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Mr. Big And The New Common Law Confessions Rule: Five Years In Review, Adelina Iftene, Vanessa Kinnear

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The Supreme Court of Canada released its decision of R v Hart in July of 2014. The decision provided a two-prong framework for assessing the admissibility of confessions obtained through the undercover police tactic known as “Mr. Big”. The goal of the framework was to address reliability concerns, to protect suspects from state abuse, and to reduce the risk of wrongful convictions. The first prong of the test created a new common law evidentiary rule, under which Mr. Big obtained confessions are now presumptively inadmissible. The second prong revamped the existing abuse of process doctrine. In this article, the authors …

Mr. Big And The New Common Law Confessions Rule: Five Years In Review, Adelina Iftene, Vanessa Kinnear

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The Supreme Court of Canada released its decision of R v Hart in July of 2014. The decision provided a two-prong framework for assessing the admissibility of confessions obtained through the undercover police tactic known as “Mr. Big”. The goal of the framework was to address reliability concerns, to protect suspects from state abuse, and to reduce the risk of wrongful convictions. The first prong of the test created a new common law evidentiary rule, under which Mr. Big obtained confessions are now presumptively inadmissible. The second prong revamped the existing abuse of process doctrine.

In this article, the authors …

The Costs And Benefits Of Forensics, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote that states can be laboratories for experimentation in law and policy. Disappointingly, however, the actual laboratories that states and local governments run are not a home for experimentation. We do not have adequate information about either the costs or the benefits of forensic testing or allocation of resources. Increased spending and expansion of crime laboratories has perversely accompanied growing backlogs. Poor quality control has resulted in a series of audits and even closures of crime laboratories. In response to these problems, however, some laboratories and some entire states have developed new approaches toward …

Justice In A Brave New World?, Jean R. Sternlight

Scholarly Works

As science fiction has become reality, we should consider the implications of our new technologies for our system of justice. In addition to DNA, we are now regularly using cameras, geo-tracking, facial recognition software, brain scans, computers, and much more to discern and record our physical and mental surroundings. Existing technology and more we cannot yet imagine will increasingly take the place of often unreliable evidence, such as that provided by eyewitnesses. Yet, we have given far too little thought as to how these advances should impact our civil and criminal dispute resolution systems.

Historically, many justice systems have emphasized …

Evidentiary Irony And The Incomplete Rule Of Completeness: A Proposal To Amend Federal Rule Of Evidence 106, Daniel J. Capra, Liesa L. Richter

Faculty Articles

In recent years, there have been many calls and suggestions for a more equitable criminal justice system. Although sometimes overlooked in that dialogue, the fair operation of the Federal Rules of Evidence is a crucial component in ensuring such an equitable system. Unfortunately, the interpretation of Federal Rule of Evidence 106 in some jurisdictions permits unjust results, particularly for criminal defendants seeking to rely upon the Rule. Rule 106, also known as the “rule of completeness,” is premised upon notions of fundamental fairness and ostensibly permits a party to force its adversary to introduce the remainder of a written or …

Title Ix Beyond School Lines: The Proposed Regulations That Will Limit Colleges And Universities’ Jurisdictional Scope Of Responsibility, Rachel Dunham

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Title Ix & The Civil Rights Approach To Sexual Harassment In Education, Nancy Chi Cantalupo

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Can The Pursuit Of Truth Reconcile With The Principle Of Minimizing False Convictions?, Doron Menashe

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

No abstract provided.

Washington’S Young Offenders: O’Dell Demands A Change To Sentencing Guidelines, Erika Vranizan

Seattle University Law Review

This Note argues that the O’Dell decision was a watershed moment for criminal justice reform. It argues that the reasoning in O’Dell should be seized upon by the legislature to take action to remediate instances in which defendants are legal adults but do not possess the cognitive characteristics of an adult sufficient to justify adult punishment. Given both the scientific impossibility of identifying a precise age at which characteristics of youthfulness end and adulthood begins and the Court’s repeated recognition that these very factors impact culpability, the current approach to sentencing young offenders aged eighteen to twenty-five as adults simply …

Prejudice-Based Rights In Criminal Procedure, Justin Murray

Articles & Chapters

This Article critically examines a cluster of rules that use the concept of prejudice to restrict the scope of criminal defendants’ procedural rights, forming what I call prejudice-based rights. I focus, in particular, on outcome-centric prejudice- based rights—rights that apply only when failing to apply them might cause prejudice by affecting the outcome of the case. Two of criminal defendants’ most important rights fit this description: the right, originating in Brady v. Maryland, to obtain favorable, “material” evidence within the government’s knowledge, and the right to effective assistance of counsel. Since prejudice (or equivalently, materiality) is an element of these …

