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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Politics Of Privacy In The Criminal Justice System: Information Disclosure, The Fourth Amendment, And Statutory Law Enforcement Exemptions, Erin Murphy
Michigan Law Review
When criminal justice scholars think of privacy, they think of the Fourth Amendment. But lately its domain has become far less absolute. The United States Code currently contains over twenty separate statutes that restrict both the acquisition and release of covered information. Largely enacted in the latter part of the twentieth century, these statutes address matters vital to modern existence. They control police access to driver's licenses, educational records, health histories, telephone calls, email messages, and even video rentals. They conform to no common template, but rather enlist a variety of procedural tools to serve as safeguards - ranging from …
The Mosaic Theory Of The Fourth Amendment, Orin S. Kerr
The Mosaic Theory Of The Fourth Amendment, Orin S. Kerr
Michigan Law Review
In the Supreme Court's recent decision on GPS surveillance, United States v. Jones, five justices authored or joined concurring opinions that applied a new approach to interpreting Fourth Amendment protection. Before Jones, Fourth Amendment decisions had always evaluated each step of an investigation individually. Jones introduced what we might call a "mosaic theory" of the Fourth Amendment, by which courts evaluate a collective sequence of government activity as an aggregated whole to consider whether the sequence amounts to a search. This Article considers the implications of a mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment. It explores the choices and puzzles that …
A Failure Of The Fourth Amendment & Equal Protection's Promise: How The Equal Protection Clause Can Change Discriminatory Stop And Frisk Policies, Brando Simeo Starkey
A Failure Of The Fourth Amendment & Equal Protection's Promise: How The Equal Protection Clause Can Change Discriminatory Stop And Frisk Policies, Brando Simeo Starkey
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Terry v. Ohio changed everything. Before Terry, Fourth Amendment law was settled. The Fourth Amendment had long required that police officers have probable cause in order to conduct Fourth Amendment invasions; to administer a "reasonable" search and seizure, the state needed probable cause. But in 1968, the Warren Court, despite its liberal reputation, lowered the standard police officers had to meet to conduct a certain type of search: the so-called "'stop' and 'frisk.'" A "stop and frisk" occurs when a police officer, believing a suspect is armed and crime is afoot, stops the suspect, conducts an interrogation, and pats him …
Empty Promises: Miranda Warnings In Noncustodial Interrogations, Aurora Maoz
Empty Promises: Miranda Warnings In Noncustodial Interrogations, Aurora Maoz
Michigan Law Review
You have the right to remain silent; anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney; if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you at the state's expense. In 2010, the Supreme Court declined an opportunity to resolve the question of what courts should do when officers administer Miranda warnings in a situation where a suspect is not already in custody-in other words, when officers are not constitutionally required to give or honor these warnings. While most courts have found a superfluous warning to be …
A Tale Of Two Sciences, Erin Murphy
A Tale Of Two Sciences, Erin Murphy
Michigan Law Review
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . .. . So might one describe the contrasting portraits of DNA's ascension in the criminal justice system that are drawn in David Kaye's The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence and Sheldon Krimsky and Tania Simoncelli's Genetic Justice: DNA Data Banks, Criminal Investigations, and Civil Liberties. For Kaye, the double helix stands as the icon of twenty-first-century achievement, a science menaced primarily by the dolts (lawyers, judges, and the occasional analyst) who misuse it. For Krimsky and Simoncelli, DNA is a seductive forensic tool that is …
The Problem Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon
The Problem Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon
Michigan Law Review
The legal problem of policing is how to regulate police authority to permit officers to enforce law while also protecting individual liberty and minimizing the social costs the police impose. Courts and commentators have largely treated the problem of policing as limited to preventing violations of constitutional rights and its solution as the judicial definition and enforcement of those rights. But constitutional law and courts alone are necessarily inadequate to regulate the police. Constitutional law does not protect important interests below the constitutional threshold or effectively address the distributional impacts of law enforcement activities. Nor can the judiciary adequately assess …
One More Good Reason For In-Car Videotaping Of Traffic Stops: An Accurate Assessment Of "Consent", Robert L. White
One More Good Reason For In-Car Videotaping Of Traffic Stops: An Accurate Assessment Of "Consent", Robert L. White
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat
There are a number of reasons why legislative reform mandating the use of in-car cameras in police cruisers would benefit the criminal justice system in Illinois. In-car cameras provide evidence for cases involving traffic violations or intoxicated motorists. They produce instantly available training materials. They also assist victims of police misconduct, as well as officers defending themselves against misconduct claims. This Comment looks to add to this list of benefits the role in-car cameras can play in assessing the validity of consents to search that officers obtain during traffic stops.
