Law Commons^™

The Miranda Case Fifty Years Later, Yale Kamisar

Articles

A decade after the Supreme Court decided Miranda v. Arizona, Geoffrey Stone took a close look at the eleven decisions the Court had handed down “concerning the scope and application of Miranda.” As Stone observed, “[i]n ten of these cases, the Court interpreted Miranda so as not to exclude the challenged evidence.” In the eleventh case, the Court excluded the evidence on other grounds. Thus, Stone noted, ten years after the Court decided the case, “the Court ha[d] not held a single item of evidence inadmissible on the authority of Miranda.” Not a single item. To use …

Disentangling Miranda And Massiah: How To Revive The Sixth Amendment Right To Counsel As A Tool For Regulating Confession Law, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

Fifty years after Miranda v. Arizona, many have lamented the ways in which the Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts Courts have cut back on Miranda's protections. One underappreciated a spect of Miranda's demise is the way it has affected the development of the pretrial Sixth Amendment right to counsel guaranteed by Massiah v. United States. Much of the case law diluting suspects' Fifth Amendment Miranda rights has bled over into the Sixth Amendment right to counsel cases without consideration of whether the animating purposes of the Massiah pretrial right to counsel would support such an importation. This development is unfortunate …

Conviction Integrity Units Revisited, Barry Scheck

Articles

“Conviction Integrity Unit” has become a brand name that has good public relations value for an elected official. But what does it really mean? Is it just a fashion accessory, a flashy but empty appellation intended to convey the idea that the office is extremely serious about correcting wrongful convictions and holding its own members accountable for errors or acts of misconduct, but really is not? Is conviction integrity nothing more than a passing fad, a nebulous slogan without real meaning that is good for propaganda purposes, but will not bring about any serious change in the way business is …

On Competence: (Re)Considering Appropriate Legal Standards For Examining Sixth Amendment Claims Related To Criminal Defendants’ Mental Illness And Disability, Sarah Gerwig-Moore

Articles

This Article addresses the questions of attorney error and client competency and examines the following issues: the origin and development of the legal tests for intellectual competency to stand trial or enter a plea and the tests for evaluating Sixth Amendment effective assistance of counsel claims; the range of state and federal approaches to circumstances when those two situations converge; and whether and how our legal tests should be shaped to best assess attorney error when the client likely has an intellectual disability or incompetence. When consideration of a defendant's mental illness or mental disability forms the basis of a …

Firepower To The People: Gun Rights & Self-Defense To Curb Police Misconduct, Spearit

Articles

This Article represents a polemic against the most harmful aspects of the policing status quo. At its core, the work asserts the right of civilians to defend against unlawful deadly police conduct. It argues that existing gun and self-defense laws provide a practical and principled basis for curbing police misconduct. It also examines legislative trends in gun laws to show that much of most recent liberalizing of gun rights is a direct response to self-defense concerns sparked by mass public shootings. The expansion of gun rights and self-defense comes at a time when ongoing police killings of Black civilians menace …

Justice Visualized: Courts And The Body Camera Revolution, Mary D. Fan

Articles

What really happened? For centuries, courts have been magisterially blind, cloistered far away from the contested events that they adjudicate, relying primarily on testimony to get the story—or competing stories. Whether oral or written, this testimony is profoundly human, with all the passions, partisanship and imperfections of human perception.

Now a revolution is coming. Across the nation, police departments are deploying body cameras. Analyzing body camera policies from police departments across the nation, the article reveals an unfolding future where much of the main staple events of criminal procedure law will be recorded. Much of the current focus is on …