Law Commons^™

Frankly, It's A Mess: Requiring Courts To Transparently "Redline" Affidavits In The Face Of Franks Challenges, Diana Bibb

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Part I provides a brief overview of the Fourth Amendment, probable cause, and the exclusionary rule. Part II discusses Franks v. Delaware, the development of the challenge’s framework, and subsequent expansions to the doctrine made by the lower courts. Next, Part III argues that, despite the aforementioned expansions, courts have consistently weakened Franks. Notably, the Supreme Court refuses to consider Franks issues, including the multitude of splits over which standard of review is applicable. Moreover, some circuits have developed their own minute rules that have chiseled away at the effectiveness of a Franks challenge. Part IV proposes that …

A Comparative Examination Of Police Interrogation Of Criminal Suspects In Australia, Canada, England And Wales, New Zealand, And The United States, Carol A. Brook, Bruno Fiannaca, David Harvey, Paul Marcus, Renee Pomerance, Paul Roberts

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The interrogation process is central to the investigation and resolution of criminal matters throughout the world. It is fundamental to a comprehensive understanding of comparative criminal procedure to study and appreciate the different approaches to the interrogation process in different nations. This Article developed through a series of conversations between six international criminal justice professionals— practicing attorneys, scholars, and judges—regarding the interrogation practices and rules in their respective countries. Providing a comparative look at this important area, this Article examines the applicable practices and procedures in the common law nations of Australia, Canada, England and Wales, New Zealand, and the …

Divided Court Issues Bright-Line Ruling On Fourth Amendment Seizures, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Case Preview: When Is A Fleeing Suspect “Seized”?, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable “searches” and “seizures.” On Wednesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral argument in Torres v. Madrid, a case that will provide important guidance on what constitutes a Fourth Amendment seizure. Here’s a rundown of the case starting with the relevant facts and procedural history, followed by a discussion of the legal issues and finally a couple of things to watch for at the argument.

Toolkit Or Tinderbox? When Legal Systems Interface Conflict, Christie S. Warren

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Second Guessing Double Jeopardy: The Stare Decisis Factors As Proxy Tools For Original Correctness, Justin W. Aimonetti

William & Mary Law Review Online

In Gamble v. United States, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the 170-year-old dual-sovereignty doctrine. That doctrine permits both the federal and state governments—as “separate sovereigns”—to each prosecute a defendant for the same offense. Justice Thomas concurred with the majority opinion in Gamble, but wrote separately to reject the traditional stare decisis formulation. In particular, the factors the majority used to evaluate stare decisis, in his view, amount to nothing more than marbles placed subjectively on either side of the stare decisis balancing scale. He would have preferred, instead, an inquiry into whether the precedent was demonstrably erroneous as an original matter, …

First Amendment Lochnerism & The Origins Of The Incorporation Doctrine, James Y. Stern

Faculty Publications

The 20th century emergence of the incorporation doctrine is regarded as a critical development in constitutional law, but while issues related to the doctrine's justification have been studied and debated for more than fifty years, the causes and mechanics of its advent have received relatively little academic attention. This Essay, part of a symposium on Judge Jeffrey Sutton's recent book about state constitutional law, examines the doctrinal origins of incorporation, in an effort to help uncover why the incorporation doctrine emerged when it did and the way it did. It concludes that, for these purposes, incorporation is best understood as …

Justice On The Line: Prosecutorial Screening Before Arrest, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Publications

Police make more than eleven million arrests every year. Yet prosecutors dismiss about 25% of criminal charges with no conviction being entered. Needless arrests are therefore clogging the criminal justice system and harming criminal defendants. For instance, Freddie Gray was fatally injured in police custody after being arrested for possession of a switchblade knife. Prosecutors later announced, however, that they did not believe the knife was actually illegal. If prosecutors had to approve warrantless arrests before police could take suspects into custody, Freddie Gray would still be alive. Yet prosecutors’ offices almost never dictate who the police should or should …

