Law Commons^™

The Qualitative Dimension Of Fourth Amendment "Reasonableness", Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Supreme Court doctrine protects two seemingly distinct kinds of interests under the heading of privacy rights: one "substantive," the other "procedural." The Fourth Amendment guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures" has been generally interpreted to protect procedural privacy. Searches are typically defined as governmental inspections of activities and locations in which an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy from observation. In the typical case, this reasonable expectation of privacy may be breached only where the government has acquired a quantitatively substantial objective basis for believing that the search would uncover evidence of a crime. Substantive privacy rights have not …

Aggravation And Mitigation In Capital Cases: What Do Jurors Think?, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Capital Jury Project in South Carolina interviewed jurors who sat in forty-one capital murder cases. The Project asked jurors a range of questions relating to crime, the defendant, the victim, the victim's family, the jurors' deliberations, the conduct of counsel, and background characteristics of the jurors. In this essay, Professor Stephen P. Garvey presents and examines data from the Project relating to the importance jurors attach to various aggravating and mitigating factors. The results suggest that jurors have a discernible moral compass. According to the data, jurors found especially brutal killings, killings with child victims, future dangerousness, and lack …

Death By Default: State Procedural Default Doctrine In Capital Cases, John H. Blume, Pamela A. Wilkins

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Before 1991, South Carolina capital defendants benefitted from lenient policies of error preservation. However, in 1991 the South Carolina Supreme Court put an end to these policies and began enforcing default rules that are more draconian than those of any other American jurisdiction with a death penalty. Furthermore, the South Carolina Supreme Court’s decisions have made it difficult for trial practitioners to discern the rules under which they must operate. Taken in combination, the strictness of the new procedural policy, the lack of clarity regarding the applicable rules, and the South Carolina Supreme Court’s often ad hoc approach to enforcing …

Post-Mccleskey Racial Discrimination Claims In Capital Cases, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In federal habeas corpus proceedings, Earl Matthews, an African American, South Carolina death row inmate, alleged that his death sentence was the result of invidious racial discrimination that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. To support his contention, Matthews presented statistical evidence showing that in Charleston County, where a jury convicted him and sentenced him to death, the prosecutor was far more likely to seek a death sentence for a Black defendant accused of killing a white person than for any other racial combination of victims and defendants, and also that such a Black defendant was more …

But Was He Sorry? The Role Of Remorse In Capital Sentencing, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What role does remorse really play in capital sentencing? We divide this basic question in two. First, what makes jurors come to believe a defendant is remorseful? Second, does a belief in the defendant's remorse affect the jury's final judgment of life or death? Here we present a systematic, empirical analysis that tries to answer these questions.

What makes jurors think a defendant is remorseful? Among other things, we find that the more jurors think that the crime is coldblooded, calculated, and depraved and that the defendant is dangerous, the less likely they are to think the defendant is remorseful. …

Can Shaming Punishments Educate?, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

So-called "shaming" penalties have received a fair amount of attention in the popular press and, thanks primarily to the work of Dan Kahan and Toni Massaro, in the legal literature as well. Unfortunately, the current debate focuses on "shame" as the main way to understand what these penalties are all about. I argue that at least some of these so-called shaming penalties are better understood as "educative" penalties. I develop this "educating model" and contrast it with the "shaming model." I also suggest that penalties fitting the educating model have more normative appeal than those fitting the shaming model.

Unconscious Racism And The Criminal Law, Sheri Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Batson Ethics For Prosecutors And Trial Court Judges, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Evidence: 1996-1997 Survey Of New York Law, Faust Rossi

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.