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In U.S. legal nomenclature, the verdict is the jury's finding on the questions of fact submitted to it. Once the court (the judge) receives the verdict, the judge enters judgment on the verdict. The judgment of the court is the final order in the case. If the defendant is found guilty, they can choose to appeal the case to the local Court of ...
A sentence may consist of imprisonment, a fine, or other sanctions. Sentences for multiple crimes may be a concurrent sentence, where sentences of imprisonment are all served together at the same time, or a consecutive sentence, in which the period of imprisonment is the sum of all sentences served one after the other. [2]
JMOL motions may also be made after the verdict is returned and are then called "renewed" motions for judgment as a matter of law (RJMOL), but the motion is still commonly known by its former name, judgment notwithstanding the verdict, or JNOV (from the English judgment and the Latin non obstante veredicto).
Hence, both the layman majority and the jury must convict to sentence a culprit; however, if the deciding two-thirds jury majority approves and the district court finds the defendant not guilty, the not guilty verdict may still be appealed to the Court of Appeals where, conversely, the professional judges outvotes the layman judges.
A suspended sentence is a sentence on conviction for a criminal offence, the serving of which the court orders to be deferred in order to allow the defendant to perform a period of probation. If the defendant does not break the law during that period and fulfills the particular conditions of the probation, the sentence is usually considered ...
The legal definition of "judgment" contemplates decisions made by judges in a court of law. [3] Decisions of quasi-judicial bodies and administrative bodies may also be colloquially referred to as "judgments," but they must be distinguished from true judgments in that they are not made by judges in courts of law. [3]
In Nebraska the sentence is decided by a three-judge panel, which must unanimously agree on death, and the defendant is sentenced to life imprisonment if one of the judges is opposed. [12] Montana is the only state where the trial judge decides the sentence alone. [13] Two states do not require a unanimous jury decision:
The first major decision in this direction was Games v. Stiles ex dem Dunn, [23] which held that the bench could override the jury's verdict on a point of law. The 1895 decision Sparf v. United States, [24] written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, held that a trial judge has no responsibility to inform the jury of its right to nullify laws. It ...