Justice Begins Before Trial: How To Nudge Inaccurate Pretrial Rulings Using Behavioral Law And Economic Theory And Uniform Commercial Laws, Michael Gentithes

William & Mary Law Review

Injustice in criminal cases often takes root before trial begins. Overworked criminal judges must resolve difficult pretrial evidentiary issues that determine the charges the State will take to trial and the range of sentences the defendant will face. Wrong decisions on these issues often lead to wrongful convictions. As behavioral law and economic theory suggests, judges who are cognitively busy and receive little feedback on these topics from appellate courts rely upon intuition, rather than deliberative reasoning, to resolve these questions. This leads to inconsistent rulings, which prosecutors exploit to expand the scope of evidentiary exceptions that almost always disfavor …

The Haves Of Procedure, Ion Meyn

William & Mary Law Review

In litigation, “haves” and “have-nots” battle over what procedures should govern. Yet, much greater hostilities have been avoided—a war between the “haves” themselves. “Criminal haves” (prosecutors) and “civil haves” (institutional players) litigate in separate territories and under different sets of rules. This is good, for them, because they have incompatible objectives. This Article contends that protecting the “haves” from each other has profoundly influenced the development of procedure in the United States.

The “haves” reap significant benefits in being insulated from each other as they seek rules responsive to their unique preferences. A “criminal have” seeks easy access to the …

Common Law Evidence And The Common Law Of Human Rights: Towards A Harmonic Convergence?, John D. Jackson

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Article considers the impact which European Human Rights Law has made upon the common law rules of evidence with reference to the approach the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has adopted towards exclusionary rules of evidence. Particular attention will be given to rules that have been developed by the ECtHR in relation to the right to counsel during police questioning (the so-called “Salduz” doctrine) and the right to examine witnesses (the so-called “sole or decisive” evidence rule). The Article argues that the effect of these rules has encouraged common law judges to engage more holistically with the effect …

A First Step Towards Sentencing Reform, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

The Unconstitutionality Of Criminal Jury Selection, Brittany L. Deitch

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The criminal defendant’s right to a jury trial is enshrined within the U.S. Constitution as a protection for the defendant against arbitrary and harsh convictions and punishments. The jury trial has been praised throughout U.S. history for allowing the community to democratically participate in the criminal justice system and for insulating criminal defendants from government oppression. This Article asks whether the jury selection process is consistent with the defendant-protection justification for the Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury. Currently, the prosecution and defense share equal control over jury selection. Looking to the literal text of the Sixth Amendment, …

The Fourth Amendment Disclosure Doctrines, Monu Bedi

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The third party and public disclosure doctrines (together the “disclosure doctrines”) are long-standing hurdles to Fourth Amendment protection. These doctrines have become increasingly relevant to assessing the government’s use of recent technologies such as data mining, drone surveillance, and cell site location data. It is surprising then that both the Supreme Court and scholars, at times, have associated them together as expressing one principle. It turns out that each relies on unique foundational triggers and does not stand or fall with the other. This Article tackles this issue and provides a comprehensive topology for analyzing the respective contours of each …

The Miranda Custody Requirement And Juveniles, Paul Marcus

Faculty Publications

Concerns about the interrogation process and the ability of minors to navigate the criminal justice system often intersect. The impact of the age of juveniles can be seen in a variety of judicial decisions, most markedly those dealing with punishment. But judicial concern for juveniles goes well beyond sentencing. The interrogation process raises especially grave fears.

