Law Commons^™

The Impact Of Joinder And Severance On Federal Criminal Cases: An Empirical Study, Andrew D. Leipold, Hossein A. Abbasi

Vanderbilt Law Review

Dave is in trouble. It was bad enough to be arrested for bank robbery; now he has learned that the prosecutor plans to join the current charge with three other, unrelated bank robberies and present all four counts in a single trial. To his priest and to his lawyer, Dave admits that he committed the first and the second robberies, but he did not commit the third or fourth. Dave is smart enough to realize, however, that once the jury starts hearing evidence of some of the crimes-all of which will sound quite similar-his ability to cast doubt on the …