The Latest 4th Amendment Privacy Conundrum: "Stingrays", Max Bulinksi
The Latest 4th Amendment Privacy Conundrum: "Stingrays", Max Bulinksi
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat
Wired is reporting renewed hubbub regarding statutory and Fourth Amendment protections of individuals’ privacy in the digital age. This time, it comes in the form of federal officers using a fake cellphone tower (called a “stingray”) to locate their suspect, Mr. Rigmaiden, by tracking the location of his cellphone. According to an affidavit submitted to the court, the stingray only captures the equivalent of header information – such as the phone or account number assigned to the aircard as well as dialing, routing and address information involved in the communication.
Signal Lost: Is A Gps Tracking System The Same As An Eyeball?, Eric Andrew Felleman
Signal Lost: Is A Gps Tracking System The Same As An Eyeball?, Eric Andrew Felleman
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat
On November 8th, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in United States v. Jones. One of the primary issues in the case is whether law enforcement personnel violated Mr. Jones' Fourth Amendment right to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures by using a GPS tracking device to monitor the location of his car without a warrant. The 7th Circuit and the 9th Circuit have both recently held that use of GPS tracking is not a search under the Fourth Amendment.
Bringing Clarity To Administrative Search Doctrine: Distinguishing Dragnets From Special Subpopulation Searches, Eve Brensike Primus
Bringing Clarity To Administrative Search Doctrine: Distinguishing Dragnets From Special Subpopulation Searches, Eve Brensike Primus
Articles
Anyone who has been stopped at a sobriety checkpoint, screened at an international border, scanned by a metal detector at an airport or government building, or drug tested for public employment has been subjected to an administrative search or seizure. Searches of public school students, government employees, and probationers are characterized as administrative, as are business inspections and-increasingly-wiretaps and other searches used in the gathering of national security intelligence. In other words, the government conducts thousands of administrative searches every day. None of these searches requires either probable cause or a search warrant. Instead, courts evaluating administrative searches need only …
J.D.B. V. North Carolina And The Reasonable Person, Christopher Jackson
J.D.B. V. North Carolina And The Reasonable Person, Christopher Jackson
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
This Term, the Supreme Court was presented with a prime opportunity to provide some much-needed clarification on a "backdrop" issue of law-one of many topics that arises in a variety of legal contexts, but is rarely analyzed on its own terms. In J.D.B. v. North Carolina, the Court considered whether age was a relevant factor in determining if a suspect is "in custody" for Miranda purposes, and thus must have her rights read to her before being questioned by the police. Miranda, like dozens of other areas of law, employs a reasonable person test on the custodial question: it asks …
¡Silencio! Undocumented Immigrant Witnesses And The Right To Silence, Violeta R. Chapin
¡Silencio! Undocumented Immigrant Witnesses And The Right To Silence, Violeta R. Chapin
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
At a time referred to as "an unprecedented era of immigration enforcement," undocumented immigrants who have the misfortune to witness a crime in this country face a terrible decision. Calling the police to report that crime will likely lead to questions that reveal a witness's inmigration status, resulting in detention and deportation for the undocumented immigrant witness. Programs like Secure Communities and 287(g) partnerships evidence an increase in local immigration enforcement, and this Article argues that undocumented witnesses' only logical response to these programs is silence. Silence, in the form of a complete refusal to call the police to report …
How United States V. Jones Can Restore Our Faith In The Fourth Amendment, Erica Goldberg
How United States V. Jones Can Restore Our Faith In The Fourth Amendment, Erica Goldberg
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
United States v. Jones, issued in January of this year, is a landmark case that has the potential to restore a property-based interpretation of the Fourth Amendment to prominence. In 1967, the Supreme Court abandoned its previous Fourth Amendment framework, which had viewed the prohibition on unreasonable searches in light of property and trespass laws, and replaced it with a rule protecting the public’s reasonable expectations of privacy. Although the Court may have intended this reasonable expectations test to provide more protection than a test rooted in property law, the new test in fact made the Justices’ subjective views about …
Pretrial Incentives, Post-Conviction Review, And Sorting Criminal Prosecutions By Guilt Or Innocence, Samuel R. Gross
Pretrial Incentives, Post-Conviction Review, And Sorting Criminal Prosecutions By Guilt Or Innocence, Samuel R. Gross
Articles
The fundamental problem with false convictions is that they are unobserved, and in general, unobservable. We don't spot them when they happen-if we did, they wouldn't happen-and in most cases we can't identify them after the fact. We have no general reliable test for innocence or guilt; if we did, we'd use it at trial. As result, we often say that we don't know for sure whether a convicted criminal defendant is innocent or guilty, or even that we can't know for sure. But this isn't exactly true-or rather, its truth depends on who we mean by "we."
