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criminal charge

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a formal accusation made by a governmental authority (usually a public prosecutor or the police)

~4 min read

Encyclopedic overview

A criminal charge is a formal accusation made by a governmental authority (usually a public prosecutor or the police) asserting that somebody has committed a crime. A charging document, which contains one or more criminal charges or counts, can take several forms, including:

complaint

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “criminal charge” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.