The Future Of The Confrontation Clause: Semiautonomous And Autonomous Machine Witnesses, Brian Sites

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

How should the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment be interpreted as to machine witnesses? Courts across the country have resisted efforts to cross-examine the human agents who assist machines that generate data used in criminal trials. Such challenges under the Confrontation Clause have been rejected directly and in great number, and the rules of evidence are largely being read to not require the testimony of those who have the best information about the machine's use for the case at hand. This problem arises in an era of machine exceptionalism and widespread use. From increasingly sophisticated forensic lab tools to …

Maintaining The Delicate Balance Between Due Process And Protecting Reporting Students From Re-Traumatization During Cross-Examination: Title Ix Investigations In The Wake Of The Trump Administration's Proposed Regulations, Lauren Bizier

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sexual Contact Between A Suspect And Police Officers: How Far Should Police Go To Prove Prostitution?, Paula Del Valle Torres

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Judging Eyewitness Evidence, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rule 43(A): Remote Witness Testimony And A Judiciary Resistant To Change, Christopher Fobes

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Technology has improved our lives in countless ways. In 1996, it made its way into our federal courtrooms and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure when the Congress codified Rule 43(a). Rule 43(a) permits a witness to testify remotely via telephone or video transmission upon a showing of good cause. Despite this large step into the modern era, some courts are pressed to exclude a witness’s remote testimony because of Rule 43(a)’s burdensome good-cause standard and the risks implicated by such testimony. The judiciary has struggled to find cohesion in determining when remote witness testimony is permissible. This Note critiques …

Finding Justice, Hannah Miller

Capstones

Finding Justice tackles the devastation caused by wrongful conviction through the journey of Jeffrey Deskovic. After serving 16 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, Deskovic has strived to rebuild his life. The film follows him as he finishes law school and runs a foundation that frees the wrongfully convicted, all while dealing with lingering trauma.

Regulating Bite Mark Evidence: Lesbian Vampires And Other Myths Of Forensic Odontology, Jennifer D. Oliva, Valena E. Beety

Washington Law Review

This is the third piece in a trilogy that examines and evaluates the standards that American courts apply to admit forensic “science” evidence proffered by prosecutors in criminal trials. The first two articles in the trilogy expose the criminal courts’ on-going practice of admitting false forensic evidence that is virtually always excluded in civil cases. They also advance a panoply of procedural and evidentiary solutions aimed at reforming this legally unviable discrepancy. Those solutions are court-centric insofar as they advocate for, among other things, open and early criminal discovery, pre-trial Daubert hearings to challenge evidence and experts, and court-appointment of …

Killer's Code: Familial Dna Searches Through Third-Party Databases Under Carpenter, Jesse Kitnick

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Evidence’S #Metoo Moment, Aníbal Rosario-Lebrón

University of Miami Law Review

The #MeToo movement has drawn attention to the prevalence of sexual and gender-based violence. But more importantly, it has exposed how society discounts the testimony of women. This Article unfolds how this credibility discounting is reinforced in our evidentiary system through the use of character for untruthfulness evidence to impeach victims. Specifically, through defense attorneys’ practice of impeaching sexual and gender-based violence victims’ character for truthfulness as a way to introduce functional evidence of credibility biases regarding the trustworthiness of sexual and gender-based violence victims and the plausibility of their testimonies. The Article further shows a correlation between the poor …

Catching Killers With Consumer Genetic Information, Angela Hackstadt

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

In April 2018, Joseph James D'Angelo was arrested as a suspect in the Golden State Killer case. DNA evidence collected at a 1980 crime scene finally shed light on the murderer's identity in early 2018 when investigators turned to GEDMatch, a service that allows users to upload and share DNA data obtained from consumer genetic tests. Consumer genetic testing, DNA collection, and familial DNA searching all raise ethical and privacy concerns. If investigators are using genetic genealogy to solve cold cases, where does that leave consumers?

