Legal Question in Criminal Law in California

Re: grand jury indictment

It has more or less the same effect it would have had if the person had not moved. As long as the crime was committed within its jurisdiction, a Grand Jury can indict a defendant regardless of where he happens to be living at the moment.

If you move to a country with which the U.S. has the appropriate treaties and the prosecution finds out where you are, it may try to have you extradited. If the charges are very serious then the prosecutor will almost surely seek your extradition. If the charges are relatively minor he may not bother, since extradition is expensive and requires effort that could be used on other matters.

But there is a catch: the statute of limitations stops ticking while you are out of the country. This means that if you ever -- and I really mean *ever* -- set foot in the United States again you will be subject to arrest and prosecution. Customs and border patrol personnel have lists of people abroad who have charges pending against them in the U.S., and when one of those people gets off a plane or drives through a border crossing he is arrested and sent to face the charges. There are a variety of reasons why this might not happen in some instances, but this is what you should expect.

You will basically be putting yourself in the same position as the film director Roman Polanski, who skipped out on a criminal charge and ran off to France about 30 years ago. California does not want to go through the effort and expense of extraditing him but he knows he will be seized at the border if he tries to re-enter the U.S., so he has never come back.