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Articles 91 - 120 of 145

Full-Text Articles in Criminal Procedure

Summerlin V. Stewart And Ring Retroactivity, Tonya G. Newman Jun 2004

Summerlin V. Stewart And Ring Retroactivity, Tonya G. Newman

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants a trial before a jury. Until the Supreme Court decided Ring v. Arizona, however, nine states wholly or partially surrendered a portion of the jury's role to a sentencing judge. Specifically, those states allowed sentencing judges to make factual determinations regarding sentencing considerations by which capital defendants became eligible for the death penalty. The Ring Court halted the use of sentencing considerations to erode the jury's fundamental role in preserving accuracy and fairness of criminal proceedings, holding that the Sixth Amendment requires that a jury make factual findings on all elements, including sentencing …


Jury Sentencing As Democratic Practice, Jenia I. Turner Jan 2003

Jury Sentencing As Democratic Practice, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

After a century of reform and experimentation, sentencing remains a highly contested area of the criminal justice system. Scholars as well as the public at large disagree about the proper purposes and functions of punishment, and dissatisfaction with the sentencing status quo is high. Most recent critiques of the sentencing process have focused on the amount of discretion tolerated by the system. This Article goes further in arguing that the source of sentencing discretion is also very important to the legitimacy and integrity of the sentencing process. In the absence of wide consensus on sentencing goals, it is best to …


How Much Do We Really Know About Race And Juries? A Review Of Social Science Theory And Research, Samuel R. Sommers, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 2003

How Much Do We Really Know About Race And Juries? A Review Of Social Science Theory And Research, Samuel R. Sommers, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

The past decade has witnessed numerous high-profile criminal trials in which controversial verdicts have been attributed to racethe race of the defendant, the racial composition of a jury, an attorney "playing the race card," and so on. A predominantly Black jury's acquittal of O.J. Simpson and White jurors' leniency in the police brutality cases of Rodney King and Amadou Diallo not only sparked public debate, but also led to rioting and violence. In the wake of trials such as these, many have questioned the viability of the American jury system.' More specific questions regarding the influence of race on jury …


Do Jury Trials Encourage Harsh Punishment In The United States?, William T. Pizzi Jan 2002

Do Jury Trials Encourage Harsh Punishment In The United States?, William T. Pizzi

Publications

No abstract provided.


Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel Jan 2001

Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

When I was first introduced to the constitutional regulation of criminal procedure in the mid-1950s, a single issue dominated the field: To what extent did the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment impose upon states the same constitutional restraints that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments imposed upon the federal government? While those Bill of Rights provisions, as even then construed, imposed a broad range of constitutional restraints upon the federal criminal justice system, the federal system was (and still is) minuscule as compared to the combined systems of the fifty states. With the Bill of Rights provisions …


Race, Peremptories, And Capital Jury Deliberations, Samuel R. Gross Jan 2001

Race, Peremptories, And Capital Jury Deliberations, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

In Lonnie Weeks's capital murder trial in Virginia in 1993, the jury was instructed: If you find from the evidence that the Commonwealth has proved beyond a reasonable doubt, either of the two alternative aggravating factors], and as to that alternative you are unanimous, then you may fix the punishment of the defendant at death or if you believe from all the evidence that the death penalty is not justified, then you shall fix the punishment of the defendant at life imprisonment ... This instruction is plainly ambiguous, at least to a lay audience. Does it mean that if the …


The Jury And Scientific Evidence, Richard O. Lempert Sep 1999

The Jury And Scientific Evidence, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Read court decisions and commentaries from 100, or evenfive years ago, and you will find that experts and scientific evidence were causing problems then just as they are causing problems now. I do not think that Daubert, Kumho Tire, or any change in a rule of evidence will keep expert scientific testimony from being a difficult area for the legal system. Yet we must still ask: "What are the best terms on which to deal with scientific experts, and how can weimprove the system?"


