And some of the need for a criminal defense attorney is the requirement to translate all of the legal nonsense that is tossed back and forth between the judge and the attorneys. Here are just a couple of expressions you might hear during your criminal process, some you may perhaps be acquainted with, some you may well not: hearsay, nunc pro tunc; arraignment; omnibus; voir dire; res ipsa loquitor; and on and on.
Well, today at the Seattle DUI Attorney Blog we're going to to help you know what one of those legal expressions means - corpus delicti. This is a word you may not hear spouted in court a lot, but it is an critical term for your defense attorney to know, specifically if you have confessed to a wrong and he or she wishes to try to get that confession suppressed. So that you better appreciate the word, I've broken it down for you below.
As I stated above, corpus delicti comes up most regularly in the context of confessions, and specifically in the context of confessions where not a lot of supplementary data exists against the defendant. witness, judges and courts, although more than ready to allow in a confession if one is provided, don't necessarily like confessions, specifically if they are the single thing the proseuctor has on a defendant. The reason is, we be acquainted with false confessions are provided from time to time. And we be acquainted with that juries place in awfully high regard confessions of defendants. So, judges and courts are timid to permit confessions in unless there is some other independent proof of the criminal act.
And that other independent facts of a criminal act is what corpus delicti connotes. If there is no corpus delicti, or extra unconnected support of a wrong, the court will not permit in a confession for the reason that there is the likelihood (whether reasonable or otherwise) that the confession was falsely provided. Still a little bit baffled as to what it means? How about an example.
Let's say there is a guy. He is standing out in a parking lot with some supplementary citizens around some automobiles. Let's say the citizens in the vehicle and the citizens out of the auto get into a shouting match, for whatever rationale. In the end, the chaps in the car decide to depart. As they are pulling away, the driver hears a noise on his van and turns around. He doesn't spot any person touching his van or necessarily by his car, but there is solitary one person in the vicinity. The male in the automobile doesn't check his van out until later, when he sees a dent in the side of his sedan. He surmises it was the guy he saw around his auto before.
The police go and pick up the man they suspect of injuring the vehicle and take him down to the police station. After some chatting and interrogating, they get the man to let in to kicking the car. He is detained and charged with malicious mischief.
In this state of affairs, do you sense the rule of corpus delicti exists here? Devoid of the confession, all the cops have for data is the man hearing something happen to his auto, turn around, and notice the gentleman near the auto. What is omitted is any proof that the male hit the vehicle, and that he did it with an plan to injure the auto. It is feasible (in theory, if no confession had been given) that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time when the gentleman turned around. For a instance like that a corpus delicti line of reasoning might be a way to get the confession suppressed.
Corpus delicti, like most additional Latin legal terms, are not difficult to understand after they are clarified. But getting that explanation can be a very difficult process at times. So why chance misunderstanding a question or a direction because you don't have the legal training of the prosecutors? The instant you are placed under arrest or believe like you can't go away is the moment you should demand to speak with a Seattle criminal defense attorney. A criminal defense lawyer can not only help you through the network of legal nonsense, but assist you to keep your jaws shut and the police off your back.
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