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Georgia's Safe Harbor Ruling For Affirmative Defenses In Criminal Cases Should Be Revisited, Ben W. Studdard, Michal A. Arndt

Mercer Law Review

The State has the entire burden of proving the defendant's guilt of the offense charged beyond a reasonable doubt, reads the instruction given to every jury empaneled to try a criminal case in Georgia. The defendant has no burden of proof at all. Where the evidence raises a defense, the burden remains with the State to negate or disprove that defense beyond a reasonable doubt. But those same Georgia citizens, when summoned to federal jury service, may hear a very different instruction: that the defendant, upon raising an affirmative defense, has the burden of proof as to that defense, by …

How The Narrative About Louisiana's Non-Unanimous Criminal Jury System Became A Person Of Interest In The Case Against Justice In The Deep South, Angela A. Allen-Bell

Mercer Law Review

Stories are central to what lawyers do; yet, to the average member of the legal community, they exist only inconspicuously. In actuality, all cases start with a story. As lawyers do their work, that initial story grows and evolves. When judges enter the picture, the story is revised and, ultimately, the final chapter is written; then, the process begins again with an entirely different cast of characters. This Article advocates against impersonal, mechanized systems of justice that are built upon defendants, dockets, cases, quotas, formulas, and rapidity. This Article calls for the justice community to see cases in a highly …

Public Defenders, Local Control, And Brown V. Board Of Education, Russell C. Gabriel

Mercer Law Review

The topics the Mercer Law Review Symposium addresses-race, history, criminal law, and the South-have a long reach across time, place, and the spectrum of justice. It is both temptingly easy and distressfully complicated to disentangle the strands of the Southern tapestry, woven from past to present. The theory of this Essay is the easy part. Evaluating the correctness of the theory is more complicated. I am indebted to Mercer Law Review for inviting the effort.

When the United States Supreme Court decided Gideon v. Wainright' and told the states that they were required to provide lawyers to poor defendants accused …