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Full-Text Articles in Law
To Speak Or Not To Speak? Navigating The Treacherous Waters Of Parallel Investigations Following The Amendment Of Federal Rule Of Evidence 408, Mikah K. Story Thompson
To Speak Or Not To Speak? Navigating The Treacherous Waters Of Parallel Investigations Following The Amendment Of Federal Rule Of Evidence 408, Mikah K. Story Thompson
Mikah K. Story Thompson
This article is the first to explore the true impact of the recently amended Fed. R. Evid. 408 on parallel proceedings. Parallel proceedings exist where the government conducts both a civil and criminal investigation against a defendant for single instance of alleged misconduct. Prior to the rule’s amendment, a defendant facing parallel proceedings had the ability to negotiate settlement of the civil suit without fear that any incriminating statements made during settlement talks would later re-surface in the criminal case. However, the amendment to Rule 408 singles out defendants facing parallel proceedings by stating that the government may use any …
Miranda Is Not Enough: A New Justification For Demanding "Strong Corroboration" To A Confession, Boaz Sangero
Miranda Is Not Enough: A New Justification For Demanding "Strong Corroboration" To A Confession, Boaz Sangero
Prof. Boaz Sangero
Following research conducted in recent years—some of it regarding evidence obtained through DNA testing—no doubt remains that, in reality, innocent persons are convicted of crimes and that, in a significant number of these cases, wrongful convictions are solely based on the out-of-court confessions of accused persons obtained by police interrogators.This Article discusses existing law regarding confessions and convictions based on confessions. While this body of law deals in a relatively satisfactory manner with the fear that the confession is involuntary (primarily, through Miranda rules), unfortunately, it does not adequately address the serious fear of false confessions.The Article is designed to …
Fear And Loathing In Insanity Law: Explaining The Otherwise Inexplicable Clark V. Arizona, Susan Rozelle
Fear And Loathing In Insanity Law: Explaining The Otherwise Inexplicable Clark V. Arizona, Susan Rozelle
Seattle University
Eric Clark believed he was battling space aliens when he shot and killed Officer Jeffrey Moritz. Charged under a first-degree murder statute that requires knowledge the victim is a police officer, Clark should have been “not guilty” two ways: first, by reason of insanity, and second, because he did not satisfy the mens rea requirement. Instead, he was found guilty, and the United States Supreme Court’s decision upholding this result tortured insanity law jurisprudence. The only plausible explanation for the Court’s decision lies in society’s emotional reaction to mental illness. Fear and loathing have displaced not only care and compassion, …
Coporate America Fights Back: The Battle Over Waiver Of The Attorney-Client Privilege, Michael L. Seigel
Coporate America Fights Back: The Battle Over Waiver Of The Attorney-Client Privilege, Michael L. Seigel
Michael L Seigel
This article address a topic that is the subject of an on-going and heated contest between the business lobby and its lawyers, represented primarily by the American Bar Association, the Association of Corporate Counsel, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, on the one side, and the United States Department of Justice, on the other. The fight is over federal prosecutors’ escalating practice of requesting that corporations accused of criminal wrongdoing waive their attorney-client privilege as part of their cooperation with the government. The Department views privilege waiver as a legitimate and very important tool in its post-Enron battle …
Neuroimaging And The "Complexity" Of Capital Punishment, Orlando Carter Snead
Neuroimaging And The "Complexity" Of Capital Punishment, Orlando Carter Snead
O. Carter Snead
The growing use of brain imaging technology to explore the causes of morally, socially, and legally relevant behavior is the subject of much discussion and controversy in both scholarly and popular circles. From the efforts of cognitive neuroscientists in the courtroom and in the public square, the contours of a project to transform capital sentencing both in principle and practice have emerged. In the short term, such scientists seek to intervene in the process of capital sentencing by serving as mitigation experts for defendants, where they invoke neuroimaging research on the roots of criminal violence to support their arguments. Over …
The Individualization Fallacy In Forensic Science Evidence, Michael J. Saks, Jonathan J. Koehler
The Individualization Fallacy In Forensic Science Evidence, Michael J. Saks, Jonathan J. Koehler
Michael J Saks
Forensic scientists across a broad array of sub-specialties have long maintained that they can link an unknown mark (e.g., a partial fingerprint or tireprint) to a unique source. Yet no scientific basis exists for this assertion, which is sustained largely by faulty probabilistic intuition that equates infrequency with uniqueness. This article traces the origins of the individualization claim and explicates the various failed lines of evidence and argument offered in its support. We conclude with suggestions for how to improve the scientific basis of the forensic identification sciences.
