Law Commons^™

Bias, Subjectivity, And Wrongful Conviction, Katherine Judson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

A talk about bias, subjectivity and wrongful convictions.

Blackness As Character Evidence, Mikah K. Thompson

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Federal Rule of Evidence 404 severely limits the government’s ability to offer evidence of a defendant’s character trait of violence to prove action in conformity with that trait on the occasion in question. The Rule states that such character evidence is generally inadmissible when offered to prove propensity. The Rule also allows the government to offer evidence of an alleged victim’s character for peacefulness in homicide cases where the defendant asserts the self-defense privilege. Although criminal defendants may offer character evidence under limited circumstances, Rule 404 creates a significant disincentive for doing so. Where a defendant offers evidence of an …

The Banality Of Wrongful Executions, Brandon L. Garrett

Michigan Law Review

What is so haunting about the known wrongful convictions is that those cases are the tip of the iceberg. Untold numbers of unnoticed errors may send the innocent to prison — and to the death chamber. That is why I recommend to readers a trilogy of fascinating new books that peer deeper into this larger but murkier problem. Outside the rarified group of highly publicized exonerations, which have themselves done much to attract attention to the causes of wrongful convictions, errors may be so mundane that no one notices them unless an outsider plucks a case from darkness and holds …

Doctors & Juries, Philip G. Peters Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Physicians widely believe that jury verdicts are unfair. This Article tests that assumption by synthesizing three decades of jury research. Contrary to popular belief the data show that juries consistently sympathize more with doctors who are sued than with patients who sue them. Physicians win roughly half of the cases that expert reviewers believe physicians should lose and nearly all of the cases that experts feel physicians should win. Defendants and their hired experts, it turns out, are more successful than plaintiffs and their hired experts at persuading juries to reach verdicts contrary to the opinions of independent reviewers.

Discovery And Presentation Of Evidence In Adversary And Nonadversary Proceedings, E. Allan Lind, John Thibaut, Laurens Walker

Michigan Law Review

In order to evaluate fully the advantage claimed for the adversary model we sought to add a third element that would test the hypothesis under a variety of conditions. The degree to which the evidence discovered in a case favors one party at the expense of another appeared to meet this criterion. This fact-distribution element is a pervasive condition of legal conflict resolution that, intuition suggests, may significantly influence information search and transmission. Further, this variable could be easily and accurately controlled by regulating the flow of favorable information acquired by the subjects during the experiment.

The remainder of this …