Digital Commons Network^™

Strengths, Limitations, And Controversies Of Dna Evidence, Naseam Rachel Behrouzfard

University of Massachusetts Law Review

This article explores the benefits of DNA evidence as well as the evidentiary problems associated with DNA. Part II discusses the history, development, and the emergence of DNA in the criminal justice system. Part III analyzes the significance of DNA evidence and its impact on recent cases. Part IV describes the disadvantages of DNA evidence in terms of efficiency, risks, human error, and its impact on jurors.

Architects Of Justice: The Prosecutor’S Role And Resolving Whether Inadmissible Evidence Is Material Under The Brady Rule, Blaise Niosi

Fordham Law Review

In Brady v. Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the prosecution has a constitutional duty to disclose evidence favorable to the defendant’s guilt or punishment upon request. The Court’s subsequent expansion of its holding in Brady has formed the “Brady rule,” which requires the prosecution to learn of and to disclose to the defendant all material exculpatory and impeachment information. The Court defined “material” as information that would cause a reasonable probability of a different trial outcome had it been disclosed.

Currently, a circuit court split exists regarding whether evidence is material for purposes of the Brady …

The Case For Ehearsay, Jeffrey Bellin

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Court As Gatekeeper: Preventing Unreliable Pretrial Ediscovery From Jeopardizing A Reliable Fact-Finding Process, Daniel K. Gelb

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Evidence Of Lies And Rules Of Evidence: The Admissibility Of Fmri-Based Expert Opinion Of Witness Truthfulness, William A. Woodruff

William A. Woodruff

No abstract provided.

Trending@Rwulaw: Professor Larry Ritchie's Post: Representing The Indigent, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Gay Panic And The Case For Gay Shield Laws, Kelly Strader, Molly Selvin, Lindsey Hay

Kelly Strader

In a highly publicized “gay panic” case, Brandon McInerney shot and killed Larry King in their middle school classroom. King was a self-identified gay student who sometimes wore jewelry and makeup to school and, according to those who knew him, was possibly transgender. Tried as an adult for first-degree murder, McInerney asserted a heat of passion defense based upon King’s alleged sexual advances. The jury deadlocked, with a majority accepting McInerney’s defense. Drawing largely upon qualitative empirical research, this article uses the Larry King murder case as a prism though which to view the doctrinal, theoretical, and policy bases of …

After Shelby County: Getting Section 2 Of The Vra To Do The Work Of Section 5, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Douglas M. Spencer

Christopher S. Elmendorf

Until the Supreme Court put an end to it in Shelby County v. Holder, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was widely regarded as an effective, low-cost tool for blocking potentially discriminatory changes to election laws and administrative practices. The provision the Supreme Court left standing, Section 2, is generally seen as expensive, cumbersome and almost wholly ineffective at blocking changes before they take effect. This paper argues that the courts, in partnership with the Department of Justice, could reform Section 2 so that it fills much of the gap left by the Supreme Court’s evisceration of Section …

Death By Daubert: The Continued Attack On Private Antitrust, Christine P. Bartholomew

Journal Articles

In 2011, with five words of dicta, the Supreme Court opened Pandora’s box for private antitrust enforcement. By suggesting trial courts must evaluate the admissibility of expert testimony at class certification, the Court placed a significant obstacle in the path of antitrust class actions. Following the Supreme Court’s lead, most courts now permit parties to bring expert challenges far earlier than the traditional summary judgment or pretrial timing. Premature rejection of expert testimony dooms budding private antitrust suits — cases that play an essential role in modern antitrust enforcement. The dangers for private antitrust plaintiffs are compounded by the Court’s …

The Wire As A Gap-Filling Class On Criminal Law And Procedure, Adam M. Gershowitz

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Teaching “The Wire”: Crime, Evidence, And Kids, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

I have a confession: I have only watched Season 1 of The Wire, and it has been many years since I did that. Thus, both my knowledge and pedagogical use of the show are limited. What explanation can I offer for my failings? I am a Maryland native with family who resides in Baltimore City, or Charm City as it is affectionately called. I worked for several years as an assistant federal public defender in Baltimore City. Over time, I have seen the city evolve, and I have seen it chew up and spit out many good people and some …

The Experiential Sabbatical, Martin H. Pritikin

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Wire: Crime, Evidence And Kids, Andrea L. Dennis