Law Symposium: Adjudicating Sexual Misconduct On Campus: Title Ix And Due Process In Uncertain Times, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

"I Still Like Smear": The Senate Judiciary Committee's Obstructing Politics Surrounding The Kavanaugh Hearing And A Solution To The Chaos That Ensued, Frank J. Tantone

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

The incredible events and raucous behavior by members of the Committee that colored Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation process rose to a level of intensity and virulence never seen before in this specific area of American government and politics. Nevertheless, the most analogous situation that somewhat closely reflects the events that transpired in 2018 occurred seventeen years earlier. President George H.W. Bush, on July 1, 1991, nominated then District of Columbia Circuit Court Judge, Clarence Thomas, to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Thomas’s confirmation hearing was also opposed from the outset but by civil rights and feminist organizations …

Assessing The Impact Of Police Body Camera Evidence On The Litigation Of Excessive Force Cases, Mitch Zamoff

Georgia Law Review

In the wake of several hotly debated and widely publicized shootings of civilians by police officers, calls for the increased use of body-worn cameras (bodycams) by law enforcement officers have intensified. As police departments across the country expand their use of this emergent technology, courts will increasingly be presented with video evidence from bodycams when making determinations in cases alleging the excessive use of force by the police. This Article tests the hypotheses that bodycam evidence will be dispositive in most excessive force cases and that such evidence will positively impact the way those cases are litigated and decided. In …

The Noisy "Silent Witness": The Misperception And Misuse Of Criminal Video Evidence, Aaron M. Williams

Indiana Law Journal

This Note examines recent developments in the research of situational video evidence biases. Part I examines the current and growing body of psychological research into the various situational biases that can affect the reliability of video evidence and the gaps in this research that require further attention from researchers and legal academics. Because these biases do not “operate in a vacuum,” Part I also examines some of the recent and exciting research into the interaction between situational and dispositional biases. Part II examines the development of camera and video processing technology and its limitations as a means of mitigating such …

Why Do We Admit Criminal Confessions Into Evidence?, David Crump

Seattle University Law Review

There is an enormous literature about the admissibility of criminal confessions. But almost all of it deals with issues related to self-incrimination or, to a lesser extent, with hearsay or accuracy concerns. As a result, the question whether we ever admit criminal confessions into evidence has not been the subject of much analysis. This gap is odd, since confessions are implicitly disfavored by a proportion of the literature and they often collide with exclusionary doctrines. Furthermore, the self-incrimination issue sometimes is resolved by balancing, and it would help if we knew what we were balancing. Therefore, one might ask: Why …

Judges Versus Jurors: Biased Attributions In The Courtroom, Goran Dominioni, Pieter Desmet, Louis Visscher

Cornell International Law Journal

The fundamental purpose of a tort trial is to allocate responsibility. However, attributing fault is difficult, and decades of research in psychology have shown that human beings are prone to make systematic errors in performing this task. What can be done about this? The United States and countries in continental Europe adopt diametrically opposed strategies to reduce errors in the attribution of responsibility in the courtroom. American law delegates fact-finding to jurors and makes some type of evidence inadmissible in court to protect jurors from potentially biasing information, such as character evidence. European legal systems, instead, employ almost exclusively judges …

Can You Hear Me Now: The Impacts Of Prosecutorial Call Monitoring On Defendants' Access To Justice, Hope L. Demer

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Forensic Science Evidence And The Limits Of Cross-Examination, Gary Edmond, Emma Cunliffe, Kristy Martire, Mehera San Roque

All Faculty Publications

The ability to confront witnesses through cross-examination is conventionally understood as the most powerful means of testing evidence, and one of the most important features of the adversarial trial. Popularly feted, cross-examination was immortalised in John Henry Wigmore’s (1863–1943) famous dictum that it is ‘the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth’. Through a detailed review of the cross-examination of a forensic scientist, in the first scientifically-informed challenge to latent fingerprint evidence in Australia, this article offers a more modest assessment of its value. Drawing upon mainstream scientific research and advice, and contrasting scientific knowledge with answers …

Maryland Makes New Evidence Postconviction Review Provisions Available To Defendants With Plea Deals, Felicia Langel

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Social Media, Venue And The Right To A Fair Trial, Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Judicial failure to recognize social media's influence on juror decision making has identifiable constitutional implications. The Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial demands that courts grant a defendant's change of venue motion when media-generated pretrial publicity invades the unbiased sensibility of those who are asked to sit in judgment. Courts limit publicity suitable for granting a defendant's motion to information culled from newspapers, radio, and television reports. Since about 2014, however, a handful of defendants have introduced social media posts to support their claims of unconstitutional bias in the community. Despite defendants' introduction of negative social media in support …