Law Commons^™

Error Aversions And Due Process, Brandon L. Garrett, Gregory Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

William Blackstone famously expressed the view that convicting the innocent constitutes a much more serious error than acquitting the guilty. This view is the cornerstone of due process protections for those accused of crimes, giving rise to the presumption of innocence and the high burden of proof required for criminal convictions. While most legal elites share Blackstone’s view, the citizen-jurors tasked with making due process protections a reality do not share the law’s preference for false acquittals over false convictions.

Across multiple national surveys, sampling more than 10,000 people, we find that a majority of Americans views false acquittals and …

Aedpa Repeal, Brandon L. Garrett, Kaitlin Phillips

Faculty Scholarship

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (“AEDPA”) dramatically altered the scope of federal habeas corpus. Enacted in response to a domestic terrorism attack, followed by a capital prosecution, and after decades of proposals seeking to limit post conviction review of death sentences, and Supreme Court rulings severely limiting federal habeas remedies, AEDPA was ratified with little discussion or deliberation. The law and politics of death penalty litigation, which had been particularly active since the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated all death penalty schemes in its 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia, culminated in restrictions for all federal habeas …

Life Without Parole Sentencing In North Carolina, Brandon L. Garrett, Travis M. Seale-Carlisle, Karima Modjadidi, Kristen M. Renberg

Faculty Scholarship

What explains the puzzle of life without parole (LWOP) sentencing in the United States? In the past two decades, LWOP sentences have reached record highs, with over 50,000 prisoners serving LWOP. Yet during this same period, homicide rates have steadily declined. The U.S. Supreme Court has limited the use of juvenile LWOP in Eighth Amendment rulings. Further, death sentences have steeply declined, reaching record lows. Although research has examined drivers of incarceration patterns for certain sentences, there has been little research on LWOP imposition. To shed light on what might explain the sudden rise of LWOP, we examine characteristics of …

Monitoring The Misdemeanor Bail Reform Consent Decree In Harris County, Texas, Brandon L. Garrett, Sandra Guerra Thompson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Law Of Corporate Investigations And The Global Expansion Of Corporate Criminal Enforcement, Jennifer Arlen, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

The United States model of corporate crime control, developed over the last two decades, couples a broad rule of corporate criminal liability with a practice of reducing sanctions, and often withholding conviction, for firms that assist enforcement authorities by detecting, reporting, and helping prove criminal violations. This model, while subject to skepticism and critiques, has attracted interest among reformers in overseas nations that have sought to increase the frequency and size of their enforcement actions. In both the U.S. and abroad, insufficient attention has been paid to how laws controlling the conduct of corporate investigations are critical to regimes of …

Declining Corporate Prosecutions, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, people across the United States protested that "too big to jail" banks were not held accountable after the financial crisis. Little has changed. Newly collected data concerning enforcement during the Trump Administration has made it possible to assess what impact a se­ries of new policies has had on corporate enforcement. To provide a snapshot comparison, in its last twenty months, the Obama Administration levied $I4.15 billion in total corporate penalties by prosecuting seventy-one financial institu­tions and thirty-four public companies. During the first twenty months of the Trump Administration, corporate penalties declined to …

The Transparency Of Jail Data, William E. Crozier, Brandon L. Garrett, Arvind Krishnamurthy

Faculty Scholarship

Across the country, pretrial policies and practices concerning the use of cash bail are in flux, but it is not readily possible for members of the public to assess whether or how those changes in policy and practice are affecting outcomes. A range of actors affect the jail population, including: law enforcement who make arrest decisions, magistrates and judges who rule at hearings on pretrial conditions and may modify such conditions, prosecutors and defense lawyers who litigate at hearings, pretrial-service providers who assist in evaluation and supervision of persons detained pretrial, and the custodian of the jail who supervises facilities. …

The State Of The Death Penalty, Ankur Desai, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

The death penalty is in decline in America and most death penalty states do not regularly impose death sentences. In 2016 and 2017, states reached modern lows in imposed death sentences, with just thirty-one defendants sentenced to death in 2016 and thirty-nine in 2017, as compared with over three hundred per year in the 1990s. In 2016, only thirteen states imposed death sentences, and in 2017, fourteen did so, although thirty-one states retain the death penalty. What explains this remarkable and quite unexpected trend? In this Article, we present new analysis of state-level legislative changes that might have been expected …

The End Of Intuition-Based High-Crime Areas, Ben Grunwald, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In 2000, the Supreme Court held in Illinois v. Wardlow that a suspect’s presence in a “high-crime area” is relevant in determining whether an officer has reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop. Despite the importance of the decision, the Court provided no guidance about what that standard means, and over fifteen years later, we still have no idea how police officers understand and apply it in practice. This Article conducts the first empirical analysis of Wardlow by examining data on over two million investigative stops conducted by the New York Police Department from 2007 to 2012.