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Teaching Fiction?: The Wire As A Pedagological Tool In The Examination Of Punishment Theory, Kristin Henning

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Evidence-Based Practice Attitudes, Knowledge And Perceptions Of Barriers Among Juvenile Justice Professionals, Esther Chao Mckee

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This mixed methods study examined the attitudes, knowledge and perceptions of barriers toward Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) among Florida Juvenile Justice Service Professionals (JJSP). Previous research established individual factors such as age, gender, years of professional experience and educational attainment are related to attitudes and perceptions of barriers among social service and mental health professionals, but scant research has been conducted among juvenile justice providers (Aarons 2004, 2010; Rubin & Parrish, 2007, 2012; Jette et al., 2003). Most individual factors were found to have no significant effect on attitude and knowledge scores within this population with exception of gender and major …

"To Corral And Control The Ghetto": Stop, Frisk, And The Geography Of Freedom, Anders Walker

University of Richmond Law Review

While criminal law scholar Michelle Alexander has shown that stop and frisks often serve as the gateway into the criminal justice system for young men of color, she occludes the complex forces that led to their rise." This article seeks to identify those forces, relating the rise of stop and frisk rules to liberal politics, Cold War concerns, and spatial dynamics. To illustrate, this article will proceed in three parts. Part I will demonstrate how Mapp v. Ohio coincided with judicial frustration at police intrusions into private, intimate space-including private thought-precisely at a time when the United States sought to …

Federal Rules Of Evidence 413, 414, And 415: Fifteen Years Of Hindsight And Where The Law Should Go From Here, Bryan C. Hathorn

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

In 1995, Congress added three rules, which governed the admissibility of "prior sexual misconduct" in federal trials, to the Federal Rules of Evidence. The procedure by which Congress added the rules was outside of the normal procedure for the creation of federal rules, it was highly controversial, and it was done over the objections of the judicial conference. The controversy surrounding the rules produced a flurry of scholarship on the rules, which continued for about five years. After this initial period, the storm quieted with a reduced amount of scholarship on the subject. It is now fifteen years since the …

Post-Conviction Access To A State's Forensic Dna Evidence For Probative Testing: Not A Freestanding Constitutional Right, Dorothea Thompson

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

In District Attorney's Office v. Osborne, the United States Supreme Court addressed the central issue of whether Respondent William Osborne should have a "freestanding and far-reaching constitutional right of access" to the State's deoxyribonucleic acid ("DNA") evidence for the purpose of post-conviction relief. Osborne asserted this constitutional right of access under the federal civil rights statute, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, rather than proceeding through a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2254. The United States District Court for the District of Alaska initially dismissed the respondent's claims, holding that an application for habeas corpus constituted the proper mechanism …

Evidence And The Pursuit Of Truth In The Law, Jeffery L. Johnson

Jeffery L Johnson

Lawyers should be much more concerned with the concepts of truth and evidence. The entire profession depends on truth. It is what police detectives, District Attorneys, juries, trial judges, appellate judges, and academic lawyers offering interpretive theories, are all concerned with. But, since truth is seldom apparent on its sleeve, these legal actors are equally dependent on evidence as the only(?) reliable(?) means of determining truth. I defend a commonsensical theory of [good] evidence. I argue that this view, inference to the best explanation, captures most, if not all, of a lawyer’s appeal to evidence. It is far from clear, …

Rationality, Insanity, And The Insanity Defense: Reflections On The Limits Of Reason, Theodore Y. Blumoff

Theodore Y. Blumoff

Individuals who suffer from chronic paranoid ideations live with deeply embedded conspiratorial delusions that are sometimes accompanied by unwanted visual and/or auditory stimuli, sometime neither: just psychotic delusions in which they feel as if they have lost control of their lives – and of course they have, albeit not from the performances of foreign forces. When those perceived forces persevere for even a fairly short period of time, they can dictate the performance of evil deeds that the individual ultimately feels helpless to oppose. What observations and findings from neuroscience make clear is that such individuals do not lack knowledge, …

Forensic Science(S) In The Courtroom: Symposium, Joseph R. Slights, Jules Epstein, Lisa M. Schwind, Gerard Spadaccini, Anjali A. Ranadive

Jules Epstein

No abstract provided.

