reasonable person in a similar situation with similar knowledge would have believed. If the defendant’s beliefs were reasonable, the danger does not need to have actually existed. The defendant’s belief that (he/she/ [or] someone else) was threatened may be reasonable even if (he/she) relied on information that was not true. However, the defendant must actually and reasonably have believed that the information was true. There is no explanation of what it means to be "a reasonable person". Since nobody believes that they themselves are unreasonable, a simple and also wrong way of judging the matter is to subjectively judge whether you yourself would do the same thing, if you were in that situation. Very often, instructions do not even bother to say what "reasonable" means, so (re interpreting expert testimony) "You may disregard any opinion that you find unbelievable, unreasonable, or unsupported by the evidence"; (re corpus delicti) "That other evidence may be slight and need only be enough to support a reasonable inference that a crime was committed"; "Also, before you may rely on circumstantial evidence to find the defendant guilty, you must be convinced that the only reasonable conclusion supported by the circumstantial evidence is that the defendant is guilty", "when considering circumstantial evidence, you must accept only reasonable conclusions and reject any that are unreasonable" The closest the law has come to articulating an objective characterization of "reasonableness" is in "reasonable doubt" instructions. One characterization is in People v. Feldman, 71 N.E. 2d 433. It is not a doubt based upon sympathy or a whim or prejudice or bias or a caprice, or a sentimentality, or upon a reluctance of a weak-kneed, timid, jellyfish of a juror who is seeking to avoid the performance of a disagreeable duty, namely, to convict another human being of the commission of a serious crime A somewhat improved characterization is the Calcrim instruction Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that leaves you with an abiding conviction that the charge is true. The evidence need not eliminate all possible doubt because everything in life is open to some possible or imaginary doubt There is room for improvement, but it points in the right direction. On rare occasions, a law is written that actually includes a definition. The Gas Price Spike Act HR 3784 said The term ‘reasonable profit’ means the amount determined by the Reasonable Profits Board to be a reasonable profit on the sale. It is then up to the board to subjectively determine what that profit is. (BTW this did not become law). [Addendum] It's actually very difficult to determine what reasoning judges use in those cases where they are the determiners of fact. They will likely call on their knowledge of law, asking "are these circumstances sufficiently like past circumstance A where the defendant was convicted, or more like B where the defendant was acquitted".
Judges and justices can file lawsuits like anyone else, but ordinarily the judges who are colleagues of the judge or justice would recuse themselves and it would be assigned to another venue at trial (in the case of a trial court judge), and on appeal would be assigned to judges who don't have a personal relationship with the judge (possibly sitting by assignment from another appellate jurisdiction or by senior judges who weren't on the bench when this judge was on the bench). A U.S. Supreme Court justice's suit would not be considered recusal worth by an unfamiliar lower court judge who is only theoretically in the jurisdiction of the justice and no suit by a U.S. Supreme Court justice has ever been deemed cert worthy. If it did reach the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justice would be expected to, but not required in any enforceable way, to recuse from hearing the case.
That remains to be determined. This article (100 Tex. L. Rev. 56 (2021)) discusses the possibility. To start, the Constitution does not directly say that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. The lack of an express presidential immunity and the fact that an attempt by Madison to create such an immunity is an indication of &quot;original intent&quot;. The view that an incumbent president cannot be indicted, prosecuted, convicted or punished is a policy stance set forth by the Dept. of justice, but is not constitutional law. Alito in Trump v. Vance points to some apparently negative consequences of allowing indictment of a sitting president, but this was in a dissenting opinion. Practical considerations of policy might argue for not prosecuting a sitting president, but the Constitution itself does not expressly forbid it. As we know from numerous SCOTUS rulings, the court is also capable of finding implicit support for a rule in the Constitution. For example theimpeachment provisions do not demand or even hint that impeachment must precede trial and punishment. An argument that prosecution would &quot;incapacitate&quot; the president is met with the fact that there is a provision for replacing an incapacitated POTUS with VPOTUS as acting president. The idea that a trial interferes with a person's ability to do their job (or that they can't adequately participate in their defense if they are doing their job) has not actually prevented ordinary people with jobs from being prosecuted for their crimes.