Since the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Miranda v. Arizona disallowing compelled inculpatory statements by criminal suspects and defendants, there has been concern as to whether juveniles fully understand and appreciate their rights as articulated in Miranda and based in the Fifth …

Reducing The Dangers Of Future Dangerousness Testimony: Applying The Federal Rules Of Evidence To Capital Sentencing, Jaymes Fairfax-Columbo, David Dematteo

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The United States Supreme Court has long held that the death penalty cannot be imposed arbitrarily, and that during sentencing in capital cases, jurors must be provided with guidelines to assist them in narrowing down the class of individuals for whom the death penalty is appropriate. Typically, this is accomplished through the presentation of aggravating and mitigating evidence. One aggravating factor is a capital offender’s future dangerousness, or the likelihood that the individual will engage in violent institutional misconduct while in prison. Future dangerousness may be assessed using a variety of measures; Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), a measure of personality …

Grave Crimes And Weak Evidence: Fact-Finding Evolution In International Criminal Law, Nancy Amoury Combs

Faculty Publications

International criminal courts carry out some of the most important work that a legal system can conduct: prosecuting those who have visited death and destruction on millions. Despite the significance of their work--or perhaps because of it--international courts face tremendous challenges. Chief among them is accurate fact-finding. With alarming regularity, international criminal trials feature inconsistent, vague, and sometimes false testimony that renders judges unable to assess with any measure of certainty who did what to whom in the context of a mass atrocity. This Article provides the first-ever empirical study quantifying fact-finding in an international criminal court. The study shines …

Designing Plea Bargaining From The Ground Up: Accuracy And Fairness Without Trials As Backstops, Stephanos Bibas

William & Mary Law Review

American criminal procedure developed on the assumption that grand juries and petit jury trials were the ultimate safeguards of fair procedures and accurate outcomes.But nowthat plea bargaining has all but supplanted juries, we need to think through what safeguards our plea-bargaining systemshould be built around. This Symposium Article sketches out principles for redesigning our plea-bargaining system from the ground up around safeguards. Part I explores the causes of factual, moral, and legal inaccuracies in guilty pleas. To prevent and remedy these inaccuracies, it proposes a combination of quasi-inquisitorial safeguards, more vigorous criminal defense, and better normative evaluation of charges, pleas, …

Plea Bargaining And The Substantive And Procedural Goals Of Criminal Justice: From Retribution And Adversarialism To Preventive Justice And Hybrid-Inquisitorialism, Christopher Slobogin

William & Mary Law Review

Plea bargaining and guilty pleas are intrinsically incompatible with themost commonly-accepted substantive and procedural premises of American criminal justice: Plea bargaining routinely results in punishment disproportionate to desert, and guilty pleas are an insult to procedural due process. This Article argues that the only way to align plea bargaining with our criminal justice premises is to change those premises. It imagines a system in which retribution is no longer the lodestar of punishment, and in which party-control of the process is no longer the desideratum of adjudication. If, instead, plea bargaining were seen as a mechanism for implementing a sentencing …

Plea Bargaining's Baselines, Josh Bowers

William & Mary Law Review

In this Symposium Article, I examine the Court’s unwillingness to take seriously the issue of coercion as it applies to plea bargaining practice. It is not so much that the Court has ignored coercion entirely. Rather, it has framed the inquiry in a legalisticmanner that has made immaterial the kinds of considerations we might think most relevant to the evaluation. The Court has refused to ask qualitative questions about felt pressure, prosecutorial motivation, or the risk or reality of excessive punishment. All that matters is legal permissibility. A prosecutor may compel a defendant to plead guilty as long as she …

Judicial Power To Regulate Plea Bargaining, Darryl K. Brown

William & Mary Law Review

Plea bargaining in the United States is in critical respects unregulated, and a key reason is the marginal role to which judges have been relegated. In the wake of Santobello v. New York (1971), lower courts crafted Due Process doctrines through which they supervised the fairness of some aspects of the plea bargaining process. Within a decade, however, U.S. Supreme Court decisions began to shut down any constitutional basis for judicial supervision of plea negotiations or agreements. Those decisions rested primarily on two claims: separation of powers and the practical costs of regulating plea bargaining in busy criminal justice systems. …

A Comparative Look At Plea Bargaining In Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, And The United States, Carol A. Brook, Bruno Fiannaca, David Harvey, Paul Marcus, Jenny Mcewan, Renee Pomerance

