Law Commons^™

Silencing Grand Jury Witnesses, R. Michael Cassidy

Indiana Law Journal

This Article addresses one crucial aspect of the ongoing debate about grand jury transparency. Assuming that well over half the states and the federal government continue to employ the grand jury to investigate felony offenses, and assuming that these proceedings continue to be shielded from public view, should witnesses themselves be allowed to discuss their testimony with the press or with each other? This larger question raises two narrow but very important subsidiary issues. First, does a prosecutor who conditions a written proffer or cooperation agreement with a grand jury witness on the witness’s promise not to inform other targets, …

A Welfarist Perspective On Lies, Ariel Porat, Omri Yadlin

Indiana Law Journal

Should a Muslim employee who, in order to avoid discrimination, falsely stated in his job interview that he is Christian be fired for his dishonesty? Should a buyer of a tract of land who, before contracting, conducted an expensive investigation that revealed a high likelihood of mineral deposits be subject to liability for fraud because he told the seller he knew nothing about the land’s mineral potential before purchase? Is a doctor violating her legal duties toward her patient if she convinces him to get vaccinated on the pretext that it is in his best interest when it is instead …

The Eighth Amendment’S Lost Jurors: Death Qualification And Evolving Standards Of Decency, Aliza Plener Cover

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court’s inquiry into the constitutionality of the death penalty has over-looked a critical “objective indicator” of society’s “evolving standards of decency”: the rate at which citizens are excluded from capital jury service under Witherspoon v. Illinois due to their conscientious objections to the death penalty. While the Supreme Court considers the prevalence of death verdicts as a gauge of the nation’s moral climate, it has ignored how the process of death qualification shapes those verdicts. This blind spot biases the Court’s estimation of community norms and dis-torts its Eighth Amendment analysis.

This Article presents a quantitative study of …

Contemporary Perspectives On Wrongful Conviction: An Introduction To The 2016 Innocence Network Conference, San Antonio, Texas, Gwen Jordan, Aliza B. Kaplan, Valena Beety, Keith A. Findley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Innocent people have been convicted of crimes they did not commit throughout history. The exact number of wrongful convictions is unknowable. In 2014, however, the National Academy of Sciences (“NAS”) released a study of the cases of criminal defendants who were convicted and sentenced to death and concluded that 4.1% were wrongfully convicted. The researchers explained that “this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.” According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1,561,500 adults were incarcerated in federal prisons, state prisons, and county jails in 2014, …