Law Commons^™

The Ambiguity Of Accountability: Deaths In Custody, And The Regulation Of Police Power, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Policing is power. Police authority relies on transactions or relationships of power and influence. The nature of that authority depends on, and takes its form from specific environments of opportunity. Opportunity is, in turn, designated by the aspirations for such relationships, and structures and processes at work towards their regulation. Police authority can be confirmed either legitimately or illegitimately, depending on its context. Essential to the operation of police authority are the "boundaries of permission" which designate the dominion of police power. A principal regulator of police authority, and therefore an important mechanism whereby boundaries of permission are determined, is …

Testing Penry And Its Progeny , Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

In Penry v. Lynaugh, the United States Supreme Court held that the Texas death penalty statute was applied unconstitutionally because the trial court gave no instructions allowing the jury to “consider and give effect to” the defendant's mitigating evidence of organic brain damage, moderate retardation, and disadvantaged background. The Court considered these mitigating factors relevant because of society's steadfast belief in the lesser culpability of defendants whose criminal acts are due to a disadvantaged background, or to emotional and mental disorders. The jury must have full consideration of such evidence in order to give its “reasoned moral response” to the …

The Criminal Defense Lawyer's Reliance On Bias And Prejudice, Eva S. Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is divided into three parts. Part I examines both the many contexts in which criminal defense lawyers and clinical students encounter bias and prejudice,¹² and the commonly-raised objections to its exploitation. Part II looks at the way the tactical use of bias relates to a lawyer's duty of zealous advocacy. Here, the Article focuses on whether existing ethics rules provide guidance for a lawyer's use of bias and whether proposed rules aimed at eliminating such advocacy would improve or diminish justice. This article argues against such efforts because they impinge on legitimate lawyering, and they may distract …

Prosecutors And Domestic Violence: Local Leadership Makes A Difference, Janet E. Findlater, Dawn Van Hoek

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Prosecution Discovery In The U.S.: A Balancing Perspective, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In R. v. Stinchcombe, the Supreme Court of Canada held that the Crown has a legal duty to disclose all relevant information, exculpatory and inculpatory, to a defendant charged with an indictable offence. Left undiscussed by the decision, and by Canadian decisional and statutory law generally, is the scope of discovery against the defence. A description and analysis of the American experience in this regard may be of interest to Canadian practitioners and academics.

Prior to the middle of this century, defence attorneys and prosecutors in the United States depended on preliminary hearings and informal exchanges to obtain information about …

Double Jeopardy, The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, And The Subsequent-Prosecution Dilemma, Elizabeth T. Lear

UF Law Faculty Publications

The choice to embrace a real-offense regime probably constitutes the single most controversial decision made by the Federal Sentencing Commission in drafting the Federal Sentencing Guidelines ("Guidelines"). Real-offense sentencing bases punishment on a defendant's actual conduct as opposed to the offense of conviction. The Guidelines sweep a variety of factors into the sentencing inquiry, including criminal offenses for which no conviction has been obtained. Under the Guidelines, therefore, prosecutorial charging decisions and even verdicts of acquittal after jury trial may have little impact at sentencing.

Long before the adoption of the Guidelines, courts bent on rationalizing the real-offense regime devised …

A Town Hall Meeting On Three Strikes And You're Out, The Hon. William J. Cahill, Moderator

California Agencies

A community discussion of the new law, the initiative, alternatives to prison .

Assuming Facts Not In Evidence: A Response To Russell M. Coombs, Reforming New Jersey Evidence Law On Fresh Complaint Of Rape, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Law, Culture, And Harassment, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A World Without Privacy: Why Property Does Not Define The Limits Of The Right Against Unreasonable Searches And Seizures, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Guilty Pleas, Meredith Kolsky Lewis

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Police Interrogation: The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, The Right To Counsel, And The Incomplete Metamorphosis Of Justice White, 48 U. Miami L. Rev. 511 (1994), Ralph Ruebner

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fifth Amendment Compelled Statements: Modeling The Contours Of Their Protected Scope, Kate Bloch

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Spelling Guilt Out Of A Record? Harmless Error Review Of Conclusive Mandatory Presumptions And Elemental Misdescriptions, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this Article summarizes the history of harmless-error review. Part II explains more fully the constitutional infirmities generated by conclusive mandatory presumptions and elemental misdescriptions, and demonstrates that the unique nature of these infirmities complicates the question of how courts should review them for harmlessness. It also examines the Supreme Court's attempts to answer the questions of whether, and how, conclusive mandatory presumptions and elemental misdescriptions should be reviewed for harmlessness. In so doing, it focuses particularly on how these attempts have been undermined by the Court's failure to take account of the structural rights undermined by these …

Brecht V. Abrahamson: Harmful Error In Habeas Corpus Law, James S. Liebman, Randy Hertz

Faculty Scholarship

For the past two and one-half decades, the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have applied the same rule for assessing the harmlessness of constitutional error in habeas corpus proceedings as they have applied on direct appeal of both state and federal convictions. Under that rule, which applied to all constitutional errors except those deemed per se prejudicial or per se reversible, the state could avoid reversal upon a finding of error only by proving that the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The Supreme Court adopted this stringent standard in Chapman v. California to fulfill the federal …

Is Electrocution An Unconstitutional Method Of Execution? The Engineering Of Death Over The Century, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the Eighth Amendment analysis of electrocution that the courts thus far have not approached. The analysis has two parts. The first inquires whether, according to available scientific evidence, electrocution amounts to cruel and unusual punishment even if it is administered as planned. The second inquires whether, in light of the frequency with which electrocutions are botched, continuing the practice amounts to cruel and unusual punishment even if the properly administered electrocution would not.

