Law Commons^™

Watts: The Decline Of The Jury, William T. Pizzi

Publications

No abstract provided.

What's Guilt (Or Deterrence) Got To Do With It?: The Death Penalty, Ritual, And Mimetic Violence, 38 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 487 (1997), Donald L. Beschle

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Whoever Fights Monsters Should See To It That In The Process He Does Not Become A Monster: Hunting The Sexual Predator With Silver Bullets -- Federal Rules Of Evidence 413-415 -- And A Stake Through The Heart -- Kansas V. Hendricks, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Race And Criminal Justice, Richard B. Collins

Publications

No abstract provided.

Sistema Da Justiça Criminal Nos Estados Unidos Da América Uma Visāo Resumida, Paul Marcus

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Disparate Effects In The Criminal Justice System: A Response To Randall Kennedy's Comment, Janai S. Nelson

Faculty Publications

For many African Americans, the criminal justice system symbolizes an oppressive force, and yet, is a necessary institution in an increasingly lawless society. African Americans are at the same time its victims and beneficiaries, although various sentiments exist regarding the extent to which they are either. It is precisely this paradox, coupled with the promulgation of certain criminal legislation and legal precedent which directly and, potentially, adversely affect the African-American community that inspired the author to address the issues and arguments raised in Randall Kennedy's The State, Criminal Law, and Racial Discrimination: A Comment, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 1255 (1994), …

The Failure Of The Criminal Procedure Revolution: A Response, Craig M. Bradley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The In/Into Controversy: Lubet Misses The Point, J. Alexander Tanford

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Representing Black Male Innocence, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

This Article is a case study of a California capital case. Drawing on cultural studies, the first part develops the social construction of Black male gang member, especially as that identity is understood within white imaginations. The powerful and frightening idea of a Black man who is a gang member, even gang leader, captured the imagination and moral passion of the decisionmakers in this case, recasting and reframing the evidence in furtherance of this idea. In fundamental ways, this idea or imposed identity is fundamentally inconsistent with any American concept of innocence.

The second part uses the case to investigate …

The Jury As Critic: An Empirical Look At How Capital Juries Perceive Expert And Lay Testimony, Scott E. Sundby

Articles

No abstract provided.

Getting To Death: Are Executions Constitutional?, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses the question of when a method of executing a capital defendant amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. This Article contends that execution methods cases, while reaching the right result, fail to provide a sufficiently comprehensive Eighth Amendment standard for determining the constitutionality of any execution method. The Article proposes a test that better comports with the Court's Eighth Amendment case law and more appropriately considers scientific determinations of excessive pain. To apply this test, the Article studies each state's legislative changes in execution methods during the Twentieth Century as well as accounts of …

Concepts Of Culpability And Deathworthiness: Differentiating Between Guilt And Punishment In Death Penalty Cases, Phyllis L. Crocker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The punishment of death is supposed to be reserved for those defendants who commit the most grievous murders and deserve the most extreme punishment. It is constitutionally insufficient to conclude that because a defendant is guilty of committing murder, death is the only deserved punishment. The judgment that a defendant is one of the few who will be sentenced to death requires an inquiry that looks beyond the defendant's guilt to consider whether the defendant is worthy of a death sentence. This article argues that the distinction between a defendant's guilt and deathworthiness is so often obscured that defendants who …

Does Privacy Really Have A Problem In The Law Of Criminal Procedure?, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

Agreeing with William Stuntz's conclusion that privacy retains a significant position in the law of criminal procedure, the author defends a privacy-oriented procedural regime that can .be reconciled with an activist regulatory state. Part One of this Article suggests that the comparatively light judicial supervision of police coercion owes more to the conditions under which force is used than to what Stuntz views as the Court's indifference to what police do to us, or to its "obsession" over what police can see and hear. By redescribing questions of privacy, or questions of privacy and coercion, merely as questions of coercion, …

The Jury As Catalyst For The Reform Of Criminal Evidentiary Procedure In Continental Europe: The Cases Of Russia And Spain, Stephen C. Thaman

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper focuses on the dialectic between the search for truth, adversarial procedure, and lay participation in the preparation, presentation, and evaluation of evidence in criminal trials. Its primary focus is on the reintroduction of trial by jury in two classic inquisitorial criminal justice systems, Russia (1993) and Spain (1995), as a catalyst in those countries’ move to adversary procedure. It focuses on the effect of the jury system on preparing evidence for trial, the presentation of evidence at trial, and the evaluation of evidence.