William & Mary Law Review

In a world where the vast majority of criminal cases are resolved through some means other than the popularly depicted criminal trial, it is fundamental to a comprehensive understanding of comparative criminal procedure to study and appreciate the different mechanisms for criminal case resolution in different nations. This Article developed through a series of conversations (and ultimately a panel discussion) between six international criminal justice professionals - practicing attorneys, scholars, and judges - regarding the nature and effects of plea bargaining (and its comparative substitutes) in their respective countries. Providing a comparative look at different mechanisms for criminal case resolution, …

The Prosecutor's Turn, I. Bennett Capers

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pleading Guilty Without Client Consent, Gabriel J. Chin

William & Mary Law Review

In some cases, lawyers are, and should be, permitted to conclude plea bargains to which their clients have not agreed. Because clients bear the consequences of a conviction, ordinarily, clients should choose between a plea and the possibility of acquittal at trial. Further, clients have the right to decide that even though conviction is practically certain, moral or political reasons warrant insistence on a trial. But some clients have the goal of minimizing incarceration, have been offered reasonable pleas, face substantially greater sentences if convicted after trial, have no plausible ground for acquittal —and nevertheless decline to plead guilty. They …

Why Plea Bargains Are Not Confessions, Brandon L. Garrett

William & Mary Law Review

Is a plea bargain a type of confession? Plea bargaining is often justified as, at its core, a process involving in-court confession. The U.S. Supreme Court’s early decisions approved plea bargains as something “more than a confession which admits that the accused did various acts.” I argue in this Article that plea bargains are not confessions—they do not even typically involve detailed admissions of guilt. The defendant generally admits to acts satisfying elements of the crime—a legally sufficient admission to be sure, but often not under oath, and often not supported by any extensive factual record. Because plea bargains typically …

Thinking Outside The Jury Box: Deploying The Grand Jury In The Guilty Plea Process, Roger A. Fairfax Jr.

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Training For Bargaining, Jenny Roberts, Ronald F. Wright

William & Mary Law Review

While plea bargaining dominates the practice of criminal law, preparation for trial remains central to defense attorneys’ training. Negotiation is still peripheral to that training. Defense lawyers enter practice with little exposure to negotiation techniques and strategies in the plea bargaining context, the most significant skills they will use every day.

Empirical research on plea negotiations has concentrated on outcomes of negotiations rather than the process itself. Our multiphase field study examines the negotiation techniques that attorneys use during plea bargaining as well as their preparation and training for negotiation. This Article explores the data on the training aspects of …

Guilt, Innocence, And Due Process Of Plea Bargaining, Donald A. Dripps

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Plea Bargaining And Disclosure In Germany And The United States: Comparative Lessons, Jenia I. Turner

William & Mary Law Review

This Article analyzes recent trends in plea bargaining and disclosure of evidence in Germany and the United States. Over the last two decades, a number of U.S. jurisdictions have adopted rules requiring broader and earlier discovery in criminal cases. This development reflects a growing consensus that, in a system that resolves most of its cases through guilty pleas, early and extensive disclosure is necessary to ensure fair and informed outcomes.

The introduction of broader discovery in criminal cases in the United States aligns American rulesmore closely with longstanding German rules on access to the investigative file. At the same time, …

Charging On The Margin, Paul T. Crane

William & Mary Law Review

The American criminal justice system has experienced a significant expansion in the number and severity of penalties triggered by misdemeanor convictions. In particular, legislatures have increasingly attached severe collateral consequences to misdemeanor offenses — penalties such as requirements to register as a sex offender, prohibitions on owning or possessing a firearm, and deportation. Although there is a wealth of scholarship studying the effect this development has on defendants and their attorneys, little attention has been paid to the impact collateral consequences have on prosecutorial incentives. This Article starts to remedy that gap by exploring the influence that collateral consequences exert …