When Terry Met Miranda: Two Constitutional Doctrines Collide, Mark A. Godsey

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Process And Prediction: A Return To A Fuzzy Model Of Pre-Trial Detention, Jack F. Williams

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Taking The Fifth: Reconsidering The Origins Of The Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this essay is to cast doubt on two basic elements of the received historical wisdom concerning the privilege as it applies to British North America and the early United States. First, early American criminal procedure reflected less tenderness toward the silence of the criminal accused than the received wisdom has claimed. The system could more reasonably be said to have depended on self-incrimination than to have eschewed it, and this dependence increased rather than decreased during the provincial period for reasons intimately connected with the economic and social context of the criminal trial in colonial America.

Second, …

On The Moral Irrelevance Of Bodily Movements, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

In the mess of confusions called Anglo-American criminal law, writers commonly refer to the "problem of punishing omissions." There is something untoward, they say, about imposing criminal liability on the bystander who could intervene to save a drowning child and fails to do so. Punishing acts in violation of the law is all right, but there is some special difficulty, never completely understood and clarified, about imposing liability for omissions.

The confusion about omissions has suffered unnecessary compounding by the organization of one of the leading casebooks on criminal law. Apparently not quite sure where to locate their cases on …

Brutality In Blue: Community, Authority, And The Elusive Promise Of Police Reform, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

In January 1994, President Clinton invited Kevin Jett, a thirtyone-year-old New York City police officer who walks a beat in the northwest Bronx, to attend the State of the Union Address. Jett stood for Congress's applause as the President called for the addition of 100,000 new community police officers to walk beats across the nation. The crime problem faced by Officer Jett and community police officers like him, the President said, has its roots "in the loss of values, the disappearance of work, and the breakdown of our families and communities." According to the Clinton administration, however, the police – …

Of Laws And Men: An Essay On Justice Marshall's View Of Criminal Procedure, Daniel C. Richman, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

As a general rule, criminal defendants whose cases made it to the Supreme Court between 1967 and 1991 must have thought that, as long as Justice Thurgood Marshall occupied one of the nine seats, they had one vote for sure. And Justice Marshall rarely disappointed them – certainly not in cases of any broad constitutional significance. From his votes and opinions, particularly his dissents, many were quick to conclude that the Justice was another of those "bleeding heart liberals," hostile to the mission of law enforcement officers and ready to overlook the gravity of the crimes of which the defendants …

Character Impeachment Evidence: The Asymmetrical Interaction Between Personality And Situation, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

In Part I of this Comment, I present a short version of my argument against the admissibility of character impeachment evidence of criminal defendants, showing how the key elements ofthis argument are present in Professor Uviller's own Article. In Part II, I suggest that, notwithstanding Professor Uviller's comments to the contrary, an asymmetrical result-never admitting character evidence to impeach criminal defendants but admitting such evidence in some circumstances to impeach other witnesses- is perfectly reasonable. Finally, in Part III, I contend that Professor Uviller's interesting judicial surveys support the solution I have proposed for the problem of character impeachment evidence.

Keeping Cross-Examination Under Control, J. Alexander Tanford

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Connecticut V. Doehr And Procedural Due Process Requirements For Prejudgment Remedies: The Sniadach Tetrad Revisited, Linda Beale

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

How Reasonable Is The Reasonable Man?: Police And Excessive Force, Geoffrey P. Alpert, William C. Smith

Faculty Publications

The authority of the police to use force represents one of the most misunderstood powers granted to representatives of government. Police officers are authorized to use both psychological and physical force to apprehend criminals and solve crimes. This Article focuses on issues of physical force. After a brief introduction and a review of current legal issues in the use of force, the Article discusses "reasonableness" and the unrealistic expectation which is placed on police to understand, interpret, and follow vague "reasonableness" guidelines. Until the expectations and limitations on the use of force are clarified, in behavioral terms, police officers will …

The Court's "Two Model" Approach To The Fourth Amendment: Carpe Diem!, Craig M. Bradley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Consent Exception To The Warrant Requirement, H. Patrick Furman

Publications

No abstract provided.

Depravity Thrice Removed: Using The 'Heinous, Cruel, Or Depraved' Factor To Aggravate Convictions Of Nontriggermen Accomplices In Capital Cases, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

In Tison v. Arizona, the Tison brothers' appeal from their death sentences, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a nontriggerman convicted of first-degree felony murder could constitutionally be executed if he was a major participant in the crime and if he exhibited a reckless disregard for human life. This decision blurred the bright-line rule announced just five years earlier in Enmund v. Florida, which limited the death penalty to defendants who kill, attempt to kill, or at least intend to kill. Tison thus dramatically increased the exposure of nontriggermen to capital punishment, undercutting the death penalty's limited purpose of identifying …

Deciding To Kill: Revealing The Gender In The Task Handed To Capital Jurors, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

Day after day, across this country, ordinary people are summoned to court for a selection process that ultimately leaves them in a room deciding, with other jurors, whether a criminal defendant should be killed. The task handed to these jurors is an awesome, personal, moral decision, encased within the complex legal standards and procedures that constitute modern capital jurisprudence. The doctrine that created and sustains this moment of conscience reflects an ongoing struggle of rule against uncertainty, reason against emotion, justice against mercy, and thus, at one level, male against female. Capital jurisprudence -- the law for deciding whether to …