Law Commons^™

Regulating Interrogations And Excluding Confessions In The United States: Balancing Individual Rights And The Search For Truth, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Like other criminal justice systems, the U.S. system must balance, on the one hand, enforcing the criminal law and, on the other, protecting individual rights in the process. Reliable fact-finding is a prerequisite to the effective enforcement of criminal law and to just outcomes. Protection of individual rights often promotes reliable fact-finding, as when a ban on involuntary confessions prevents the introduction of unreliable testimony at trial. On occasion, however, the commitment to accurate fact-finding may conflict with individual rights in a particular case. One of the clearest examples of such a conflict occurs when a court must decide whether …

Evidence Laundering In A Post-Herring World, Kay L. Levine, Jenia I. Turner, Ronald F. Wright

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court’s decision in Herring v. United States authorizes police to defeat the Fourth Amendment’s protections through a process we call evidence laundering. Evidence laundering occurs when one police officer makes a constitutional mistake when gathering evidence and then passes that evidence along to a second officer, who develops it further and then delivers it to prosecutors for use in a criminal case. When courts admit the evidence based on the good faith of the second officer, the original constitutional taint disappears in the wash.

In the years since Herring was decided, courts have allowed evidence laundering in a …

Limits On The Search For Truth In Criminal Procedure: A Comparative View, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Across diverse legal traditions, the search for truth is a basic function of the criminal process. Uncovering the truth about the charged crime is regarded as an essential precondition to achieving justice, enforcing criminal law, and legitimating the verdict. Yet while truthseeking is a broadly accepted goal in the criminal process, no system seeks the truth at all costs. The search for truth must on occasion yield to considerations related to efficiency, democratic participation, and protection of individual rights.

Different jurisdictions around the world show different preferences with respect to the tradeoffs between these values and the search for truth …

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 …

Effective Remedies For Ineffective Assistance, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In two recent cases, Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper, the Supreme Court affirmed that criminal defendants have a right to competent counsel during plea bargaining. The Court also established that the injury caused by ineffective assistance is not mooted by the subsequent conviction of the defendant at trial. The cases were broadly celebrated for clarifying that the Sixth Amendment applies fully to plea bargaining — the standard process by which our justice system resolves criminal cases today.

The most significant and surprising part of Lafler, however, was the Court’s holding concerning remedies. The Court held that trial courts …