emotional distress. A highly unpleasant mental reaction (such as anguish, grief, fright, humiliation, or fury) that results from another person’s conduct; emotional pain and suffering. • Emotional distress, when severe enough, can form a basis for the recovery of tort damages. — Also termed emotional harm; mental anguish; mental distress; mental suffering. See INTENTIONAL INFLICTION […]
emotional distress Read More »
probation. 1. A court-imposed criminal sentence that, subject to stated conditions, releases a convicted person into the community instead of sending the criminal to jail or prison. Cf. PAROLE. [Cases: Sentencing and Punishment 1811.] — probationary, adj. bench probation. Probation in which the offender agrees to certain conditions or restrictions and reports only to the
moral turpitude. 1. Conduct that is contrary to justice, honesty, or morality. • In the area of legal ethics, offenses involving moral turpitude — such as fraud or breach of trust — traditionally make a person unfit to practice law. — Also termed moral depravity. 2. Military law. Any conduct for which the applicable punishment
legal fiction. An assumption that something is true even though it may be untrue, made esp. in judicial reasoning to alter how a legal rule operates; specif., a device by which a legal rule or institution is diverted from its original purpose to accomplish indirectly some other object. • The constructive trust is an example
A verdict that results from the jury’s passion or prejudice and thereby shocks the court’s conscience. [Cases: Damages 128; Federal Civil Procedure 2345; New Trial 77(2). C.J.S. Damages §§ 384, 387–394; New Trial §§ 101, 103.]
Rochin rule. The now-rejected principle that unconstitutionally obtained evidence is admissible against the accused unless the evidence was obtained in a manner that shocks the conscience (such as pumping the stomach of a suspect to obtain illegal drugs that the suspect has swallowed, as occurred in the Rochin v. California case). • The Supreme Court