Prosecuting The Informant Culture, Andrew E. Taslitz
Prosecuting The Informant Culture, Andrew E. Taslitz
Michigan Law Review
Alexandra Natapoff, in her outstanding new book, Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, makes a compelling case for reform of the system by which we regulate police use of criminal informants. Indeed, as other writers have discussed, law enforcement's overreliance on such informants has led to a "snitching culture" in which informant snitching replaces other forms of law enforcement investigation (pp. 12, 31, 88-89). Yet snitches, especially jailhouse snitches, are notoriously unreliable.
Don't Answer The Door: Montejo V. Louisiana Relaxes Police Restrictions For Questioning Non-Custodial Defendants, Emily Bretz
Don't Answer The Door: Montejo V. Louisiana Relaxes Police Restrictions For Questioning Non-Custodial Defendants, Emily Bretz
Michigan Law Review
In 2009, the Supreme Court held in Montejo v. Louisiana that a defendant may validly waive his Sixth Amendment right to counsel during police interrogation, even if police initiate interrogation after the defendant's invocation of the right at the first formal proceeding. This Note asserts that Montejo significantly altered the Sixth Amendment protections available to represented defendants. By increasing defendants' exposure to law enforcement, the decision allows police to try to elicit incriminating statements and waivers of the right to counsel after the defendant has expressed a desire for counsel. In order to protect the defendant's constitutional guarantee of a …
Jail Strip-Search Cases: Patterns And Participants, Margo Schlanger
Jail Strip-Search Cases: Patterns And Participants, Margo Schlanger
Articles
Among Marc Galanter’s many important insights is that understanding litigation requires understanding its participants. In his most-cited work, Why the “Haves” Come Out Ahead, Galanter pioneered a somersault in the typical approach to legal institutions and legal change: Most analyses of the legal system start at the rules end and work down through institutional facilities to see what effect the rules have on the parties. I would like to reverse that procedure and look through the other end of the telescope. Let’s think about the different kinds of parties and the effect these differences might have on the way the …
Government Entrepreneurship: How Cop, Direct Supervision, And A Business Plan Helped To Solve Santa Ana's Crime Problems, Paul M. Walters, Russell Davis
Government Entrepreneurship: How Cop, Direct Supervision, And A Business Plan Helped To Solve Santa Ana's Crime Problems, Paul M. Walters, Russell Davis
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
Much has been written about Community Oriented Policing for police agencies and about the Direct Supervision concept for jail operations. Each strategy is at the cutting edge of its respective discipline. This Commentary describes how the progressive City of Santa Ana implemented both strategies— along with a visionary business plan to operate its jail at minimal cost—to combat crime successfully. The City’s business plan relies on entrepreneurship that is too often lacking in government programs. This approach has led to a number of innovations in law enforcement, corrections, and government service. Pay-to-Stay programs provide yet another example of how Santa …
Separate And Unequal: Federal Tough-On-Guns Program Targets Minority Communities For Selective Enforcement, Bonita R. Gardner
Separate And Unequal: Federal Tough-On-Guns Program Targets Minority Communities For Selective Enforcement, Bonita R. Gardner
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Article examines the Project Safe Neighborhoods program and considers whether its disproportionate application in urban, majority- African American cities (large and small) violates the guarantee of equal protection under the law. This Article will start with a description of the program and how it operates-the limited application to street-level criminal activity in predominately African American communities. Based on preliminary data showing that Project Safe Neighborhoods disproportionately impacts African Americans, the Article turns to an analysis of the applicable law. Most courts have analyzed Project Safe Neighborhoods' race-based challenges under selective prosecution case law, which requires a showing by the …
Criminal Justice And The 1967 Detroit 'Riot', Yale Kamisar
Criminal Justice And The 1967 Detroit 'Riot', Yale Kamisar
Articles