Juries, Hindsight, And Punitive Damage Awards: Failures Of A Social Science Case For Change, Richard O. Lempert Jul 1999

Juries, Hindsight, And Punitive Damage Awards: Failures Of A Social Science Case For Change, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

In their recent Arizona Law Review article entitled What Juries Can't Do Well: The Jury's Performance As a Risk Manager,' Professors Reid Hastie and W. Kip Viscusi purport to show that juries are likely to do a poor job in setting punitive damages, largely because jurors cannot avoid the influence of what is called "hindsight bias," or the tendency to see the likelihood of an event higher in retrospect than it would have appeared before it happened. In particular, they argue that hindsight bias and other cognitive biases undermine the utility of jury-set punitive damage awards as risk management devices. …


Will The Punishment Fit The Victims? The Case For Pre-Trial Disclosure, And The Uncharted Future Of Victim Impact Information In Capital Jury Sentencing, José F. Anderson Jan 1997

Will The Punishment Fit The Victims? The Case For Pre-Trial Disclosure, And The Uncharted Future Of Victim Impact Information In Capital Jury Sentencing, José F. Anderson

All Faculty Scholarship

The United States Supreme Court decision in Payne v. Tennessee, upholding the use of victim impact statements in capital jury sentencing proceedings, marked one of the most dramatic reversals of a precedent in the history of United States constitutional jurisprudence. The decision in Payne expressly overruled Booth v. Maryland decided only four years earlier. The Booth case rejected the use of victim impact statements in capital sentencing cases that involved juries. In Payne, the Supreme Court made it clear that victims were entitled to offer, and juries were permitted to consider, the effect that a "death eligible" homicide had on …


The Jury As Critic: An Empirical Look At How Capital Juries Perceive Expert And Lay Testimony, Scott E. Sundby Jan 1997

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

Articles

No abstract provided.


That's My Story And I'M Stickin' To It: The Jury As Fifth Business In The Trial Of O.J. Simpson And Other Matters, Marianne Wesson Jan 1996

That's My Story And I'M Stickin' To It: The Jury As Fifth Business In The Trial Of O.J. Simpson And Other Matters, Marianne Wesson

Publications

No abstract provided.


The Rights Of The Accused In A 'Crime Crisis', Yale Kamisar Jan 1996

The Rights Of The Accused In A 'Crime Crisis', Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

"I grieve for my country to say that the administration of the criminal law in all the states in the Union (there may be one or two exceptions) is a disgrace to our civilization .... The institution of trial by jury has come to be regarded as such a fetish in our country that state legislatures have exalted the power of the jury and diminished the power of the court .... The counsel for the defense, relying on the diminished power of the court, creates, by dramatic art and by harping on the importance of unimportant details, a false atmosphere …


Incoming Drug Calls And Performative Words: They're Not Just Talking About It, Baron Parke!, Christopher B. Mueller Jan 1995

Incoming Drug Calls And Performative Words: They're Not Just Talking About It, Baron Parke!, Christopher B. Mueller

Publications

No abstract provided.


Asymmetrical Peremptories Defended: A Reply, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1995

Asymmetrical Peremptories Defended: A Reply, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Three years ago, with the publication of his article ''An Asymmetrical Approach to the Problem of Peremptories" in this journal, Professor Friedman initiated a debate on the subject that was taken up in 1994 by three prosecutors who offered a rebuttal that was also printed in these pages. Professor Friedman continues the debate.


Rethinking The Jury, Phoebe A. Haddon Aug 1994

Rethinking The Jury, Phoebe A. Haddon

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.


Experts, Stories, And Information, Richard O. Lempert Nov 1993

Experts, Stories, And Information, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

In the infancy of the jury trial, there were no witnesses. The jury was self-informing. Members of the jury were drawn from the community. It was expected that they would know, either firsthand or on the basis of what they had heard, the true facts of any disputed incident, and they were gathered together to say what those facts were. Ronald Allen and Joseph Miller, in their insightful paper, see the ideal of the self-informing jury as very much alive today. Allen and Miller tell us that jurors ideally should experience firsthand the factual information needed to arrive at rational …


Cornerstones Of The Judicial Process, Jerold H. Israel Jan 1993

Cornerstones Of The Judicial Process, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

