That’s not a **legal **loophole at all.
What is the most serious crime anyone ever got away with because of a legal loophole or technicality
IIRC, wasn’t there someone who once got away with murder because he hadn’t been read his Miranda Rights?
LOL! I was going to quip that Miranda got away with something because the cops didn’t read him (what would become known as) his Miranda Rights.
But, since this is the SDMB, I’ve learned to fact-check my jokes first and it turns out following the SCOTUS decision, he was retried and found guilty in a trial that did not use his confession.
Ignorance (self-)fought!
One could argue that Curtis LeMay and James Doolittle committed major war crimes against a civilian population. They weren’t prosecuted because the victors in a war seldom are.
In the awesome and disturbing documentary “Fog of War”, Robert McNamara made exactly that argument. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but IIRC, McNamara was one of the chef planners of the bombing of Japanese cities, and he said that if the US had lost, he would have been prosecuted as a war criminal.
If jury nullification counts as a legal loophole, the murder of Emmett Till was probably far more serious than Nicole Brown Simpson.
Interesting statement, but was it really accurate? After the war, the Germans & the Japanese weren’t charged with war crimes relating to carpet-bombing cities.
Reading the details of farmer-tractor story it sounds like the police determined that the kid was horsing around the farm and ran out of a barn into the path of a tractor was backing up, he was in the blind spot and got hit. It appears the jury determined it was pretty much 100% the kid’s fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time with respect to causing the accident and the driver’s intoxication was not directly relevant to causing the accident.
Other than an unprosecutable DWI on private land it does not sound like there was determination the driver was directly at fault or “got away” with a crime.
Now, I won’t assert to being an authority on legal “technicalities” or “loopholes”, but at least in my “common usage” understanding of those terms almost none of the cases mentioned in this thread are examples of either. You’re all mostly just talking about people who have gotten outright acquitted, or entities that for various reasons were/are above the law (maybe unfairly, but that’s not really a technicality.) Nixon for example was pardoned, no criminal case against him was ever processed and was never “thrown out” due to a technicality.
To me a technicality generally means someone got off despite compelling evidence of guilt because the civil authorities made some minor legal or procedural mistake that required the case either be thrown out, or resulted in an acquittal.
Justice William J. Brennan in his career had discussed the concept of “legal” technicalities. To take an egregious example (not from Brennan, but just my own imagining), a police officer serving a normal search warrant (not a special “no-knock” warrant) forgets to knock on the door and just walks in, and finds evidence of a serious crime. Due to the police officers technical mistake in executing the warrant, all evidence found is “fruit of the poisonous tree”, and thrown out, lacking any other evidence, a serious criminal goes unpunished. Justice Brennan explained that incidents like these aren’t “technicalities” they’re “due process.” But I do think this is what people are talking about when they talk about technicalities–violations of due process that probably weren’t malicious, probably weren’t “major” (like say, beating a confession out of someone), but nonetheless they deprived someone of due process and even when they are obviously guilty our legal system requires we rectify due process violations.
There’s a ton of serious cases over the many years we’ve had our legal system where obviously guilty men have avoided punishment due to technical errors in warrant filings, interview procedures, evidence handling or etc. I can’t think of any super notable ones off the top of my head. I do know that Ted Bundy’s first murder trial, the case of Caryn Campbell, lots of the evidence against him was thrown out as inadmissible. If that case had been allowed to proceed as it was, he was highly likely to prevail and get an acquittal–and he was one of the worst murderers we’ve ever had. [Bundy was in prison because he had already been convicted of kidnapping, but he got a relatively short sentence, he was working as his own attorney in the Campbell murder trial, and if he had been acquitted he’d likely have been out of prison in a few years on the kidnapping charges. Instead Bundy escaped out of the law library and went on to do more murders, and far more evidence was available in the Florida murders, of which he was ultimately convicted and for which he was executed.]
A loophole is an instance of the law being written with a certain intention, but a weird case allows for someone to do something that people “assume should be illegal” but ends up not being.
An example of the loophole would be “rape by deception.” Rape by deception is if I sneak into a woman’s house, and it’s pitch black, and initiate sex with her while she’s asleep. She has a boyfriend, and assumes I’m him, and reciprocates. The next morning she finds out her boyfriend never came over that night–I’ve committed rape, by deceiving the woman. I can’t remember if the law has subsequently been changed, but there was an infamous California case called People v. Morales, Julio Morales broke into a woman’s home and impersonated her boyfriend and had sex with her. [A wrinkle in this–she realized some time after vaginal intercourse had began that Morales was not her boyfriend and attempted to physically stop him, and he forcefully continued–which is a much more traditional rape.] The prosecutors presented two theories to the jury–one was that Morales had initiated sex with a sleeping person (who could not give consent), and the other was that Morales improperly obtained consent by impersonating her boyfriend. The jury convicted Morales. On appeal, his conviction was overturned because one of the two theories was legally impermissible in this case–under California law at the time, rape by deception is only illegal if perpetrated against a married woman.
