Does a defendant have a right to object at a hearing?

As with its oblique attempt to establish that the hearing below was not a critical stage, respondent leaves us to guess how the cited case is thought to furnish useful precedent here. Certainly there was a failure to object in both cases. Beyond that no obvious similarity appears; instead, material distinctions abound. First, in Santos the possibility that the trial court's action might implicate the defendant's right to presence was inobvious, to say the least. The purpose of a predicate objection is to apprise the trial court of a potential defect in the proceeding in order to provide it with an opportunity to correct the defect and avert an appellate reversal. Thus in People v. Scott (1994) 9 Cal.4th 331, 353, the court adopted a rule of "waiver" of certain sentencing errors on the rationale that "[r]outine defects... are easily prevented and corrected if called to the court's attention" and that the rule would "reduce the number of errors committed in the first instance and preserve the judicial resources otherwise used to correct them." But when a court imposes judgment on a defendant it knows is

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