Evidence Commons^™

The Need For Additional Safeguards Against Racist Police Practices: A Call For Change To Massachusetts & Illinois Wiretapping Laws, Andrew Martinez Whitson

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

Police misconduct is still prevalent throughout the United States. Unfortunately for members of minority communities, this misconduct often comes in the form of racially discriminatory police practices. In many cases, such practices are deeply rooted in the police department’s culture. It is imperative that all citizens are equipped with every possible safeguard from such abuse at the hands of the police. In Massachusetts and Illinois, however, wiretapping and eavesdropping laws prevent people from employing one such safeguard that has proven to help change unconstitutional police practices. The safeguard that those laws criminalize is the ability to surreptitiously record on-duty ...

Absolute Immunity: General Principles And Recent Developments, Erwin Chemerinsky

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Discretion Abused: Reinterpreting The Appellate Standard Of Review For Hearsay, Matthew J. Peterson

Matthew J. Peterson

Matthew J. Peterson, Discretion Abused: Reinterpreting the Appellate Standard of Review for Hearsay

Abstract:

The decision by a federal a court to exclude or admit hearsay can be crucial to the case of either party. Despite this prospective impact, the federal courts of appeal currently defer to district courts’ expertise by reviewing a district court’s decision to admit or exclude hearsay for an abuse of discretion. Such deference often insulates district courts’ incorrect interpretation of the rule against hearsay and the improper application of the exclusions and exceptions to the rule from appellate reversal.

Lowering the standard of review ...

Futility Of Exhaustion: Why Brady Claims Should Trump Federal Exhaustion Requirements, Tiffany R. Murphy

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

A defendant’s Fourteenth Amendment due process rights are violated when a state agency fails to disclose crucial exculpatory or impeachment evidence — so-called Brady violations. When this happens, the defendant should be provided the means not only to locate this evidence, but also to fully develop it in state post-conviction processes. When the state system prohibits both the means and legal mechanism to develop Brady claims, the defendant should be immune to any procedural penalties in either state or federal court. In other words, the defendant should not be required to return to state court to exhaust such a claim ...

Making The Right Call For Confrontation At Felony Sentencing, Shaakirrah R. Sanders

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Felony sentencing courts have discretion to increase punishment based on un-cross-examined testimonial statements about several categories of uncharged, dismissed, or otherwise unproven criminal conduct. Denying defendants an opportunity to cross-examine these categories of sentencing evidence undermines a core principle of natural law as adopted in the Sixth Amendment: those accused of felony crimes have the right to confront adversarial witnesses. This Article contributes to the scholarship surrounding confrontation rights at felony sentencing by cautioning against continued adherence to the most historic Supreme Court case on this issue, Williams v. New York. This Article does so for reasons beyond the unacknowledged ...

The "Double-Edged" Dilemma: The Eleventh Circuit's Devaluation Of Mental Health Mitigators In Evans V. Secretary, Department Of Corrections, Erik Thompson

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

In Evans v. Secretary, Department of Corrections, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit denied habeas corpus relief to a death row inmate who claimed that ineffective assistance of counsel prejudiced his death sentence hearing. Despite the defense counsel’s omission of evidence suggesting that the inmate suffered from various mental disabilities, the court resolved that such evidence would not have affected the jury’s ultimate recommendation of the death sentence because some of the evidence was stigmatized. This standard creates a burden that is far too great for individuals facing the death penalty and significantly minimizes ...

Delay And Its Benefits For Judicial Rulemaking Under Scientific Uncertainty, Rebecca Haw

Boston College Law Review

The Supreme Court’s increasing use of science and social science in its decision making has a rationalizing effect on law that helps ensure that a rule will have its desired effect. But resting doctrine on the shifting sands of scientific and social scientific opinion endangers legal stability. The Court must be responsive, but not reactive, to new scientific findings and theories, a difficult balance for lay justices to strike. This Article argues that the Court uses delay—defined as refusing to make or change a rule in light of new scientific arguments at time one, and then making or ...

