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Prolegomenon On The Status Of The Hopey, Changey Thing In American Criminal Justice, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Prolegomenon On The Status Of The Hopey, Changey Thing In American Criminal Justice, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Faculty Publications
This is an introductory essay to Volume 23, Number 2, of the FEDERAL SENTENCING REPORTER, which considers the state of American criminal justice policy in 2010, two years after the "Change" election of 2008. Part I of the essay paints a statistical picture of trends in federal criminal practice and sentencing over the last half-decade or so, with particular emphasis on sentence severity and the degree of regional and inter-judge sentencing disparity. The statistics suggest that the expectation that the 2005 Booker decision would produce a substantial increase in the exercise of judicial sentencing discretion and a progressive abandonment of …
Debacle: How The Supreme Court Has Mangled American Sentencing Law And How It Might Yet Be Mended, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Debacle: How The Supreme Court Has Mangled American Sentencing Law And How It Might Yet Be Mended, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Faculty Publications
This Article argues that the line of Supreme Court Sixth Amendment jury right cases that began with McMillan v. Pennsylvania in 1986, crescendoed in Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker in 2004-2005, and continued in 2009 in cases such as Oregon v. Ice, has been a colossal judicial failure. First, the Court has failed to provide a logically coherent, constitutionally based answer to the fundamental question of what limits the Constitution places on the roles played by the institutional actors in the criminal justice system. It failed to recognize that defining, adjudicating and punishing crimes implicates both the …
Coconspirators, “Coventurers,” And The Exception Swallowing The Hearsay Rule, Ben L. Trachtenberg
Coconspirators, “Coventurers,” And The Exception Swallowing The Hearsay Rule, Ben L. Trachtenberg
Faculty Publications
In recent years, prosecutors - sometimes with the blessing of courts - have argued that when proving the existence of a “conspiracy” to justify admission of evidence under the Coconspirator Exception to the Hearsay Rule, they need show only that the declarant and the defendant were “coventurers” with a common purpose, not coconspirators with an illegal purpose. Indeed, government briefs and court decisions specifically disclaim the need to show any wrongful goal whatsoever. This Article contends that such a reading of the Exception is mistaken and undesirable. Conducted for this article, a survey of thousands of court decisions, including the …