Rochin

Dismissal in the Interest of Justice

One of the few preserved case-level doctrines that lets a judge refuse to lend the court's authority to a legally prosecutable case when the substance of doing so would do more damage to justice than dismissing would. In some states — most clearly New York (CPL § 210.40, the Clayton motion) and California (Penal Code § 1385) — the legislature has codified judicial discretion to dismiss 'in furtherance of justice,' with New York's statute enumerating 'the impact of a dismissal upon the confidence of the public in the criminal justice system' as an explicit factor. Federally the equivalent is much narrower (FRCrP 48 is mechanical, not a substantive standard; the outrageous-government-conduct due-process doctrine of Rochin and Russell survives but rarely succeeds). This concept matters for the asymmetry analysis because it is the codified state-level counter-balance to the case-level foreclosures (Whren, the immunity stack, Armstrong) — the political-branches version of Mugler / Lawton's internal substance-over-form check, available at the case level in some jurisdictions, foreclosed in others.