Impeachment By Unreliable Conviction, Anna Roberts

Boston College Law Review

This Article offers a new critique of Federal Rule of Evidence 609, which permits impeachment of criminal defendants by means of their prior criminal convictions. In admitting convictions as impeachment evidence, courts are wrongly assuming that such convictions are necessarily reliable indicators of relative culpability. Courts assume that convictions are the product of a fair fight, that they demonstrate relative culpability, and that they connote moral culpability. But current prosecutorial practice and other data undermine each of these assumptions. Accordingly, this Article proposes that before a conviction is used for impeachment, there should be an assessment of the extent to ...

The Death Of Inference, Andrew S. Pollis

Boston College Law Review

This Article examines a disturbing trend in civil litigation: the demise of the jury’s historic prerogative to draw inferences from circumstantial evidence. Judges have arrogated to themselves the power to dismiss cases if they find the proffered inferences factually implausible. They have increasingly dismissed cases under the “equal-inference rule” by finding the proffered inferences no more plausible than other available inferences. And they have severely limited the powerful inferences jurors can draw when they conclude that a witness has lied. Commentators have bemoaned the heightened-pleading standard of the 2007 and 2009 U.S. Supreme Court cases, Bell Atlantic Corp ...

Search Method In E-Discovery: How Rule 26'S Silence Poses A Risk Of Sanctions To Attorneys And Increases The Cost Of Litigation, Khanh T. Huynh

University of Massachusetts Law Review

The 2006 Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are the first codified references in the FRCP to electronic discovery. However, the lack of comprehensive rules in this area provides opportunities for attorneys to leverage search terms as a weapon, primarily to wear out opponents financially. Disagreement on search terms used to produce documents can prolong litigation. Complicated Boolearn search tems can be difficult to run. Other search methods, such as natural language search, cannot provide efficient and accurate results. The cost to run complicated searches is high, and the lack of rules addressing search terms in the FRCP ...

The Discoverability Of E-Mails: The Smoking Gun Of The Modern Era, Michael J. Martin

University of Massachusetts Law Review

The discoverability of e-mails is an area of law that every modern day lawyer must be familiar with in order to avoid the risk of being sanctioned. Over the past years, courts have awarded sanctions to moving parties at a steadily increasing pace. These sanctions have included adverse jury instructions, default judgements, attorney's fees, large monetary fines, and in one instance, a jail sentence. Courts have sent the message that improper conduct will not be tolerated in this developing area of law by not hesitating to order sanctions. Thus, it is essential that modern day lawyers become acquainted with ...

The Science Behind Breath Testing For Ethanol, Thomas E. Workman Jr.

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Nationwide, law enforcement officers utilize breath-test machines to identify suspected drunk drivers. When defense attorneys represent a client who has been charged with alcohol related driving crimes, it is important to understand the science and methodology behind alcohol breath-testing, and specifically the functionality of the device used to test their client. This article explains the various methods of testing and types of devices used, as well as their effectiveness, by examining the scientific principles associated with common testin measures. This article serves as an aid to the practicing attorney who, by understanding the science and methodology of breath-testing, will be ...

Conflicting Confrontation Clause Concerns: The Admissibility Of Hospital Records Versus A Defendant's Right To Confrontation, Susan Barlow

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Admissibility Of Field Test Results At Trial To Prove Intoxication, Vincent J. Costa

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Federal Retreat From Protecting Defendants From Tainted Show-Up Identifications And The Superiority Of New York's Approach, Stephan Josephs

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Prearraignment Lineup Procedures: Are Multiple Lineups Unduly Suggestive Or Sufficiently Reliable?, Jared R. Artura

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is New York Achieving More Reliable And Just Convictions When The Admissibility Of A Suggestive Pretrial Identification Is At Issue?, Matthew Gordon

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

It's Reasonable To Expect Privacy When Watching Adult Videos, Matthew Leonhardt

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Catalogs, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

Faculty Scholarship

It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become ...

Painful Disparities, Painful Realities, Amanda C. Pustilnik

Faculty Scholarship

Legal doctrines and decisional norms treat chronic claims pain differently than other kinds of disability or damages claims because of bias and confusion about whether chronic pain is real. This is law’s painful disparity. Now, breakthrough neuroimaging can make pain visible, shedding light on these mysterious ills. Neuroimaging shows these conditions are, as sufferers have known all along, painfully real. This Article is about where law ought to change because of innovations in structural and functional imaging of the brain in pain. It describes cutting-edge scientific developments and the impact they should make on evidence law and disability law ...