Legal Question in Criminal Law in California

Re: Rights of the accused

There are no legal technicalities that automatically let criminals go free. There are rules which the state has to follow and which, if violated, could hamper the prosecution and make it impossible to win a conviction, but that is not the same thing.

The example you give -- police failing to read the defendant his rights -- does not result in the defendant being set free. Technically, a defendant is not entitled to have his rights read to him at all. However, if the police fail to do this, they are not allowed to use as evidence statements made by the defendant while in custody or any other evidence they obtain as a result of these statements (unless they can prove that they inevitably would have found this evidence by other means).

In some cases, being unable to use this evidence will cripple the prosecution as there may be no other evidence available to support a conviction. In other cases, though, there will be mountains of such evidence. If someone commits a murder in front of 100 witnesses and the police forget to give Miranda warnings, the prosecution can go forward using the testimony of the witnesses and physical evidence gathered at the scene.

It is theoretically possible that the prosecution could commit so much misconduct that the only appropriate remedy would be to dismiss the case against the defendant. Several years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court said that such cases could arise. More recently, a federal judge in Pennsylvania thought he had such a case and ordered it dismissed despite substantial evidence of the defendant's guilt. (There was some truly astonishing evidence of a wholesale effort by the police and the prosecution to railroad the defendant.) He was overruled on appeal, though, and to the best of my knowledge no other judge has since made a similar finding.

The bottom line is that some cases do get thrown out, but that result follows from the specific facts of the cases themselves and not from some legal "technicality" that automatically allows the defendant to go free.