Revealing mistake: Watch closely as Phoenix is about to fight the cops near the computer kiosk: the same two people wearing white robes pass behind the officer with the hand-held computer twice. (00:25:30)
Revealing mistake: When Cocteau's corpse is thrown into the fireplace, you can see that it is a dummy due to the fact the the hair is longer and shaggy. (01:38:05)
Revealing mistake: Towards the end of the movie, when Spartan goes after Phoenix in the cryolab, he fires several rounds at him with his Beretta 92 handgun and the slide locks back indicating he is out of rounds. The camera pans to a shot of a crane as he inserts a new magazine and is about to pull on the slide. However, when the camera returns to him, he pulls the slide back and a round can be seen ejecting out, indicating he hit the slide release before pulling the slide back.
Revealing mistake: The cables Spartan slices in order to bring down the parasol, have quickreleases on them so that they snap in the right place. This is best visible with the second one. (01:01:50)
Revealing mistake: When Simon Phoenix needs to get out of the cryo-prison, we are led to believe he removes the eyeball and put it on the nib of a fountain pen. When he scans the eyeball to get out of the prison, the outer edges shows that the scanned eyeball is still in the eye socket. You can see the eyelids on the in the top right and bottom right edges of the shot.
Revealing mistake: During the slo-mo portion of the fight between Spartan and Phoenix, Snipes intentionally slowed down his movements to allow Stallone more time to smash the glass tube; this is not consistent with the other fights in the film where Snipes was always quicker with his actions.
Revealing mistake: During the fight at the end the blood spot on Spartan's top looks more like an ironed on T-shirt transfer than a tear and cut, you can also see the shine from on it from the surrounding lights.
Answer: Spartan didn't have authorization to go in and apprehend Phoenix to begin with. Depending on the time and manner of deaths of the hostages, it may have been impossible for the authorities to determine that they were already dead before Spartan went in guns blazing, so it would be determined that he was criminally negligent in their deaths. Whatever Phoenix had to say on the matter probably didn't even factor into Spartan's trial.
Phaneron ★