What Is a Criminal Preliminary Hearing?

What is a criminal preliminary hearing? So in a felony case, the first court date after your initial appearance will be for a preliminary hearing.

And that is a probable cause hearing, where the state has to produce some evidence to justify your standing for your charges or to ultimately stand for a jury trial in the case. In that hearing, the state has to show two things.

Number one, that a crime was committed, and number two, that there's probable cause to believe that you committed the crime. So it's a low standard, a preliminary hearing is not a trial.

So as the defendant and the defense attorney, we would never call witnesses because the judge is only going to listen to the prosecution witnesses and only ask themselves, "Do I think a crime was committed? And is there some evidence showing that you did it?" So we're not going to have to rebut witnesses to say something different because the judge doesn't decide who's telling the truth. That's all for a jury trial.

Now, a preliminary hearing could either be held, and the state will have to call their witnesses, and the criminal defense attorney, me, would get to cross-examine those witnesses.

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