Waiting For The Verdict On Spain's New Jury System, Stephen C. Thaman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses Spain’s history of trial by jury, focusing on the reinstatement of trial by jury in Spain by the 1995 jury legislation implementing Article 125 of the post-Franco Spanish Constitution. It discusses key provisions of the new Spanish jury law with illustrations from the cases of Otegi and others. It also predicts as to whether the classic jury will acquit itself as a catalyst for criminal justice reform in a Civil Law system such as that of Spain.

Guest Editor's Observations: Back To Basics: Helping The Commission Solve The "Loss" Mess With Old Familiar Tools, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

Roughly one-quarter of all convicted federal defendants are sentenced for some kind of economic crime.1 There is an emerging consensus that the provisions of the federal sentencing guidelines devoted to economic crime do not work very well, a consensus that has created a powerful momentum for significant change. This Issue of FSR is about whether the guidelines concerning economic offenses, principally §2B1.1 (Theft) and §2F1.1 (Fraud), should be materially altered, and if so, how. The debate that has been joined over this question is technically complex and philosophically challenging. There are disagreements over issues as particular as when collateral posted …

Appendix To Guest Editor's Observations: A Proposal For A Consolidated Theft/Fraud Guideline, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

Professor Frank Bowman proposed the following consolidated theft/fraud guideline to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in October 1997. The proposal is explained in detail in a forthcoming law review article, Coping With Loss”: A Re-Examination of Federal Economic Crime Sentencing Under the Guidelines, 51 Vanderbilt L. Rev. -- (April 1998).

Making Constitutional Doctrine In A Realist Age, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article the author considers three examples of modern constitutional doctrine that show how judges have stolen bits and pieces from popularized skepticisms about the job of judging and have molded this stolen rhetoric into doctrine. In the first example, she asks whether constitutional law's recent penchant for doctrinal rules based on "clear law" could have existed without the modern age's obsession with legal uncertainty. In the second, the author considers whether our contemporary rhetoric of constitutional "interests" and "expectations" reflects modern critiques of doctrine as failing to address social needs. In the third, she asks how an offhand …

Confrontation And The Definition Of Chutzpa, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

You may know the standard illustration of chutzpa - the man who kills both his parents and then begs the sentencing court to have mercy on an orphan. In this article, I discuss a case of chutzpa that is nearly as outlandish - the criminal defendant who, having rendered his victim unavailable to testify, contends that evidence of the victim's statement should not be admitted against him because to do so would violate his right to confront her. I contend that in a case like this the defendant should be deemed to have forfeited the confrontation right. On the same …

The Role Of Criminal Law In Policing Corporate Misconduct, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

In the early 1990s, I spent a couple of years as Chief of the Criminal Division in the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. One of my principal responsibilities was to hear "appeals" from defense lawyers, usually, although not exclusively, in white collar crime cases. These lawyers felt that their clients should not be indicted, or that the plea offer they had received from the prosecutor in charge of the case was unduly severe. Sometimes their arguments were essentially factual contentions that the government had the wrong take on the evidence – that the …

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied: May A Prisoner's Challenge To Parole Revocation Be Delayed Until The Sentence Is Completed And Then Dismissed As Moot?, Jimmy Gurule

