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Miranda 2.0, Tonja Jacobi

Tonja Jacobi

Fifty years after Miranda v. Arizona, significant numbers of innocent suspects are falsely confessing to crimes while subject to police custodial interrogation. Critics on the left and right have proposed reforms to Miranda, but few such proposals are appropriately targeted to the problem of false confessions. Using rigorous psychological evidence of the causes of false confessions, this article analyzes the range of proposals and develops a realistic set of reforms directed specifically at this foundational challenge to the justice system. Miranda 2.0 is long overdue; it should require: warning suspects how long they can be interrogated for; delivering …

Implementing The Lessons From Wrongful Convictions: An Empirical Analysis Of Eyewitness Identification Reform Strategies, Keith A. Findley

Keith A Findley

Learning about the flaws in the criminal justice system that have produced wrongful convictions has progressed at a dramatic pace since the first innocent individuals were exonerated by postconviction DNA testing in 1989. Application of that knowledge to improving the criminal justice system, however, has lagged far behind the growth in knowledge. Likewise, while considerable scholarship has been devoted to identifying the factors that produce wrongful convictions, very little scholarly attention has been devoted to the processes through which knowledge about causes is translated into reforms.

Using eyewitness misidentification—one of the leading contributors to wrongful convictions and the most thoroughly …

The Criminological Cultivation Of African American Municipal Police Officers: Sambo Or Sellout, Howard M. Henderson

Howard M Henderson

African American municipal police officers have been historically underrepresented and often face a double marginalization, arguably due to fellow officer and public perceptions. This study represents a first-step criminological cultivation analysis of the quantity and quality of African American municipal police officer depictions in the core cop film genre (1971–2011). Utilizing the unified film population identification methodology, 112 films were identified and examined to determine the overarching messages conveyed through the genre. Findings revealed that White officers were depicted in the lead or joint leading role in 89% (n ¼ 100) and African Americans in 19% (n ¼ 21) of …

The Criminal Justice System Creates Incentives For False Convictions, Roger Koppl, Meghan Sacks

Roger Koppl

We examine the incentive structure of the various actors of the criminal justice system within an organization economics framework. Specifically, we examine the incentives of the police, forensic scientists, prosecutors and public defenders. We find that police, prosecutors and forensic scientists often have an incentive to garner convictions with little incentive to convict the right person, whereas public defenders often lack the resources and incentives to provide a vigorous defense for their clients. The “multitask problem” of organizational economics helps explain how this skewed incentive structure creates false convictions.

The Problem Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon

Rachel A. Harmon

The legal problem of policing is how to regulate police authority to permit officers to enforce law while also protecting individual liberty and minimizing the social costs the police impose. Courts and commentators have largely treated the problem of policing as limited to preventing violations of constitutional rights and its solution as the judicial definition and enforcement of those rights. But constitutional law and courts alone are necessarily inadequate to regulate the police. Constitutional law does not protect important interests below the constitutional threshold or effectively address the distributional impacts of law enforcement activities. Nor can the judiciary adequately assess …

High Expectations And Some Wounded Hopes: The Policy And Politics Of A Uniform Statute On Videotaping Custodial Interrogations, Andrew Taslitz

Andrew E. Taslitz

Much has been written about the need to videotape the entire process of police interrogating suspects. Videotaping discourages abusive interrogation techniques, improves police training in proper techniques, reduces frivolous suppression motions because facts are no longer in dispute, and improves jury decision making about the voluntariness and accuracy of a confession. Despite these benefits, only a small, albeit growing, number of states have adopted legislation mandating electronic recording of the entire interrogation process. In the hope of accelerating legislative adoption of this procedure and of improving the quality of such legislation, the Uniform Law Commission (ULC), formerly the National Conference …

A System Of Exemptions: Historicizing State Illegality In Indonesia, Robert Cribb

Robert Cribb

No abstract provided.

Absolute Immunity: A License To Rape Justice At Will, Prentice L. White

Prentice L White

ABSOLUTE IMMUNITY: A LICENSE TO RAPE JUSTICE AT WILL BY PRENTICE L. WHITE We are all acquainted with the phrase the sanctity of marriage. We understand that the vows made by a couple at the wedding ceremony is sacrosanct, and if those vows are not taken seriously, or abused in any way, then the offending spouse will be penalized and evicted from the marital relationship. Likewise, justice should be handled in the same manner and with the same intensity. America prides itself on having the best legal system in the world. It broadcasts to all the surrounding nations that its …

Building The Infrastructure Of Anti-Trafficking: Information, Funding, Responses, Fiona M. David Ms

Fiona David

No abstract provided.

Gates & Crowley, Patrol Officer’S Tool Box: Mandatory Conflict Resolution Skills For Police Officers, Christopher C. Cooper

Christopher C. Cooper Dr.