Our results suggest …

Self-Policing: Dissemination And Adoption Of Police Eyewitness Policies In Virginia, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Professional policing organizations emphasize the importance of the adoption of sound police policies and procedures, but traditionally doing so has been left to individual agencies. State and local government typically does not closely regulate police, and neither federal constitutional rulings nor state law typically sets out in any detail the practices that police should follow. Thus, law enforcement agencies must themselves draft and disseminate policy. This paper presents the results of studies used to assess the adoption of eyewitness identification policies by law enforcement agencies in Virginia. Policymakers were focused on this problem because Virginia experienced a series of DNA …

Challenges Facing Judges Regarding Expert Evidence In Criminal Cases, Paul W. Grimm

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Honesty Without Truth: Lies, Accuracy, And The Criminal Justice Process, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

Focusing on “lying” is a natural response to uncertainty but too narrow of a concern. Honesty and truth are not the same thing and conflating them can actually inhibit accuracy. In several settings across investigations and trials, the criminal justice system elevates compliant statements, misguided beliefs, and confident opinions while excluding more complex evidence. Error often results. Some interrogation techniques, for example, privilege cooperation over information. Those interactions can yield incomplete or false statements, confessions, and even guilty pleas. Because of the impeachment rules that purportedly prevent perjury, the most knowledgeable witnesses may be precluded from taking the stand. The …

Evidence-Informed Criminal Justice, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

The American criminal justice system is at a turning point. For decades, as the rate of incarceration exploded, observers of the American criminal justice system criticized the enormous discretion wielded by key actors, particularly police and prosecutors, and the lack of empirical evidence that has informed that discretion. Since the 1967 President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, there has been broad awareness that the criminal system lacks empirically informed approaches. That report unsuccessfully called for a national research strategy, with an independent national criminal justice research institute, along …

Why Do Prosecutors Say Anything? The Case Of Corporate Crime, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

Criminal procedure law does not require prosecutors to speak outside of court. Professional regulations and norms discourage and sometimes prohibit prosecutors from doing so. Litigation often rewards strategic and tactical maintenance of the element of surprise. Institutional incentives encourage bureaucrats, especially those not bound by procedural requirements of administrative law, to decline to commit themselves to future action. In the always exceptional field of corporate crime, however, the Department of Justice and federal line prosecutors have developed practices of signaling and describing their exercise of discretion through detailed press releases, case filings, and policy documents. This contribution to a symposium …

Cumulative Constitutional Rights, Kerry Abrams, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Cumulative constitutional rights are ubiquitous. Plaintiffs litigate multiple constitutional violations, or multiple harms, and judges use multiple constitutional provisions to inform interpretation. Yet judges, litigants, and scholars have often criticized the notion of cumulative rights, including in leading Supreme Court rulings, such as Lawrence v. Texas, Employment Division v. Smith, and Miranda v. Arizona. Recently, the Court attempted to clarify some of this confusion. In its landmark opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court struck down state bans on same-sex marriage by pointing to several distinct but overlapping protections inherent in the Due Process Clause, including the right to individual …

Constraining Monitors, Veronica Root

Faculty Scholarship

Monitors oversee remediation efforts at dozens, if not hundreds, of institutions that are guilty of misconduct. The remediation efforts that the monitors of today engage in are, in many instances, quite similar to activities that were once subject to formal court oversight. But as the importance and power of monitors has increased, the court’s oversight of monitors and the agreements that most often result in monitorships has, at best, been severely diminished and, at worst, vanished altogether. Additionally, statutory efforts to provide formal guidance and restrictions on monitorships have stalled and published bar guidance has taken a nonbinding advisory form. …

The Fragile Promise Of Open-File Discovery, Ben Grunwald

Faculty Scholarship

Under traditional rules of criminal discovery, defendants are entitled to little prosecutorial evidence and are thus forced to negotiate plea agreements and prepare for trial in the dark. In an effort to expand defendants’ discovery rights, a number of states have recently enacted “open-file” statutes, which require the government to share the fruits of its investigation with the defense. Legal scholars have widely supported these reforms, claiming that they level the playing field and promote judicial efficiency by decreasing trials and speeding up guilty pleas. But these predictions are based largely on intuition and anecdotal data without extended theoretical analysis …

The Death Penalty And The Fifth Amendment, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

Can the Supreme Court find unconstitutional something that the text of the Constitution “contemplates”? If the Bill of Rights mentions a punishment, does that make it a “permissible legislative choice” immune to independent constitutional challenges?

