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Full-Text Articles in Law
J.D.B. V. North Carolina And The Reasonable Person, Christopher Jackson
J.D.B. V. North Carolina And The Reasonable Person, Christopher Jackson
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
This Term, the Supreme Court was presented with a prime opportunity to provide some much-needed clarification on a "backdrop" issue of law-one of many topics that arises in a variety of legal contexts, but is rarely analyzed on its own terms. In J.D.B. v. North Carolina, the Court considered whether age was a relevant factor in determining if a suspect is "in custody" for Miranda purposes, and thus must have her rights read to her before being questioned by the police. Miranda, like dozens of other areas of law, employs a reasonable person test on the custodial question: it asks …
Rodney King And The Decriminalization Of Police Brutality In America: Direct And Judicial Access To The Grand Jury As Remedies For Victims Of Police Brutality When The Prosecutor Declines To Prosecute, Peter L. Davis
Peter L. Davis
This Article begins with the premise that, despite political rhetoric and occasional prosecutions to the contrary, police brutality has been effectively decriminalized in this country. The Article adopts the Rodney King case as the paradigm for examining this phenomenon. Scrutinizing the culture and semantics of police brutality, the author concludes that a double standard of criminality exists in the United States, under which different rules apply to a police than to everyone else. This double standard is socially dysfunctional. Particularly among minorities, it leads to a sense of cynicism about our legal system that can result in civil disorder when …
Proposal To Reverse The View Of A Confession: From Key Evidence Requiring Corroboration To Corroboration For Key Evidence, Boaz Sangero, Mordechai Halpert
Proposal To Reverse The View Of A Confession: From Key Evidence Requiring Corroboration To Corroboration For Key Evidence, Boaz Sangero, Mordechai Halpert
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Both case law and legal literature have recognized that all, and not just clearly statistical, evidence is probabilistic. Therefore, we have much to learn from the laws of probability with regard to the evaluation of evidence in a criminal trial. The present Article focuses on the confession. First, we review legal and psychological literature and show that the probability of a false confession and, consequently, a wrongful conviction, is far from insignificant. In light of this, we warn against the cognitive illusion, stemming from the fallacy of the transposed conditional, which is liable to mislead the trier of fact in …
How United States V. Jones Can Restore Our Faith In The Fourth Amendment, Erica Goldberg
How United States V. Jones Can Restore Our Faith In The Fourth Amendment, Erica Goldberg
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
United States v. Jones, issued in January of this year, is a landmark case that has the potential to restore a property-based interpretation of the Fourth Amendment to prominence. In 1967, the Supreme Court abandoned its previous Fourth Amendment framework, which had viewed the prohibition on unreasonable searches in light of property and trespass laws, and replaced it with a rule protecting the public’s reasonable expectations of privacy. Although the Court may have intended this reasonable expectations test to provide more protection than a test rooted in property law, the new test in fact made the Justices’ subjective views about …
When The Child Abuser Has A Bible: Investigating Child Maltreatment Sanctioned Or Condoned By A Religious Leader, Basyle Tchividjian
When The Child Abuser Has A Bible: Investigating Child Maltreatment Sanctioned Or Condoned By A Religious Leader, Basyle Tchividjian
Basyle Tchividjian
In many cases of child sexual and physical abuse, perpetrators use religious or spiritual themes to justify their abuse of a child. Although no known religion in modern culture suggests that sexual abuse is condoned or taught as part of its tenets, some church leaders engage in conduct suggesting the child is equally, if not more to blame than the perpetrator, while also urging immediate reconciliation between the perpetrator and victim. In more than one case, pastors have asked children to confess their own “sins” in being sexually abused and have even required children to “confess” in front of an …
Pretrial Incentives, Post-Conviction Review, And Sorting Criminal Prosecutions By Guilt Or Innocence, Samuel R. Gross
Pretrial Incentives, Post-Conviction Review, And Sorting Criminal Prosecutions By Guilt Or Innocence, Samuel R. Gross
Articles
The fundamental problem with false convictions is that they are unobserved, and in general, unobservable. We don't spot them when they happen-if we did, they wouldn't happen-and in most cases we can't identify them after the fact. We have no general reliable test for innocence or guilt; if we did, we'd use it at trial. As result, we often say that we don't know for sure whether a convicted criminal defendant is innocent or guilty, or even that we can't know for sure. But this isn't exactly true-or rather, its truth depends on who we mean by "we."
Hanging On By A Thread: The Exclusionary Rule (Or What's Left Of It) Lives For Another Day, David A. Moran
Hanging On By A Thread: The Exclusionary Rule (Or What's Left Of It) Lives For Another Day, David A. Moran
Articles
Back when there was a Soviet Union, foreign intelligence officers would anxiously await the May Day parade in Moscow to see who would be standing next to the chairman of the Communist Party and who would be missing from the reviewing platform altogether. Since the Soviet government and the statecontrolled press published very little about what was really going on in the halls of state power, this was considered the most reliable way to determine who was in or out of favor and, by extension, how the domestic and foreign policies of the world's second most powerful country were likely …
Disentangling Administrative Searches, Eve Brensike Primus
Disentangling Administrative Searches, Eve Brensike Primus
Articles
Everyone who has been screened at an international border, scanned by an airport metal detector, or drug tested for public employment has been subjected to an administrative search. Since September 11th, the government has increasingly invoked the administrative search exception to justify more checkpoints, unprecedented subway searches, and extensive wiretaps. As science and technology advance, the frequency and scope of administrative searches will only expand. Formulating the boundaries and requirements of administrative search doctrine is therefore a matter of great importance. Yet the rules governing administrative searches are notoriously unclear. This Article seeks to refocus attention on administrative searches and …