What happened between a Harvard professor and a street cop from Cambridge was a Testosterone laden confrontation fueled by ego of, and misconceptions held by, both men. In the police academy, we spend hours and hours learning how to fire a gun and then have to go back to the gun range on a regular basis, but not one class or even one hour is spent crafting the best way to talk with citizens. A famous criminologist (Muir) in his studies of American police used the phrase “Streetcorner” Politician to describe the uniformed police officer. What comes to mind of …

Yes Virginia, There Is A Police Code Of Silence: Prosecuting Police Officers And The Police Subculture, Christopher C. Cooper

Christopher C. Cooper Dr.

Successfully prosecuting police officers for police malfeasance represents formidable challenges. These challenges are not impenetrable. Prosecutor attention to the secrets of the Code of Silence, many of which are on public display, thanks to generous leaks, is an absolute necessity. This author has encountered and interacted with prosecutors as a Police Officer (in particular as a policeman in Washington D.C. [Metropolitan Police]) and as a Plaintiff’s attorney. The one thing that he noticed as a cop and continues to notice (now as a practicing civil rights attorney) about attorneys who defend or prosecute police officers is that most attorneys have …

Race In The War On Drugs: The Social Consequences Of Presidential Rhetoric, Jeff L. Yates, Andrew Whitford

Jeff L Yates

One of the president’s main leadership tools for influencing the direction of American legal policy is public rhetoric. Numerous studies have examined the president’s use of the “bully pulpit” to lead policy by influencing Congress or public opinion, or by changing the behavior of public agencies. We argue that the president can use rhetoric to change the behavior of public agencies and that this can have important social consequences. We focus on the disproportionate impact of presidential rhetoric on different “target populations” in the context of the War on Drugs. Specifically, we observe that presidential rhetoric had a greater impact …

When Is Police Violence Justified?, Rachel A. Harmon

Rachel A. Harmon

The Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment doctrine regulating police violence, including its recent decision in Scott v. Harris, is unprincipled and indeterminate. The common law of justification defenses, by contrast, pro-vides a well-established legal structure for determining when one person may justly use force against another. In this Article, I argue that this struc-ture should be imported and adapted to the constitutional doctrine govern-ing police uses of force. Following the structure of justification defenses, I contend first that police uses of force can be constitutionally justified only if they are in pursuit of legitimate state interests. In particular, police uses of …

Wrongly Accused Redux: How Race Contributes To Convicting The Innocent: The Informants Example, Andrew E. Taslitz

Andrew E. Taslitz

This article analyzes five forces that may raise the risk of convicting the innocent based upon the suspect's race: the selection, ratchet, procedural justice, bystanders, and aggressive-suspicion effects. In other words, subconscious forces press police to focus more attention on racial minorites, the ratchet makes this focus every-increasing, the resulting sense by the community of unfair treatment raises its involvment in crime while lowering its willingness to aid the police in resisting crime, innocent persons suffer when their skin color becomes associated with criminality, and the police use more aggressive techniques on racial minorities in a way that raises the …

Ruling Out The Rule Of Law, Kim Forde-Mazrui

Kim Forde-Mazrui

Although criminal justice scholars continue to debate the overall value of the void-for-vagueness doctrine, broad consensus prevails that requiring crimes to be defined in specific terms reduces law enforcement discretion. A few scholars have questioned this assumption, but the conventional view remains dominant. This Article intends to resolve the question whether the void-for-vagueness doctrine really reduces police discretion. It focuses on traffic enforcement, a context in which laws are both specific and subject to discretionary enforcement. The Article concludes that specific rules do not constrain discretion unless judicial limits are placed either on the scope of activities that may be …

A Report On The Working Of The Writ Of Habeas Corpus In Kashmir: 1990 – 2005 (Chapter-Iv, The Petitions), Ashok Agrwaal

Ashok Agrwaal

This report is the first part of a two part study on the functioning of the constitutional and legal redress mechanism for the protection of the most basic of rights, the right to life and liberty, during the period of insurgency in Kashmir: 1990 to 2003. The report is pivoted around a study of petitions for a writ of habeas corpus, filed by the families of the affected persons. All these persons were subjected to illegal arrest (and unacknowledged) arrest and detention by the security forces in Kashmir. Most of them were never seen again. For comparison, we have also …

Mediation In Black And White: Unequal Distribution Of Empowerment By Police, Christopher C. Cooper

Christopher C. Cooper Dr.

Mediation in Black & White: Unequal Distribution of Empowerment by Police. On calls-for-service involving an interpersonal disputes, patrol Police officers either arbitrate the matter (e.g., authoritarian directives or arrest) or empower disputing parties to reach a collective resolutiuon; however whether the latter is availabe to disputing parties depends on their race.