Black Collar Crime: Understanding Legal Terms Used in Criminal Court Cases

Recently, an Evangelical pastor threatened me with legal action if I didn’t immediately remove a Black Collar Crime post about him. I shook in my boots as I read his threats. 🙂 I asked him for evidence for his claim of innocence, which he provided. Innocent, he was not. His charges were expunged. Whether he was guilty was never settled. I asked this preacher to send me court documents showing his expungement, which he did. I gladly removed the post. Afterward, I thought I would ask Carolyn, my editor, to write a post about the various legal terms related to Black Collar Crime stories. Far too often, preachers will lie to me about their crimes, so I do not remove posts unless the alleged offender provides evidence to justfy its removal. I have removed a handful posts over the years. Ninety-nine percent of Black Collar stories are accurate as published

Guest Post by Carolyn, my editor and friend

Introduction

Bruce has asked me to write a piece defining a few legal terms. Before I start, I thought I should give you my credentials, so you will understand that sometimes I know what I am talking about, or I’m close, at any rate.

I became an attorney in 1992, having attended law school at Louisiana State University. I was much older than most of my classmates, and I turned 40 just before I sat for the bar exam. I practiced mostly family law and personal bankruptcy law, although I did 2-3 years, part time, of indigent defense work, for those who cannot afford an attorney. I retired in 2008 and moved with my husband to France in 2010.

I stumbled onto Bruce’s blog in 2015 and immediately fell in love with it. Such delightful writing, with so many errors! So I offered to edit his work, and he accepted. So most of the errors you find today are the result of my carelessness, not his.

Now on to legal terms. 

Guilty, Not Guilty, Innocent

First, let’s talk about guilty, not guilty, and innocent. The first two are legal terms, the third is a journalism term. 

In a criminal trial, a defendant, or perpetrator, faces charges of crimes or wrongdoing against the state. It is always the state – there are not private prosecutions. When he goes to trial, the outcome is usually GUILTY or NOT GUILTY. There are other outcomes, such as a hung jury or a mistrial, but those don’t arise as often, and they are beyond the scope of this work. The prosecutor must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did, in fact, do what he is accused of doing. If a defendant is found guilty, it means that the prosecutor has done a good enough job of laying out the charges of wrongdoing against the defendant, along with sufficient evidence produced by witnesses, that the jury believes the defendant did what he is accused of doing. The result of a guilty charge is usually that the defendant goes to prison or pays a fine, or both. A few result in the death penalty, but in the grand scheme of trials, there are very few death penalty, or capital, cases. By the way – a defendant may be tried before a jury or before a judge (called a bench trial). It is up to the defendant and his attorney to make that decision.

If the jury finds that the state prosecutor did not meet his burden of proof, then the jury returns a NOT GUILTY verdict. I would like you to understand, that if a defendant is found not guilty, it does not mean he did not commit the crime! It means merely that the jury did not believe, based on the evidence produced at trial, that the defendant committed the crime. Therefore, there are sometimes people found NOT GUILTY who are, indeed, guilty of the crime, but the prosecutor didn’t lay out a good enough case, or there was ambiguous evidence or the jury chose not to believe a witness or witnesses. A person who has been found GUILTY is said to have been convicted of the crime. 

INNOCENT is primarily a journalism term. I say that because, early in the newspaper game, editors discovered that it was too easy for a typesetter to omit the very important word NOT, and the newspaper was stating in, say, the headline, that the defendant was found guilty when the reverse was actually true. Can you imagine!? So newspapers moved to calling a NOT GUILTY verdict INNOCENT in an effort to forestall any typesetting or copywriting errors. The term INNOCENT obscures the fact stated above that the defendant was not actually found innocent, but was only found NOT GUILTY, and may have actually committed the crime with which he is charged. 

A trial is not meant to determine whether a defendant did not commit a crime. It is only concerned with determining whether he did commit a crime. In life, plenty of people “get by” with something they did for which they do not receive due punishment. Sometimes that happens in the courtroom as well as in everyday life. 

Guilty verdicts may not happen only before a jury. A defendant may plead GUILTY to charges if he, in conjunction with his lawyer (hopefully), believes that the outcome of a trial would lead to a finding of GUILTY, and he might believe he would get a better deal in a plea bargain with the district attorney who is prosecuting the case than he would get before a judge or jury. 

Expungement

In most cases, a GUILTY verdict stays with the guilty party for the rest of his or her life. On certain occasions, a person who has been convicted of a crime can have the record of his conviction EXPUNGED. Expungement is a legal process by which a convicted party’s record is cleared or sealed. If this is done, the convicted individual can then answer truthfully on job applications, housing applications or other business situations. There are only a few cases in which an expungement can be done. 

Expungement is a legal process to clear or seal criminal records, treating them as if they never happened, allowing individuals to deny arrests/convictions and improve job or housing prospects. A person desiring an expungement must file a petition with the court where his conviction took place, and he must prove that he meets certain criteria, such as juvenile offenses, having completed probation or a diversion program, or that the charges were dropped. A judge will review the petition, and may call for a hearing. If the petition is granted, the court issues an order to seal or destroy records. Obviously, expungement is more complex than it seems here, but this gives the reader a basic overview. 

Dismissal

Sometimes a prosecutor or a defendant may move for a dismissal of charges. If the latter files a motion to dismiss, there must be a hearing on the issue and the judge will decide whether to dismiss the charges. If the prosecutor moves to dismiss the charges, the judge will ask the defendant if he objects. The defendant almost never does; after all, he’s about to be a free man with no charges pending. A prosecutor will generally dismiss a case if he believes he has insufficient evidence to prosecute a case. This may be because a witness cannot be located, a witness is unreliable (he’s a convicted felon, for instance, or has changed his story while meeting several times with the prosecutor or his team), or any of a number of other reasons that the prosecutor feels he cannot put a reasonable case before a judge or jury. It often happens in domestic cases, where one week the spouses love each other and will not testify against one another, and the next week they hate each other, but there are plenty of other cases where evidence and witnesses are shaky or unreliable. 

Cases are dismissed with prejudice and without prejudice. When charges are dismissed with prejudice, the dismissal is a final court order ending the prosecution permanently. Dismissal without prejudice is a procedural pause, often to fix issues like missing evidence or witnesses, leaving the door open for future prosecution later.  

I hope none of Bruce’s readers ever has to worry personally about these terms. 

Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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