I genuinely don’t understand what a technicality is, and I really want to know.
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It means “the system followed the rules, and I didn’t like the outcome.”
For instance, if the police violate the rights of a private citizen, and the prosecutor tries to use the tainted evidence they obtained to send a person to prison, and they get caught, then the person isn’t convicted, because human beings have rights which are sometimes upheld by the courts.
People who don’t understand that refer to this as “getting off on a technicality.”
I assume you are referring to something like “he got off on a technicality”? In this instance, it means that there was some violation of rule or procedure that led to the case being dismissed, instead of a jury acquitting the defendant after a trial. Typically, technicalities will be things like how a particular piece of evidence was acquired, whether the prosecution followed certain rules when preparing its case, etc.
IANAL!
A technicality is a point of law, normally procedure, that causes the case to go one way or another.
Example: If you are fired for a protected reason (religion, gender, etc), you may have 90 days to file in state court to start the process. If you waited 91 days, the suit, even if it were valid, would be dismissed due a technicality.
Another:
You are pulled over for speeding. The police officer got you with radar doing 20 MPH over the limit, but he was supposed to have his radar gun inspected every 30 days. He last had it inspected 35 days ago. Case dismissed!
In an ideal world, we’d like the operation of justice to be about “Was a crime committed?” and “Did this person commit a crime?” However the real life justice system operates on procedures.
A technicality typically refers to these procedures. For example, there may be ample evidence gathered that a crime was committed but if that evidence was gathered in an inadmissible process, eg an illegal search by the police, then that evidence will usually be excluded and in extreme situations the case is dismissed. There may be little doubt that the perpetrator did the crime they were charged with but the case cannot proceed because of tainted evidence.
Just because they are called technicalities does NOT mean they are not important. Many of these technicalities serve to protect citizens. For example, the government cannot spy on the discussions between a lawyer and their client. Or law enforcement cannot beat a confession out of a suspect. These technicalities may be at the service of higher societal principles.
Non lawyers like to use phrases like “got off on a technicality”. Us actual lawyers prefer to use the term “laws” and “rights”. As in “his conviction was overturned because his rights were violated, which broke the law”.
I’ll give an example. A man is accused of murder. He’s arrested, placed in interrogation, and questioned about his involvement. During questioning he admits to the murder, and draws the police a map of where he hid the body. Police use the map to find the body, along with ample forensic evidence proving *conclusively* that the suspect is the murder.
Ooooone tiny problem. And that problem is *Miranda v. Arizona* the Supreme Court case that codified “Miranda rights”. Which are, very simply, that the police *must* inform a suspect of their rights to an attorney, and that they are not in any way obligated to answer police questions, and may remain silent, at any time, and their remaining silent can not ever be used against them in court.
So if the police started questioning the suspect without informing the suspect of his rights per *Miranda* the police violated that suspect’s constitutional rights under the 5th and 14th amendments.
And because the suspect was never informed of that before he was questioned then *everything* he said in that questioning, and in addition *every other piece of evidence obtained as a result of that questioning, INCLUDING THE BODY* is what we call “fruit of the poisonous tree”. The questioning was illegal, so *anything and everything* that came out of that questioning can not be used.
Some would say “oh that’s just a technicality, he’s clearly a murderer and so he should be in prison”. We attorneys call that “violation of civil liberties, so now he gets to go free, do better next time”
The law is complex, and it’s worse because it’s written and interpreted by humans, so it has mistakes and there are often cases when what is written down doesn’t exactly match what the writers actually meant, or have been changed because our understand of how things work have changed with time.
When someone gets off because of a “technicality”, it means that the people doing the arrest made some procedural mistake in following the laws required, with the general implication that the person that was arrested is actually guilt and there is a problem with the laws which allow this injustice.
However, in most cases those laws exist to prevent the abuse of power by the police or members of the justice system. Failing to read someone their rights or collecting evidences when they are not allowed to are generally what the technicalities turn out to be.
It doesn’t mean anything. “Technicality” is not a legal term in any way. Lay people use it to mean some minor point of procedure or law, but the world itself has no legal use or meaning,
From my observations, “getting off on a technicality” is sometimes used for acquittals also.
Even if all rules and procedures are followed properly by the police and prosecutor(s), a jury can still acquit because the evidence presented does not meet the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. The failure to meet that standard is often called a “technicality” by people who don’t fully understand legal procedures and such.
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