Teaching “The Wire”: Crime, Evidence, And Kids, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

I have a confession: I have only watched Season 1 of The Wire, and it has been many years since I did that. Thus, both my knowledge and pedagogical use of the show are limited. What explanation can I offer for my failings? I am a Maryland native with family who resides in Baltimore City, or Charm City as it is affectionately called. I worked for several years as an assistant federal public defender in Baltimore City. Over time, I have seen the city evolve, and I have seen it chew up and spit out many good people and some …

The Impact Of Trial Evidence On Juror Decision-Making, Jeremy Shifton

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

It is widely accepted that a confession is one of the most incriminating piece of evidence that can be presented in a criminal case (Kassin & Neumann, 1997). However, little prior research has examined the impact of situational characteristics (e.g., length of interrogation, how recently suspect has slept, etc.) of the interrogation and resulting confession. While police tactics and personal characteristics are known to impact perceptions of the resulting confession, little is known about how aspects of an interrogation might impact the perceptions of jurors. In three studies, this dissertation seeks to determine how mock jurors' perceptions of evidence strength …

Law And Neuroscience: Recommendations Submitted To The President's Bioethics Commission, Owen D. Jones, Richard J. Bonnie, B. J. Casey, Andre Davis, David L. Faigman, Morris Hoffman, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer A. Richeson, Elizabeth Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Anthony Wagner, Gideon Yaffe

All Faculty Scholarship

President Obama charged the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to identify a set of core ethical standards in the neuroscience domain, including the appropriate use of neuroscience in the criminal-justice system. The Commission, in turn, called for comments and recommendations. The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience submitted a consensus statement, published here, containing 16 specific recommendations. These are organized within three main themes: 1) what steps should be taken to enhance the capacity of the criminal justice system to make sound decisions regarding the admissibility and weight of neuroscientific evidence?; 2) to what extent …

Reading Transcripts, Stephen A. Saltzburg

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article examines the reading of transcribed chat-room conversations to jurors in United States v. Tragas, 727 F.3d 610 (6th Cir. 2013), and whether some reading approaches utilized by the prosecutor were impermissible theatrical performance, improper summary, or improper vouching.

Law And Neuroscience: Recommendations Submitted To The President's Bioethics Commission, Owen D. Jones, Richard J. Bonnie, Bj Casey, Andre Davis, David L. Faigman, Morris B. Hoffman, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer A. Richeson, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Anthony Wagner, Gideon Yaffe

Faculty Scholarship

It has become increasingly clear that implications for criminal justice – both negative and positive – emerge from the rapid, important, and challenging developments in cognitive neuroscience, the study of how the brain thinks. Two examples will illustrate.

First, lawyers are ever more frequently bringing neuroscientific evidence into the courtroom, often in the forms of testimony about, and graphic images of, human brains. This trend has produced many new challenges for judges as they attempt to provide fair rulings on the admissibility of such technical evidence, consider its proper interpretation, and assess whether the probative value of such testimony may …

The Exclusionary Rule As A Symbol Of The Rule Of Law, Jenia I. Turner

SMU Law Review

Throughout South America, Southern and Eastern Europe, and East Asia, more than two dozen countries have transitioned to democracy since the 1980s. A remarkable number of these have adopted an exclusionary rule (mandating that evidence obtained unlawfully by the government is generally inadmissible in criminal trials) as part of broader legal reforms. Democratizing countries have adopted exclusionary rules even though they are not required to do so by any international treaty and there is no indication that there is widespread popular demand for such rules. This has occurred at a time when the rule has been weakened in the United …

The Exclusion Of Improperly Obtained Evidence At The International Criminal Court: A Principled Approach To Interpreting Article 69(7) Of The Rome Statute, Michael Madden

LLM Theses

This thesis examines article 69(7) of the Rome Statute, which creates an exclusionary rule for improperly obtained evidence at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Ultimately, the thesis proposes how the ICC should interpret its exclusionary rule. The thesis discusses the theory underlying exclusionary rules, the evidence law and remedial law contexts within which exclusionary rules operate, and numerous comparative examples of exclusionary doctrine from within national criminal justice systems. Finally, some unique aspects of international criminal procedure are described in order to demonstrate how an international exclusionary rule might need to differ from a domestic rule, and previous jurisprudence relating …