Symposium Foreward: Daubert, Innocence, And The Future Of Forensic Science, Jane Moriarty
Symposium Foreward: Daubert, Innocence, And The Future Of Forensic Science, Jane Moriarty
Jane Campbell Moriarty
The years since Daubert have not been kind to those seeking to challenge prosecutorial expert evidence, as many of the Symposium authors recognize. After two decades of trying to convince courts that there is no empirical basis for handwriting identification testimony declaring a match between two samples, Michael Risinger claims to be packing his bags and leaving the island until there is a more conducive climate for examining the reliability problems.
If You (Re)Build It They Will Come: Contracts To Remake The Rules Of Litigation In Arbitration's Image, Henry S. Noyes
If You (Re)Build It They Will Come: Contracts To Remake The Rules Of Litigation In Arbitration's Image, Henry S. Noyes
Henry S. Noyes
The Supreme Court describes the right to trial by jury in a civil action as a "basic and fundamental" right that is "sacred to the citizen" and therefore "should be jealously guarded by the court." But parties to a contract may agree that, in the event a dispute arises, they waive their right to a jury. If this dispute resolution right - which is fundamental, constitutional, and set forth in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure - may be used as a bargaining chip, are there any limits on parties' ability to modify the rules of litigation in their ex …
Magistrates’ Examinations, Police Interrogations, And Miranda—Like Warnings In The Nineteenth Century, Wesley M. Oliver
Magistrates’ Examinations, Police Interrogations, And Miranda—Like Warnings In The Nineteenth Century, Wesley M. Oliver
Wesley M Oliver
The New York legislature in the early-nineteenth century began to require interrogators to warn suspects of their right to silence and counsel. The Warren Court, in Miranda v. Arizona, did not invent the language of the warnings; rather, it resurrected the warnings that were no longer given in New York after the latter half of the nineteenth century. The confessions rule, a judicially created rule of evidence much like the modern voluntariness rule, excluded many statements if any threat or inducement was made to the suspect. Courts in the early-nineteenth century, however, were willing to accept confessions notwithstanding an improper …
Why A Conviction Should Not Be Based On A Single Piece Of Evidence: A Proposal For Reform, Boaz Sangero, Mordechai Halpert
Why A Conviction Should Not Be Based On A Single Piece Of Evidence: A Proposal For Reform, Boaz Sangero, Mordechai Halpert
Prof. Boaz Sangero
This article illustrates a serious flaw in the conventional legal approach enabling a conviction based solely on one piece of evidence. This flaw derives from a cognitive illusion referred to as “the fallacy of the transposed conditional.” People might assume a low error rate in evidence only leads to a small percentage of wrongful convictions. We show that, counterintuitively, even a very low error rate might lead to a wrongful conviction in most cases where the conviction is based on a single piece of evidence. Case law has indicated some awareness of this fallacy, primarily when considering the random match …
A Liberal Challenge To Behavioral Economics: The Case Of Probability, Alex Stein
A Liberal Challenge To Behavioral Economics: The Case Of Probability, Alex Stein
Alex Stein
THE "BLUE CAB" EXPERIMENT: ARE LAY FACT-FINDERS "PROBABILISTICALLY CHALLENGED"? No, they are not. The experiment is methodologically deficient, as is the behavioral economics' assumption that one needs to conceptualize probabilities in the Pascalian way in order to be rational.
Mediating Rules In Criminal Law, Alex Stein, Richard A. Bierschbach
Mediating Rules In Criminal Law, Alex Stein, Richard A. Bierschbach
Alex Stein
This Article challenges the conventional divide between substantive criminal law theory, on the one hand, and evidence law, on the other, by exposing an important and unrecognized function of evidence rules in criminal law. Throughout the criminal law, special rules of evidence work to mediate conflicts between criminal law’s deterrence and retributivist goals. They do this by skewing errors in the actual application of the substantive criminal law to favor whichever theory has been disfavored by the substantive rule itself. The mediating potential of evidentiary rules is particularly strong in criminal law because the substantive law’s dominant animating theories—deterrence and …