Under our federated system of government, each state and the federal government have their own criminal justice processes. The federal system must comply with the constitutional prerequisites set forth in the Bill of Rights, and the state systems must comply with those Bill of Rights' provisions made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment,1 but those constitutional prerequisites allow considerable room for variation from one jurisdiction to another. In many respects, the fifty states and the federal government have used that leeway to produce considerable diversity in their respective criminal justice processes. At the same time, however, one can …


Some Steps Between Attitudes And Verdicts, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 1993

Some Steps Between Attitudes And Verdicts, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

Most research that has attempted to predict verdict preferences on the basis of stable juror characteristics, such as attitudes and personality traits, has found that individual differences among jurors are not very useful predictors, accounting for only a small proportion of the variance in verdict choices. Some commentators have therefore concluded that verdicts are overwhelmingly accounted for by "the weight of the evidence," and that differences among jurors have negligible effects. But there is a paradox here: In most cases the weight of the evidence is insufficient to produce firstballot unanimity in the jury (Hans & Vidmar, 1986; Hastie, Penrod, …


The Romance Of Revenge: Capital Punishment In America, Samuel R. Gross Jan 1993

The Romance Of Revenge: Capital Punishment In America, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

On February 17, 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive terms of life imprisonment for killing and dismembering 15 young men and boys (Associated Press 1992a). Dahmer had been arrested six months earlier, on July 22, 1991. On January 13 he pled guilty to the fifteen murder counts against him, leaving open only the issue of his sanity. Jury selection began two weeks later, and the trial proper started on January 30. The jury heard two weeks of testimony about murder, mutilation and necrophilia; they deliberated for 5 hours before finding that Dahmer was sane when he committed these …


An Asymmetrical Approach To The Problem Of Peremptories?, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1992

An Asymmetrical Approach To The Problem Of Peremptories?, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The Supreme Court's decision in Batson v. Kentucky, and the extension of Batson to parties other than prosecutors, may be expected to put pressure on the institution of peremptory challenges. After a brief review of the history of peremptories, this article contends that peremptories for criminal defendants serve important values of our criminal justice system. It then argues that peremptories for prosecutors are not as important, and that it may no longer be worthwhile to maintain them in light of the administrative complexities inevitable in a system of peremptories consistent with Batson. The article concludes that the asymmetry of allowing …


Real Jurors' Understanding Of The Law In Real Cases, Alan Reifman, Spencer M. Gusick, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 1992

Real Jurors' Understanding Of The Law In Real Cases, Alan Reifman, Spencer M. Gusick, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

A survey of 224 Michigan citizens called for jury duty over a 2-month period was conducted to assess the jurors' comprehension of the law they had been given in the judges' instructions. Citizens who served as jurors were compared with a base line of those who were called for duty but not selected to serve, and with those who served on different kinds of cases. Consistent with previous studies of mock jurors, this study found that actual jurors understand fewer than half of the instructions they receive at trial. Subjects who received judges' instructions performed significantly better than uninstructed subjects …


Telling Tales In Court: Trial Procedure And The Story Model, Richard O. Lempert Nov 1991

Telling Tales In Court: Trial Procedure And The Story Model, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

There are three ways in which stories may figure prominently at trials. First, litigants may tell stories to jurors. Not only is there some social science evidence that this happens, but trial lawyers have an instinctive sense that this is what they do. Ask a litigator to describe a current case and she is likely to reply, "Our story is ... " Second, jurors may try to make sense of the evidence they receive by fitting it to some story pattern. If so, the process is likely to feed back on itself. That is, jurors are likely to build a …


Judicial Misconduct During Jury Deliberations, Bennett L. Gershman Jan 1991

Judicial Misconduct During Jury Deliberations, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The author considers the two principal types of improper judicial behavior that may occur during the jury deliberation process. Judicial conduct that attempts to place undue pressure on a jury to reach a verdict may include verdict-urging instructions, threats and intimidation, and inquiry into the numerical division of the jury on the merits of the verdict. Judicial participation in private, ex parte communications with jurors may also subvert orderly trial procedure and undermine the impartiality of the jury. Neither kind of judicial conduct may be allowed to compel a verdict from a jury.


