Evidence Commons^™

Bending The Rules Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn, Julia Simon-Kerr

Northwestern University Law Review

The evidence rules have well-established, standard textual meanings—meanings that evidence professors teach their law students every year. Yet, despite the rules’ clarity, courts misapply them across a wide array of cases: Judges allow past acts to bypass the propensity prohibition, squeeze hearsay into facially inapplicable exceptions, and poke holes in supposedly ironclad privileges. And that’s just the beginning.

The evidence literature sees these misapplications as mistakes by inept trial judges. This Article takes a very different view. These “mistakes” are often not mistakes at all, but rather instances in which courts are intentionally bending the rules of evidence. Codified evidentiary …

The State Secrets Privilege: An Institutional Process Approach, Alexandra B. Dakich

Northwestern University Law Review

It is no secret that since September 11, 2001, the Executive Branch has acted at variance with laws otherwise restraining its conduct under the guise of national security. Among other doctrines that make up the new national security canon, state secrets privilege assertions have narrowed the scope of redressability for parties alleging official misconduct in national security cases. For parties such as the Muslim American community surveilled by the FBI in Orange County, California, or Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to confirmed torture tactics by the U.S. government, success in the courts hinges on the government’s unbridled ability to assert …

Artificial Intelligence As Evidence, Paul W. Grimm, Maura R. Grossman, Gordon V. Cormack

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

This article explores issues that govern the admissibility of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) applications in civil and criminal cases, from the perspective of a federal trial judge and two computer scientists, one of whom also is an experienced attorney. It provides a detailed yet intelligible discussion of what AI is and how it works, a history of its development, and a description of the wide variety of functions that it is designed to accomplish, stressing that AI applications are ubiquitous, both in the private and public sectors. Applications today include: health care, education, employment-related decision-making, finance, law enforcement, and the legal …

Panel Discussion: Author Meets Critic

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Panel Discussion: Ethnographic Evidence

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Panel Discussion: Ethnography, Ethics & Law

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Innovating Criminal Justice, Natalie Ram

Northwestern University Law Review

From secret stingray devices that can pinpoint a suspect’s location, to advanced forensic DNA-analysis tools, to recidivism risk statistic software—the use of privately developed criminal justice technologies is growing. So too is a concomitant pattern of trade secret assertion surrounding these technologies. This Article charts the role of private law secrecy in shielding criminal justice activities, demonstrating that such secrecy is pervasive, problematic, and ultimately unnecessary for the production of well-designed criminal justice tools.

This Article makes three contributions to the existing literature. First, the Article establishes that trade secrecy now permeates American criminal justice, shielding privately developed criminal justice …

Discovering Forensic Fraud, Jennifer D. Oliva, Valena E. Beety

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay posits that certain structural dynamics, which dominate criminal proceedings, significantly contribute to the admissibility of faulty forensic science in criminal trials. The authors believe that these dynamics are more insidious than questionable individual prosecutorial or judicial behavior in this context. Not only are judges likely to be former prosecutors, prosecutors are “repeat players” in criminal litigation and, as such, routinely support reduced pretrial protections for defendants. Therefore, we argue that the significant discrepancies between the civil and criminal pretrial discovery and disclosure rules warrant additional scrutiny.

In the criminal system, the near absence of any pretrial discovery means …

Riley And Abandonment: Expanding Fourth Amendment Protection Of Cell Phones, Abigail Hoverman

Northwestern University Law Review

In light of the privacy concerns inherent to personal technological devices, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in 2014 recognizing the need for categorical heightened protection of cell phones during searches incident to arrest in Riley v. California. This Note argues for expansion of heightened protections for cell phones in the context of abandoned evidence because the same privacy concerns apply. This argument matters because state and federal courts have not provided the needed protection to abandoned cell phones pre- or post-Riley.

Revisiting The Public Safety Exception To Miranda For Suspected Terrorists: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev And The Bombing Of The 2013 Boston Marathon, Hannah Lonky

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This Comment examines the application of the public safety exception to Miranda to cases of domestic terrorism, looking particularly at the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. By comparing the Department of Justice’s War on Terror policies to the Warren Court’s rationale for Miranda, this Comment argues that courts should require law enforcement officers to have reasonable knowledge of an immediate threat to public safety before they may properly invoke the Quarles public safety exception.

When Religious Belief Becomes Scientific Opinion: Burwell V. Hobby Lobby And The Unraveling Of Federal Rule 702, Meredith Rachel Mandell

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Gatekeeping Science: Using The Structure Of Scientific Research To Distinguish Between Admissibility And Weight In Expert Testimony, David L. Faigman, Christopher Slobogin, John Monahan

Northwestern University Law Review

Fundamental to all evidence rules is the division of responsibility between the judge, who determines the admissibility of evidence, and the jury, which gauges its weight. In most evidentiary contexts, such as those involving hearsay and character, threshold admissibility obligations are clear and relatively uncontroversial. The same is not true for scientific evidence. The complex nature of scientific inference, and in particular the challenges of reasoning from group data to individual cases, has bedeviled courts. As a result, courts vary considerably on how they define the judge’s gatekeeping task under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and its state equivalents.