Why? Because the law dates back to the 19th century, and back then it was only proper for a married woman to have sex at all, and improper for one to be having casual sex outside of a marriage with a beau. Due to 19th century views on rape, a woman who had sex with a man she wasn’t married to, even if they were “together” in our modern understanding, was a woman of loose morals, and not entitled to the protection of a married woman who could “properly” have sex, but only with her husband (and thus the deceiver was violating both the husband/wife’s marital union.)
Morales was ordered a retrial–and was convicted again. But this is still an example of a loophole in the law.
Used to be, not very long ago. There was the infamous case of the depraved Malaysian sultan who (during his reign as King of Malaysia) beat his golf caddy to death in 1987, among other violent crimes—and could not be prosecuted. Thanks to him, though, they’ve since passed laws to rein in royalty.
I believe royalty in most of the Gulf states have similar privileges to this day. I believe a member of the Saud royal family was recently executed–but his prosecution/conviction had to be personally approved by the King, and was only done so, I believe, to make an example of him. The Saudi prince involved had shot a man in a quarrel, and it is believed the royal family found his behavior scandalous/brazen enough they approved his punishment. The last Saudi royal, I believe, to be punished was Prince Faisal bin Musaid who assassinated King Al Faisal in the 1970s.
I was limiting my example to a case within the USA, in which both the perpetrators and the victims were Americans, the crime was premeditated, and in retrospect, the public perception of guilt is nearly unanimous.
We had a recent case near here where a man arrested for murder was talking with his lawyer at the jail, and he told the lawyer where the murder weapon was. Problem was that there were prosecutors listening in on the conversation. They told the police, and the cops retrieved the weapon. The court ended up suppressing the weapon as evidence. I don’t know if the trial has been held yet, so I’m unsure of the ultimate verdict.
War crimes are generally for those who give the orders, although in Germany’s case, there were enough Nazi officers who were personally involved in the holocaust to satisfy any tribunal. Hitler was dead, but his #2, Goering, was sentenced to death at Nuremburg for war crimes. There were indeed war crimes trials for Japanese officers and officials. See Wiki for a very long article. For some reason Hirohito was not one of those tried, and continued to rule Japan until 1989.
This was a tricky case about interpreting the Good Friday Agreement in relation to IRA actions, for which there was a complex arrangement for, in effect, allowing them to get away with a range of what would otherwise have been serious crimes. IIRC, the question in his case was whether or not the relevant required processes applied to him or had been properly carried out. Since this was all part of an essentially political process of amnesty, it may be stretching a point to call it a legal technicality or loophole.
In the UK, I have the impression that a legal technicality or loophole may cause a prosecution to fail, but that may not necessarily count as someone getting away with it, since the option is open for a retrial if the case can be properly presented and/or if new evidence emerges. That now applies even if due process has led to an acquittal by jury, rather than just withdrawal of a prosecution, provided “compelling” new evidence emerges.
You may wish to reflect upon the degree of power that Hirohito possessed, relative to the power that Hitler possessed. I think that you will find such an exercise most instructive.
Speaking of war crimes … what about those folks held in Gitmo … they’re not “prisoners of war” because the United States never declared war against Afghanistan … thus a loophole so we can keep them locked up forever … without trial … [insert snarky political jab here]
I don’t believe in the existence of legal loopholes or technicalities that allow people to get away with serious crimes. What exists are laws that cops and prosecutors must abide by when attempting to prove someone guilty. If they fail at that, the person is found not guilty.
If you want a change to the law, advocate for a change to the law. As it stands, people want the law somehow to stop existing when someone they don’t like is being accused of a crime.
The case I thought of was Anthony Erthel Williams, a self-styled minister who on Xmas eve 1968 sexually assaulted and murdered a ten-year-old girl in a YMCA washroom in Des Moines.
He surrendered to authorities in Davenport, and on the drive back to Des Moines with two detectives, one of them gave what’s come to be known as the “Christian burial speech”, telling Williams it’d be a shame if snowfall hid the body and it couldn’t be recovered. Williams led them to the body and was convicted of murder. The conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court which ruled that the “Christian burial speech” constituted illegal interrogation without a lawyer present.
Williams didn’t actually get away with murder, since he finally was convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term (despite further efforts at tossing out conviction #2, with a total of 15 years spent wrangling through the courts).
You have to do better than that. What has he said and more importantly what law do you think he broke? I don’t know the ins and outs of Maine law but in my state it has to be a credible threat that leads to a reasonable belief that the threat is real. Just shaking your fist and saying “I’m gonna kill you” isn’t enough for terroristic threats.
Don’t be coy, just spit it out.