Forty years ago the kindling of segregation, racism, and poverty burst into the flame of urban rioting in Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, and other U.S. cities. The following essay is excerpted from a report by Professor Emeritus Yale Kamisar filed with the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) regarding the disorders that took place in Detroit July 23-28, 1967. The report provided significant material and was the subject of one article in the series of pieces on the anniversary of the disturbances that appeared last summer in The Michigan Citizen of Detroit. Immediately after the disturbances ended, …
Miranda's Reprieve: How Rehnquist Spared The Landmark Confession Case, But Weakened Its Impact, Yale Kamisar
Miranda's Reprieve: How Rehnquist Spared The Landmark Confession Case, But Weakened Its Impact, Yale Kamisar
Articles
June marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most praised, most maligned-and probably one of the most misunderstood-U.S. Supreme Court cases in American history, Miranda v. Arizona. The opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren conditions police questioning of people in custody on the giving of warnings about the right to remain silent, the right to counsel and the waiver of those rights. 384 U.S. 436. This ruling represents a compromise of sorts between the former elusive, ambiguous and subjective voluntariness/totality-of-the-circumstances test and extreme proposals that would have eliminated police interrogation altogether. But William H. Rehnquist didn't see Miranda that …
Jurisdictional Competition In Criminal Justice: How Much Does It Really Happen?, Samuel R. Gross
Jurisdictional Competition In Criminal Justice: How Much Does It Really Happen?, Samuel R. Gross
Articles
It's a familiar image from American fiction: the bad guy ridden out of town on a rail' or beaten up by the sheriff and dumped on the next train out. Where do they go? Banishment is an age-old form of punishment. In America, where an atomized criminal justice system has survived into the twentyfirst century, we can continue to try to dump our criminals on our near neighbors, and-as Doron Teichman points out in his interesting articlethat is not the only way that American states, counties, and cities can try to reduce their own crime rates by exporting crime elsewhere.3 …
Discrimination In Sentencing On The Basis Of Afrocentric Features, William T. Pizzi, Irene V. Blair, Charles M. Judd
Discrimination In Sentencing On The Basis Of Afrocentric Features, William T. Pizzi, Irene V. Blair, Charles M. Judd
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Article does not challenge the prior research on sentencing discrimination between racial categories that found no significant difference in sentences given to similarly-situated African Americans and Whites. In fact, in the jurisdiction investigated- Florida- no discrimination between African Americans and Whites was found in the sentences imposed on defendants, looking only at racial category differences. Rather, the research suggests that in focusing exclusively on discrimination between racial groups, the research has missed a type of discrimination related to race that is taking place within racial categories: namely, discrimination on the basis of a person's Afrocentric features. By Afrocentric features, …
The "Routine Traffic Stop" From Start To Finish: Too Much "Routine," Not Enough Fourth Amendment, Wayne R. Lafave
The "Routine Traffic Stop" From Start To Finish: Too Much "Routine," Not Enough Fourth Amendment, Wayne R. Lafave
Michigan Law Review
Yale Kamisar, about which I have said too much elsewhere in this issue of the Review, could rightly be called "Mr. Confessions," for he has not only authored books and a host of articles on the subject of police interrogation, but for years has been printing Miranda cards in his basement and selling them to police departments all across the nation. Moreover, he may be the only law professor in the country who has both personally coerced a confession and had a confession coerced out of him. As Kamisar has himself noted, my own "intellectual sandbox" has been the …
Bête Noire: How Race-Based Policing Threatens National Security, Lenese C. Herbert
Bête Noire: How Race-Based Policing Threatens National Security, Lenese C. Herbert
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Article asserts that race-based policing, enabled and exacerbated by race-blind judicial review, creates an ire with a purpose that promises, especially after September 11, to make us all less safe. The illegitimate marginalization of American citizens aggravates an already alienated population and primes them for cooperation with those who seek to harm the United States. Race-based policing guts the expectation of fair-dealing, legitimacy, and justice in the criminal justice system, creating marginalized populations, especially of African Americans. Lack of judicial redress in the face of such policing irrevocably stains already beleaguered African Americans (and others so policed) as inferior …