This …

Moving Beyond Miranda: Concessions For Confessions, Scott W. Howe

Northwestern University Law Review

The law governing police interrogation provides perverse incentives. For criminal suspects, the law rewards obstruction and concealment. For police officers, it honors deceit and psychological aggression. For the courts and the rest of us, it encourages blindness and rationalization. This Article contends that the law could help foster better behaviors. The law could incentivize criminals to confess without police trickery and oppression. It could motivate police officers involved in obtaining suspect statements to avoid chicanery and duress. And, it could summon courts and the rest of us to speak more truthfully about whether suspect admissions are the product of informed, …

Forced Decryption As Equilibrium—Why It’S Constitutional And How Riley Matters, Dan Terzian

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay considers whether the government can force a person to decrypt his computer. The only courts to consider the issue limited their analyses to rote application of predigital doctrine and dicta. This is a mistake; courts should instead aim to maintain the ex ante equilibrium of privacy and government power. This approach—seeking equilibrium—was just endorsed by the Supreme Court in Riley v. California, a recent Fourth Amendment case. Yet Riley’s rationale also extends to the Fifth Amendment’s Self-Incrimination Clause, and maintaining equilibrium there requires permitting forced decryption. Because current doctrine can be interpreted as allowing forced decryption, …

Digital Forensic Evidence In The Courtroom: Understanding Content And Quality, Daniel B. Garrie, J. David Morrissy

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

With the widespread permeation of continually advancing technologies into our daily lives, it is inevitable that the product of those technologies, i.e. digital information, makes its way into the courtroom. This has largely occurred in the form of electronic discovery, or “e-discovery,” where each party involved in an action provides the relevant information they possess electronically. However, in cases where information is hidden, erased, or otherwise altered, digital forensic analysis is necessary to draw further conclusions about the available evidence. Digital forensic analysis is analogous to more traditional forensic analysis. For example, in criminal cases where a firearm was used …

Blaming As A Social Process: The Influence Of Character And Moral Emotion On Blame, Janice Nadler

Faculty Working Papers

For the most part, the law eschews the role of moral character in legal blame. But when we observe an actor who causes harm, legal and psychological blame processes are in tension. Procedures for legal blame assume an assessment of the actor's mental state, and ultimately of responsibility, that is independent of the moral character of the actor. In this paper, I present experimental evidence to suggest that perceptions of intent, foreseeability, and possibly causation can be colored by independent reasons for thinking the actor is a bad person, and are mediated by the experience of negative moral emotion. Our …

An Economic Analysis Of Fact Witness Payment, Eugene Kontorovich, Ezra Friedman

Faculty Working Papers

In this paper we discuss the disparate treatment of perceptual (''fact'') witnesses and expert witnesses in the legal system. We highlight the distinction between the perceptual act of witnessing and the act of testifying, and argue that although there might be good reasons to regulate payments to fact witnesses, the customary prohibition on paying them for their services is not justified by reference to economic theory. We propose considering a court mediated system for compensating fact witnesses so as to encourage witnessing of legally important events.We construct a simple model of witness incentives, and simulate the effects of several possible …

The Need For A Research Culture In The Forensic Sciences, Jonathan Koehler, Jennifer L. Mnookin, Simon A. Cole, Barry A.J. Fisher, Itiel E. Dror, Max Houck, Kieth Inman, David H. Kaye, Glenn Langenburg, D. Michel Risinger, Norah Rudin, Jay Siegel

Faculty Working Papers

The methods, techniques, and reliability of the forensic sciences in general, and the pattern identification disciplines in particular, have faced significant scrutiny in recent years. Critics have attacked the scientific basis for the assumptions and claims made by forensic scientists both in and out of the courtroom. Defenders have emphasized courts' long-standing acceptance of forensic science evidence, the relative dearth of known errors, and the skill and experience of practitioners. This Article reflects an effort made by a diverse group of participants in these debates, including law professors, academics from several disciplines, and practicing forensic scientists, to find and explore …

What Will We Lose If The Trial Vanishes?, Robert P. Burns

Faculty Working Papers

The number of trials continues to decline andfederal civil trials have almost completely disappeared. This essay attempts to address the significance of this loss, to answer the obvious question, "So what?" It argues against taking a resigned or complacent attitude toward an important problem for our public culture. It presents a short description of the trial's internal structure, recounts different sorts of explanations, and offers an inventory of the kinds of wounds this development would inflict.

