What decisions can a Judge make after the Prosecution withdraws a case? Background In the news, the prosecutors for Michael Flynn recently withdrew their case for the reasons stated in this court brief. However, Flynn has already pleaded guilty as mentioned several times in the brief, though he has been seeking to withdraw this plea: Mr. Flynn previously pleaded guilty to making false statements. See Def’s Plea Agreement, ECF Nos. 3-4. Question Despite already pleading guilty, and a withdrawl of the prosecution, what decisions is the Judge legally allowed to make against (or for) the defendant at this point?
The government can’t withdraw The government does not have a right to unilaterally withdraw charges once the case is before the court. All they can do is ask the court to dismiss the case as they have done here. It’s up to the court (judge) to decide whether to grant the motion to dismiss or not. It granted, then the case has gone to completion and the defendant is legally not subject to punishment as they were not convicted of the crime, notwithstanding any previous guilty plea. Now, while it would be unusual for a judge to refuse such a motion it’s not impossible and they might do so if they felt that the interests of justice are better served by completing the trial in the usual way. This is possibly more common in civil litigation where a losing plaintiff might not be permitted to settle if the judge doesn’t feel an innocent defendant is being adequately compensated.
The closest case to this is Brady v. United States 397 U.S. 742 (1970): We here make no reference to the situation where the prosecutor or judge, or both, deliberately employ their charging and sentencing powers to induce a particular defendant to tender a plea of guilty. In Brady' case, there is no claim that the prosecutor threatened prosecution on a charge not justified by the evidence or that the trial judge threatened Brady with a harsher sentence if convicted after trial in order to induce him to plead guilty. In Brady, had he not entered a guilty plea, he would have been risking the death penalty. The court recognized: It may be that Brady, faced with a strong case against him and recognizing that his chances for acquittal were slight, preferred to plead guilty, and thus limit the penalty to life imprisonment, rather than to elect a jury trial which could result in a death penalty. They upheld the plea: Although Brady's plea of guilty may well have been motivated in part by a desire to avoid a possible death penalty, we are convinced that his plea was voluntarily and intelligently made, and we have no reason to doubt that his solemn admission of guilt was truthful. So, even in the case where the risk of a death penalty may have motivated a guilty plea, the plea has been upheld. All of the above is with respect to actions of the prosecution. In any case, the main test is whether the defendant entered a plea voluntarily and intelligently.
The short answer is that this is because the Florida legislature decided to do so. Why would they do that? Prosecutors are perceived to be more consistently in favor of "tough on crime policies" than judges, so allocating the authority to prosecutors makes it likely that waivers will be granted more sparingly. Prosecutors have the authority to plea bargain and bring a lesser charge that doesn't have mandatory minimums in any case. So, the waiver provision merely formalizes the ability of prosecutors to do openly something that they could have done through the back door in any case. This follows the pattern of many other states.
Would a U.S court honor his request, based on his prior commitment? You are not specifying the purpose of the court hearing, or whether Adam is pro se litigant (which sounds unlikely if this plaintiff is a movie star). If plaintiff Adam is represented by an attorney, Adam's presence is unnecessary in most or all court hearings. In fact, typically neither parties nor their lawyers have to show up in court, whence their absence does not constitute contempt of court. Absence merely implies that they miss the opportunity to [orally] argue their position before the court, and thus would depend on whether the judge bothers to actually read their brief. If you mean a hearing in which Adam needs to be present, his request to reschedule the hearing is most likely to be granted. His contract is strong evidence that his request is not a vexatious attempt to delay proceedings. Since the hearing would be in month 4, the particularity that his contract goes up to month 4 implies that rescheduling would not significantly delay proceedings. Regarding your comment, rescheduling can (and does) happen multiple times even in criminal cases. This post includes an excerpt of the Register of Actions of criminal case 16-870-FH in Michigan state court (Washtenaw county), highlighting several instances of rescheduling as requested by the defense counsel and despite prosecutor's objection. I believe the case got rescheduled a few more times beyond what the snapshots reflect.
In the United States, the question that determines whether it's perjury is whether or not you believe what you said was true. Whoever— (1) having taken an oath..., willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true; or (2) ... willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe to be true; is guilty of perjury. So if an attorney asks if you saw the defendant, and you believe you saw the defendant, &quot;yes&quot; is generally going to be the correct answer. You're free to qualify your answers or answer questions that weren't put to you, but you aren't obligated to do so. Generally speaking, our adversarial system puts the burden on the defense to ask if you're sure, how the lighting was, whether you were wearing your glasses, whether you were drunk, etc.
From Baker, Donald I. "To Indict or Not to Indict: Prosecutorial Discretion in Sherman Act Enforcement." Cornell L. Rev. 63 (1977): 405: The Assistant Attorney General must ultimately decide whether to bring a criminal prosecution. He bases that choice in part upon articulated principles, in part upon intuition gained from experience, and ultimately upon the facts of the particular case. The choice to prosecute Microsoft and not Google, Apple, or Mozilla for (what you claim to be) ostensibly similar activities is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. My guess is that the Attorney General's office simply does not believe the actions of the other companies rise to the level of an antitrust violation. When they believe they do, they prosecute. (United States of America v. Apple Inc., et al., 12 Civ. 2862 (DLC)). Microsoft settled their case. No other party is responsible for Microsoft's decision to settle, even if they were doing the same thing, and even if they are later found to be guilty for or come to a settlement agreement regarding the same thing.
This was asked and answered by KPD on the Politics stackexchange. This issue came up in a decision from an appeals court, with a judge dying before the opinion was released, leading to the following SCOTUS opinion. The short of the answer: that Judge's vote is voided. If the result of negating the deceased Justice's vote is a 4-4 tie, then the usual procedure for a 4-4 tie is invoked, which is addressed in the Q&amp;A you link. Of course this assumes that SCOTUS will apply this to themselves, but the issue appears to be non-controversial, as it was a fairly recent decision with no dissents noted. So this assumption seems safe.
You could bring a motion to compel for failing to respond substantively to a motion to admit which is objected to, just as you could for an interrogatory. The process is the same. Normally, a request to admit would not be deemed admitted if a substantive objection was filed by the deadline, even if there was no express admission or denial. Only if the objection were completely and utterly meritless would a judge be likely to order that the request to admit would be deemed admitted in that case since the response was a de facto non-answer and the objection was a mere sham. @Iñaki Viggers states in his answer: the purpose of a request for admissions is [to attempt] to stipulate --rather than to discover-- the facts on which plaintiff and defendant agree. This is not really true. A request to admit is a discovery tool to prevent you from having to prove up what should be non-controversial facts that might nonetheless take time or documentation to prove at trial and to gather evidence for in advance of trial. The questions in a request to admit are typically ones that the other side would not willingly stipulate to (for example, because they'd like to be able to offer testimony to explain a seemingly unfavorable fact) but may not be able to deny. If a party denies a request to admit and then offers nothing to support the denial in discovery practice or at trial, that party risks court sanctions for the groundless denial. Good litigation practice is also always to include some requests to admit that are effectively outcome determinative to give the opposing party a chance to screw up and essentially default the case by not responding on time.