Road Work: Racial Profiling And Drug Interdiction On The Highway, Samuel R. Gross, Katherine Y. Bames
Road Work: Racial Profiling And Drug Interdiction On The Highway, Samuel R. Gross, Katherine Y. Bames
Articles
Hypocrisy about race is hardly new in America, but the content changes. Recently the spotlight has been on racial profiling. The story of Colonel Carl Williams of the New Jersey State Police is a wellknown example. On Sunday, February 28, 1999, the Newark Star Ledger published a lengthy interview with Williams in which he talked about race and drugs: "Today... the drug problem is cocaine or marijuana. It is most likely a minority group that's involved with that."4 Williams condemned racial profiling - "As far as racial profiling is concerned, that is absolutely not right. It never has been con-doned …
Racial Profiling Under Attack, Samuel R. Gross, D. Livingston
Racial Profiling Under Attack, Samuel R. Gross, D. Livingston
Articles
The events of September 11, 2001, have sparked a fierce debate over racial profiling. Many who readily condemned the practice a year ago have had second thoughts. In the wake of September 11, the Department ofJustice initiated a program of interviewing thousands of men who arrived in this country in the past two years from countries with an al Qaeda presence-a program that some attack as racial profiling, and others defend as proper law enforcement. In this Essay, Professors Gross and Livingston use that program as the focus of a discussion of the meaning of racial profiling, its use in …
When Success Breeds Attack: The Coming Backlash Against Racial Profiling Studies, David A. Harris
When Success Breeds Attack: The Coming Backlash Against Racial Profiling Studies, David A. Harris
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
The author proposes that in an ongoing debate on questions concerning the possibility of racial or other types of invidious discrimination by public institutions, we should apply a prima facie standard to these claims in the public arena. In other words, if African Americans or Latinos say that they have been the victims of racial profiling, we should not ask for conclusive proof in the strictest statistical sense; rather, if they can present some credible evidence beyond anecdotes, some statistics that indicate that we may, indeed, have a problem, the burden should then shift to the public institution-here, law enforcement …
"Suitable Targets"? Parallels And Connections Between "Hate" Crimes And "Driving While Black", Lu-In Wang
"Suitable Targets"? Parallels And Connections Between "Hate" Crimes And "Driving While Black", Lu-In Wang
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Essay seeks to show that there is less to some of these apparent differences than meets the eye. While hate crimes may tend to be less routine and more violent than discriminatory traffic stops, closer examination of each shows the need to complicate our understanding of both. The work of social scientists who have studied bias-motivated violence and of legal scholars who have studied racial profiling- prominent among them my fellow panelist, Professor David A. Harris- reveals striking similarities and connections between the two practices. In particular, both hate crimes and racial profiling tend to be condemned only at …
Striking A Sincere Balance: A Reasonable Black Person Standard For "Location Plus Evasion" Terry Stops, Mia Carpiniello
Striking A Sincere Balance: A Reasonable Black Person Standard For "Location Plus Evasion" Terry Stops, Mia Carpiniello
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Randall Susskind originally proposed the "reasonable African American standard” for Terry stops as a way to minimize racial disparities in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. This paper will expand upon Susskind's suggested standard within the specific context of "location plus evasion" stops, in which suspects are stopped upon flight in a high-crime neighborhood. Part one will present the reasonable Black person standard in the context of Illinois v. Wardlow, a recent "location plus evasion case." Part one will then show how this alternative standard better accounts for Wardlow's "raced" decision to flee, the police officers' "raced" decision to stop him, and …