Journal Articles

A preview of Spencer v. Kemna, a 1997 Supreme Court case where a prison inmate challenged the revocation of his parole by the state of Missouri. This case is significant because the inmate initiated his challenge while in prison and continued it after he had served his sentence and was released. Substantial confusion exists in case law regarding whether such a challenge would be considered moot after the inmate had completed serving his or her sentence. At issue is if the “collateral consequences” rule applies to challenges against parole revocations. The Court has ruled that challenges by individuals against their …

Innocence, Privacy, And Targeting In Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"As The Gentle Rain From Heaven": Mercy In Capital Sentencing, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Our constitutional law of capital sentencing does not understand Shakespeare's "gentle rain from heaven." Mercy confuses and befuddles it. The jury that sentenced Albert Brown to death was instructed that "'mere ... sympathy"' should not play on its judgment. Brown claimed this instruction violated his Eighth Amendment rights, but the Supreme Court disagreed. Some five years later, Justice Scalia dissented when the Court reversed Derrick Morgan's death sentence. According to Justice Scalia, the Court had held that no "merciless" juror could sit in judgment of a capital defendant. The Constitution, he thought, demanded no such thing. These dissents, one embracing …

The Color Of Truth: Race And The Assessment Of Credibility, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Probation Officers Look At Plea Bargaining, And Do Not Like What They See, David Yellen

Articles

The Probation Officers Advisory Group's survey provides valuable insights into plea bargaining practices under the federal guidelines. Probation officers play a crucial role in guideline sentencing, and their views on the plea bargaining process are significant both because of their proximity to that process and the influence they wield with judges. The survey responses thus deserve attention and may spark lively debate within the Sentencing Commission and elsewhere. Depending on one's perspective, the picture that emerges is of plea bargaining either as a safety valve to mitigate the harshness and rigidity of the guidelines, or an unregulated process that threatens …

Resistance To Equality, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Jury Responsibility In Capital Sentencing: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The law allows executioners to deny responsibility for what they have done by making it possible for them to believe they have not done it. The law treats members of capital sentencing juries quite differently. It seeks to ensure that they feel responsible for sentencing a defendant to death. This differential treatment rests on a presumed link between a capital sentencer's willingness to accept responsibility for the sentence she imposes and the accuracy and reliability of that sentence. Using interviews of 153 jurors who sat in South Carolina capital cases, this article examines empirically whether capital sentencing jurors assume responsibility …

To Tell The Truth: The Problem Of Prosecutorial "Manipulation" Of Sentencing Facts, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

Frank O. Bowman, III*In January of this year, Francesca Bowman, Chair of Probation Officers Advisory Group, sent a letter to Judge Richard P. Conaboy, Chairman of the Sentencing Commission, summarizing the results of a survey sent to probation officers in eighty-five districts. It expresses the concern that, in the view of some probation officers, the government usually” is cooperative in supplying information to probation officers preparing presentence investigation reports, but that there appear to be exceptions when the government wants to protect a plea agreement.”

A Bludgeon By Any Other Name: The Misuse Of Ethical Rules Against Prosecutors To Control The Law Of The State, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

My objective here is threefold: (1) to explain these ethical rules and demonstrate how each is in conflict with longstanding principles of federal criminal law; (2) to explain why these rules are illegitimate, both as rules of ethics and as rules of positive law; and (3) to offer some observations on how the dispute over these rules can sharpen our thinking about the nature and proper limits of ethical rules governing lawyers.

Consistently Inconsistent: The Supreme Court And The Confusion Surrounding Proportionality In Non-Capital Sentencing, Steven P. Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

(Adapted by permission from 84 Ky. L. J. 107 (1995)) This article examines the Supreme Court's treatment of the Eighth Amendment with respect to claims of excessiveness regarding prison sentences. Specifically, it addresses the issue of whether and to what degree the Eighth Amendment requires that a punishment not be disproportional to the crime punished. In analyzing all of the modern holdings of the Court in this area, one finds significant fault with each. The result of this series of flawed opinions from the Supreme Court is that the state of the law with respect to proportionality in sentencing is …