Selecting Impartial Juries: Must Ignorance Be A Virtue In Our Search For Justice -- Welcome And Statement Of The Issue, Fred H. Cate, Newton N. Minow Jan 1991

Selecting Impartial Juries: Must Ignorance Be A Virtue In Our Search For Justice -- Welcome And Statement Of The Issue, Fred H. Cate, Newton N. Minow

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.


To Tell What We Know Or Wait For Godot?, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 1991

To Tell What We Know Or Wait For Godot?, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

Professor Elliott raises two questions about the American Psychological Association's practice of submitting amicus briefs to the courts. First, are our data sufficiently valid, consistent, and generalizable to be applicable to the real world issues? Second, are amicus briefs adequate to communicate scientific findings? The first of these is not a general question, but must be addressed anew each time the Association considers a new issue. An evaluation of the quality and sufficiency of scientific knowledge about racial discrimination, for example, tells us nothing at all about the quality and sufficiency of scientific knowledge about sexual abuse. "Are the data …


The Hong Kong Jury: A Microcosm Of Society?, Peter Duff, Mark Findlay, Carla Howarth Oct 1990

The Hong Kong Jury: A Microcosm Of Society?, Peter Duff, Mark Findlay, Carla Howarth

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The claim that the jury is a randomly chosen and representative sample of community is an important part of the ideology which currently underpins the institution. Supporters of the jury argue that both its impartiality and its independence from the State are bolstered by the fact that it represents a randomly selected cross-section of the populace. In most common law jurisdictions where the jury operates, various steps have been taken over recent years in order preserve and strengthen the perception of the jury as a "microcosm of democratic society". For example, in England the property qualification for jurors was removed …


The Law And Psychology Of Jury Instructions, J. Alexander Tanford Jan 1990

The Law And Psychology Of Jury Instructions, J. Alexander Tanford

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.


Loss Of Innocence: Eyewitness Identification And Proof Of Guilt, Samuel R. Gross Jan 1987

Loss Of Innocence: Eyewitness Identification And Proof Of Guilt, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

It is no news that eyewitness identification in criminal cases is a problem; it is an old and famous problem. Judges and lawyers have long known that the identification of strangers is a chancy matter, and nearly a century of psychological research has confirmed this skeptical view. In 1967 the Supreme Court attempted to mitigate the problem by regulating the use of eyewitness identification evidence in criminal trials; since then it has retreated part way from that effort. Legal scholars have written a small library of books and articles on this problem, the courts' response to it, and various proposed …


The Twelve-Person, Unanimous Jury: Does It Have More Than History To Recommend It?, Richard O. Lempert Jan 1986

The Twelve-Person, Unanimous Jury: Does It Have More Than History To Recommend It?, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

My focus today will be on the twelve-person unanimous jury and on the contrasts between such juries and six-person juries or twelve-person juries than can return verdicts by ten-two or nine-three votes. Until about fifteen years ago, it appeared that the sixth and seventh amendments required all federal juries to have twelve members who reached unanimous verdicts, and it appeared possible that the Supreme Court would force the states to conform to the federal standards. Instead, the court did almost the opposite. It sanctioned juries as small as size six in state criminal cases and federal civil cases, and it …


Verdict According To Conscience: Perspectives On The English Criminal Trial Jury 1200-1800, Thomas A. Green Jan 1985

Verdict According To Conscience: Perspectives On The English Criminal Trial Jury 1200-1800, Thomas A. Green

Books

This book treats the history of the English criminal trial jury from its origins to the eve of the Victorian reforms in the criminal law. It consists of eight free-standing essays on important aspects of that history and a conclusion. Each chapter addresses the phenomenon that has come to be known as "jury nullification," the exercise of jury discretion in favor of a defendant whom the jury nonetheless believes to have committed the act with which he is charged. Historically, some instances of nullification reflect the jury's view that the act in question is not unlawful, while in other cases …