Recent developments have given new hope to those seeking constitutional abolition of the death penalty. But some supporters of the death penalty continue to argue, as they have since Furman v. Georgia, that the death penalty must be constitutional because the Fifth Amendment explicitly contemplates it. The appeal of this argument is obvious, but its strength is largely superficial, and is also mostly irrelevant …

How Bayesian Are Judges?, Jack Knight, Mitu Gulati, David F. Levi

Faculty Scholarship

Richard Posner famously modeled judges as Bayesians in his book, How Judges Think? A key element of being Bayesian is that one constantly updates with new information. This model of the judge who is constantly learning and updating, particularly about local conditions, also is one of the reasons why the factual determinations of trial judges are given deference on appeal. But do judges in fact act like Bayesian updaters? Judicial evaluations of search warrant requests for probable cause provides an ideal setting to examine this question because the judges in this context have access to information on how well they …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Professors Of Law In Support Of Petitioner, Barbara Allen Babcock, Jeffrey Bellin, Darryl K. Brown, Robert P. Burns, James E. Coleman Jr., Lisa Kern Griffin, Robert P. Mosteller, Deborah Tuerkheimer, Neil Vidmar, Jessica L. West

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Development And Evolution Of The U.S. Law Of Corporate Criminal Liability And The Yates Memo, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Criminal Adjudication, Error Correction, And Hindsight Blind Spots, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

Concerns about hindsight in the law typically arise with regard to the bias that outcome knowledge can produce. But a more difficult problem than the clear view that hindsight appears to provide is the blind spot that it actually has. Because of the conventional wisdom about error review, there is a missed opportunity to ensure meaningful scrutiny. Beyond the confirmation biases that make convictions seem inevitable lies the question whether courts can see what they are meant to assess when they do look closely for error. Standards that require a retrospective showing of materiality, prejudice, or harm turn on what …

Brief For Amici Curiae Professors Of Law In Support Of Petitioner, Barbara Allen Babcock, Jeffrey Bellin, Robert P. Burns, Sherman J. Clark, James E. Coleman Jr., Lisa Kern Griffin, Robert P. Mosteller, Deborah Tuerkheimer, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Decision-Making In The Dark: How Pre-Trial Errors Change The Narrative In Criminal Jury Trials, Kara Mackillop, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade and a half, a great deal of attention has rightfully been given to the issue of wrongful convictions. In 2003, Jim Dwyer, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck published Actual Innocence, an eyeopening treatise on the reality of wrongful convictions in the United States. In the years since, more than 1400 innocent persons have been exonerated, and a very diverse research community of attorneys, academics, social scientists, and activists has developed in response to the realization offlaws in our criminal justice system. In 2012, Brandon Garrett's Convicting the Innocent quantitatively evaluated the first 250 DNA exonerations and …

Barriers To Entry And Justice Ginsburg’S Criminal Procedure Jurisprudence, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Missing Mcveigh, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Prosecutorial Discretion In Three Systems: Balancing Conflicting Goals And Providing Mechanisms For Control, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

In regulating the authority and discretion exercised by contemporary prosecutors,national systems balance a variety of goals, many of which are in tension or direct conflict. Forexample, making prosecutors politically or democratically accountable may conflict with theprinciple of prosecutorial neutrality, and the goal of efficiency may conflict with accuracy. National systems generally seek to foster equal treatment of defendants and respect for theirrights while also controlling or reducing crime and protecting the rights of victims. Systems thatrecognize prosecutorial discretion also seek to establish and implement policy decisions aboutthe best ways to address various social problems, priorities, and the allocation of resources. …

Is Now The Time For Major Federal Sentencing Reform?, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The North Carolina Racial Justice Act: An Essay On Substantive And Procedural Fairness In Death Penalty Litigation, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.