I was framed, I tells ya!
And the jury agreed. Can I walk immediately, a la ‘outta my face, gumshoe, i’m outta here’ or does the legal system get to harass me one last bit and hang onto me for a few more hours with “Processing?”
thanks,
hh
Depends. If you’ve been in jail, there’s a bit where you get your stuff back, clear out your cell if necessary and various other administrative duties are performed. If you arrived from home, you just go back there.
What, back to that dump?! Hell, no, I’m a free man!
So, they can force me to go back to the jail, if thence I came?
If you really are guilty, it’s in your interest to get all your stuff from the prison. There was this Law & Order episode where a guy got released and said “There’s nothing [back at the prison] that I want” and walked out of the courtroom. Turned out that when he was booked some 20 years earlier, one of the victim’s pubic hairs was in the band of the watch he turned in to the prison property room and it had been sitting in an envelope all that time, and with this new evidence, they threw his ass back in jail.
Just sayin’, is all.
I’m not sure what the precise procedure is, if you legally have to go back to jail to be officially released, get your belongings and so forth, so I’ll duck out and let someone who knows answer.
And that’s my favorite watch, so I’m going back for it.
And that’s where I step in. When the judge sentences someone to prison he signs a committment order. If the prisoner has his sentence reversed, the committment order is immediately vacated. And once there is no order, there is no way we can legally hold him (except by arresting him on a new charge). Assuming the prisoner was in court when his sentence was reversed, we will offer to give him a ride back to the prison so he can pick up his stuff. We will then buy him a bus ticket back to his residence of record or, if he resided outside of the state, the county he was arrested in.
But if he says he wants to just walk away, he is free to do so.
Special thanks!
hh
What happens to his stuff if he does?
Orange jumpsuit and all?
If you have a functioning brain you might want to make sure all of the paperwork is in order before getting in the cab. Consider that the government is a huge beaurocracy and that mistakes have been known to have been made. After all, you don’t want to get stopped for a broken tail light and get thrown back in jail because some release order was never processed properly.
That being said, typically the people ending up in jail in the first place probably didn’t cover their bases. They are not the smartest bunch in the world.
He can come pick it up or pay to have it shipped if he wants to. If no arrangements are made, we will throw his stuff out.
Most prisoners are not going to have a lot of valuable property. In most cases, they would just ask us to mail them a check for the money in their account.
Prisoners usually wear a cheap state-issued suit or their own personal clothes to a court appearance. And they will be issued a cheap state-issued suit if they don’t have personal clothes when they are released. So if an just released prisoner wants to walk away in his court clothing, we’ll let him go - if it wasn’t his already, we would have given it to him anyway.
There’s no release order to be signed. As far as the law is concerned, the natural state of a person is free. The only way he can be imprisoned is if there is a signed order saying so. So you don’t have to sign anything to release someone; you rescind the committment order and freedom is automatic. You can’t legally be held in custody on a technicality.
Now it is possible for a prisoner to be released mistakenly. But obviously in most such cases, the prisoner would have no interest in clearing the matter up.
A couple of other aspects to this issue.
In most cases, a prisoner is not going to be released at the court itself. The usual cases involves a prisoner submitting an appeal to a judge on some grounds and hoping the judge will rule in his favor and overturn the sentence. The court appearances involved are usually only a part of the process. The judge will usually adjurn the hearing while he considers the issue and then render his decision. The prisoner is brought back to the prison to await the judge’s decision.
Another factor, which I mentioned briefly above, is that many released prisoners are immediately re-arrested. Many prisoners have outstanding warrants for other crimes, from other jurisdictions, or are subject to deportation. In these cases we generally hand them directly over to the relevant arresting authority. Occasionally if there was an unanticipated release, we will serve the warrant on the prisoner and hold him in custody until we can turn him over to the police.
ISTR a case in which a guy who’d been wrongly imprisoned had to wait something like a month after the court cleared him of the charges before he could be released. I don’t think that it was because he had to serve out his sentence for some other crime (though it could have been) and I couldn’t fathom why it took so long for him to be let go. I have this vague memory that it had something do to with the fact that the state didn’t know what to do with the poor fellow since he’d been locked up for a couple of decades and didn’t have any family on the outside or there might have been a bit more legal work of some sort that needed to be done before they could cut him loose (perhaps they wanted make sure he wasn’t an accessory to the crime or something). I mention this solely because we’ve got a couple of folks here who could conclusively answer the matter. (The case would have been in the news in the past year or so.)
Paging Casdave.
What about double jeopardy? If a trial goes to decision, a person can’t be tried again for the same crime, even if new evidence is found, right?
Did your dad have it when he was in Viet Nam?
I’d think it would all depend on why he was released.
If he was tried, and found not guilty, then he can’t be charged again for that crime.
If he was released on a technicality, the case was dropped, etc. Then new evidence come to light, then IIRC he could be rearrested and the charges against him/her restored.
-Butler
IANALBMTAP-L
(I am not a lawyer but married to a para-legal)
There is something that I find incredibly funny about the concept of a ‘cheap state issued suit’.