Moral Character, Motive, And The Psychology Of Blame, Janice Nadler, Mary-Hunter Morris Mcdonnell

Faculty Working Papers

Blameworthiness, in the criminal law context, is conceived as the carefully calculated end product of discrete judgments about a transgressor's intentionality, causal proximity to harm, and the harm's foreseeability. Research in social psychology, on the other hand, suggests that blaming is often intuitive and automatic, driven by a natural impulsive desire to express and defend social values and expectations. The motivational processes that underlie psychological blame suggest that judgments of legal blame are influenced by factors the law does not always explicitly recognize or encourage. In this Article we focus on two highly related motivational processes – the desire to …

If The Shoe Fits They Might Acquit: The Value Of Forensic Science Testimony, Jonathan Koehler

Faculty Working Papers

The probative value of forensic science evidence (such as a shoeprint) varies widely depending on how the evidence and hypothesis of interest is characterized. This paper uses a likelihood ratio (LR) approach to identify the probative value of forensic science evidence. It argues that the "evidence" component should be characterized as a "reported match," and that the hypothesis component should be characterized as "the matching person or object is the source of the crime scene sample." This characterization of the LR forces examiners to incorporate risks from sample mix-ups and examiner error into their match statistics. But how will legal …

Proficiency Tests To Estimate Error Rates In The Forensic Sciences, Jonathan Koehler

Faculty Working Papers

A proficiency test is an assessment of the performance of laboratory personnel using samples whose sources are known to the proficiency test administrator but unknown to the examinee. Proficiency tests can help identify reasonable first pass estimates for the rates at which various types of errors occur. It is crucial to obtain error rate estimates because the reliability and probative value of forensic science evidence is inextricably linked to the rates at which examiners make errors. Without such information, legal decision makers have no scientifically meaningful way of thinking about the risk of false identification and false non-identification associated with …

No Good Whistle Goes Unpunished: Can We Protect European Antitrust Leniency Applications From Discovery?, Constanza Nicolosi

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

In recent years, the most successful tool in the antitrust arsenal of the European Commission and the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has proven to be leniency programs, which provide full immunity from fines to the first cartel-member that confesses its participation in the conspiracy. Even though European and U.S. leniency programs are fairly similar to one another, procedural differences may undermine their effectiveness. It has long been argued that potential discovery of corporate statements accompanying the leniency application before the Commission in subsequent proceedings in the United States would put the firms that cooperated with the …

Crossing Over: Why Attorneys (And Judges) Should Not Be Able To Cross-Examine Witnesses Regarding Their Immigration Statuses For Impeachment Purposes, Colin Miller

NULR Online

You are sitting in an empty bar (in a town you’ve never before visited), drinking a Bacardi with a soft-spoken acquaintance you barely know. After an hour, a third individual walks into the tavern and sits by himself, and you ask your acquaintance who the new man is. “Be careful of that guy,” you are told. “He is a man with a past.” A few minutes later, a fourth person enters the bar; he also sits alone. You ask your acquaintance who this new individual is. “Be careful of that guy, too,” he says. “He is a man with no …

Individualization Claims In Forensic Science: Still Unwarranted, Jonathan Koehler, Michael J. Saks

Faculty Working Papers

In a 2008 paper published in the Vanderbilt Law Review entitled "The Individualization Fallacy in Forensic Science Evidence," we argued that no scientific basis exists for the proposition that forensic scientists can "individualize" an unknown marking (such as a fingerprint, tire track, or handwriting sample) to a particular person or object to the exclusion of all others in the world. In this special issue of the Brooklyn Law Review, we clarify, refine, and extend some of the ideas presented in Fallacy. Some of the refinements are prompted by Professor David Kaye's paper, also in this issue of the Review, in …

Hearings, Mark Spottswood

Faculty Working Papers

This article explores a constantly recurring procedural question: When is fact-finding improved by a live hearing, and when would it be better to rely on a written record? Unfortunately, when judges, lawyers, and rulemakers consider this issue, they are led astray by the widely shared—but false—assumption that a judge can best determine issues of credibility by viewing the demeanor of witnesses while they are testifying. In fact, a large body of scientific evidence indicates that judges are more likely to be deceived by lying or mistaken witnesses when observing their testimony in person than if the judges were to review …

The Death Of The American Trial, Robert P. Burns

Faculty Working Papers

This short essay is a summary of my assessment of the meaning of the "vanishing trial" phenomenon. It addresses the obvious question: "So what?" It first briefly reviews the evidence of the trial's decline. It then sets out the steps necessary to understand the political and social signficance of our vastly reducing the trial's importance among our modes of social ordering. The essay serves as the Introduction to a book, The Death of the American Trial, soon to be published by the University of Chicago Press.

Coming Clean About "Junk Dna", Simon A. Cole

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Please, Let’S Bury The Junk: The Codis Loci And The Revelation Of Private Information, D.H. Kaye

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Is The “Junk” Dna Designation Bunk?, Simon A. Cole

NULR Online

No abstract provided.