Law Commons^™

Quantifying Reasonable Doubt: A Proposed Solution To An Equal Protection Problem, Harry D. Saunders

ExpressO

In this article we present the case that the Reasonable Doubt standard is in urgent need of repair. Our research reveals that a previously-recognized phenomenon arising from vagueness of the standard is more consequential than thus far realized and creates a serious equal protection problem. We show that the only legally feasible solution to this problem is to quantify the definition of the standard. While others have examined quantified standards, we make a direct case for it and overcome previous objections to it by offering a way to make it practical and workable.

The solution we envision will require new …

Confronting Death: Sixth Amendment Rights At Capital Sentencing, John G. Douglass

Law Faculty Publications

The Court's fragmentary approach has taken pieces of the Sixth Amendment and applied them to pieces of the capital sentencing process. The author contends that the whole of the Sixth Amendment applies to the whole of a capital case, whether the issue is guilt, death eligibility, or the final selection of who lives and who dies. In capital cases, there is one Sixth Amendment world, not two. In this Article, he argues for a unified theory of Sixth Amendment rights to govern the whole of a capital case. Because both Williams and the Apprendi-Ring-Booker line of cases purport to rest …

Reconceptualizing Due Process In Criminal Justice: Contributions From Law And Social Science, Christopher Slobogin

ExpressO

This article challenges the accepted wisdom, at least since the Supreme Court’s decision in Gault, that procedures in juvenile delinquency court should mimic the adult criminal process. The legal basis for this challenge is Gault itself, as well as the other Supreme Court cases that triggered the juvenile justice revolution of the past decades, for all of these cases relied on the due process clause, not the provisions of the Constitution that form the foundation for adult criminal procedure. That means that the central goal in juvenile justice is fundamental fairness, which does not have to be congruent with the …

Civil And Criminal Recidivists: Extraterritoriality In Tort And Crime, Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

Historically, punitive damage awards and criminal sentences have shared the common justifications of punishment and deterrence, with the culpability of tortfeasors and criminals alike being enhanced as a result of repeat misconduct. The Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in State Farm v. Campbell suggests, however, that the parallels now in effect stop at the state line. The extraterritorial misconduct of tortfeasors is permitted to play a very limited role, if any, in the assessment of punitive damage awards. Meanwhile, such misconduct continues to be used by courts to significantly enhance the sentences of criminal defendants, an asymmetry accentuated by California v. …

Taking Miranda's Pulse, William T. Pizzi, Morris B. Hoffman

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Supreme Court decided five Miranda1 cases in 2003-2004, making this one of the most active fifteen-month periods for the law of self-incrimination since the controversial case was decided in 1966. In this Article, we consider three of those five cases-Chavez v. Martinez, Missouri v. Seibert and United States v. Patane-along with the blockbuster decision four years ago in Dickerson v. United States. in an attempt to decipher what, if anything, this remarkable level of activity teaches us about the direction of the Court's self-incrimination jurisprudence. In the end, while these cases, like those before them, may not entirely clarify …

Purposeless Restraints: Fourteenth Amendment Rationality Scrutiny And The Constitutional Review Of Prison Sentences, Michael P. Oshea

ExpressO

This Article presents an analysis and defense of the Supreme Court's current Eighth Amendment case law on prison sentencing. I argue that in the pivotal cases of Ewing v. California and Harmelin v. Michigan, a plurality of the Supreme Court has assimilated Eighth Amendment review of individual prison sentences to rationality review of state action under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause. When the cases are read rightly, it becomes clear that Eighth Amendment review does not really ask whether a sentence is "grossly disproportionate," as the Court has asserted; rather, it seeks to identify arbitrary and capricious prison sentences …

Ending Impunity The Case For War Crimes Trials In Liberia, Charles Chernor Jalloh, Alhagi Marong

Faculty Publications

This paper argues that Liberia owes a duty under international law to investigate and prosecute the heinous crimes, including torture, rape and extra-judicial killings of innocent civilians, committed in that country by the various warring parties in the course of 14 years of brutal conflict. The authors evaluate the options for prosecution, starting with the possible use of Liberian courts. They argue that even if willing, the national courts are unable to render credible justice that protects the due process rights of the accused given the collapse of legal institutions and the paucity of financial, human and material resources in …

Deviance, Due Process, And The False Promise Of Federal Rule Of Evidence 403, Aviva A. Orenstein

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In a significant break with traditional evidence rules and policies, Federal Rules of Evidence 413 and 414 (concerning rape and child abuse, respectively) allow jurors to use the accused's prior sexual misconduct as evidence of character and propensity. Courts have rejected due process challenges to the new rules, holding that Federal Rule of Evidence 403 serves as a check on any fairness concerns. However, courts' application of Rule 403 in cases involving these sexual propensity rules is troubling. Relying on the legislative history of the new rules and announcing a presumption of admissibility, courts have forsaken the traditional operation of …