Going by Hollywood movies, you should think about half of all US hardcore criminals; killers, rapist, terrorists, child molesters, tree-huggers, are released on a technicality (after hard work by unscrupulous defence lawyers naturally).
Is this something that, except in very rare cases – if ever, actually happens in real life?
Does a Supreme Court ruling count? The example that comes to mind is Miranda, of “read 'em their rights” fame, did do it but was not properly interrogated. He was retried, however, without the confession.
As the linked threa makes clear, the “tecnicalities” the popular media is so interested in hyping are typically violations of the suspects’s rights under the Constitution. Some criminals do get for these reasons, certainly, but if so, that is almost always a result of the police (or occasionally the court system) not doing their jobs properly.
I’m a little curious about this too. By watching Law and Order (which, yes, I know is not an accurate reflection of reality), you’d get the impression that cops routinely blow it and obtain evidence in ways that get the evidence thrown out. Does this really happen frequently? I’d think a cop who caused this sort of situation would get in enough trouble that they’d eventually catch on, but every other L&O episode, I find myself thinking, “don’t look in that car/house/backpack/whatever without the owner’s permission until you get a warrant, dummy!”
It is extremely tough to find actual studies on these issues. There was one done in 1971 that indicated only .7% of federal criminal defendants are being freed because of violations of the Exclusionary rule. Another study, done in California in 1982, reported nearly 5% of felony arrests were unprosecuted because of search issues, with 45% of those uncharged persons being re-arrested within 2 years. Also in 1982, a study of 7500 criminal cases indicated that 5% of cases (375) had motions filed to suppress physical evidence and that 17% (about 64) of those motions were successful. In cases where the suppression motion was granted, the study further found that 78% of persons who succeeded in getting the evidence excluded were later acquitted at trial.
Another study found that the exclusionary rule led to nonprosecution and/or nonconviction in between 0.6% and 2.35% of felony arrests in those jurisdictions under study. That study indicated a total loss of 2.8 to 7.1% of cases.
I heard data similiar to Hamlet’s , that in 6% of all criminal cases evidence was being discarded under the exclusionary rule, and that in about half of those cases convictions were obtained even without the excluded evidence.
There’s certainly not as many cases of people being freed on a technicality as TV watchers would believe.