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Full-Text Articles in Law
Smoke But No Fire: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted Of Crimes That Never Happened, Jessica S. Henry
Smoke But No Fire: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted Of Crimes That Never Happened, Jessica S. Henry
Jessica S. Henry
Nearly one-third of exonerations involve the wrongful conviction of an innocent person for a crime that never actually happened, such as when the police plant drugs on an innocent person, a scorned lover invents a false accusation, or an expert mislabels a suicide as a murder. Despite the frequency with which no-crime convictions take place, little scholarship has been devoted to the subject. This Article seeks to fill that gap in the literature by exploring no-crime wrongful convictions as a discrete and unique phenomenon within the wrongful convictions universe. This Article considers three main factors that contribute to no-crime wrongful …
Brass Rings And Red-Headed Stepchildren: Protecting Active Criminal Informants, Michael L. Rich
Brass Rings And Red-Headed Stepchildren: Protecting Active Criminal Informants, Michael L. Rich
Michael L Rich
Informants are valued law enforcement tools, and active criminal informants – criminals who maintain their illicit connections and feed evidence to the police in exchange for leniency – are the most prized of all. Yet society does little to protect active criminal informants from the substantial risks inherent in their recruitment and cooperation. As I have explored elsewhere, society’s apathy toward these informants is a result of distaste with their disloyalty and a concern that protecting them will undermine law enforcement effectiveness. This Article takes a different tack, however, building on existing scholarship on vulnerability and paternalism to argue that …
Lessons Of Disloyalty In The World Of Criminal Informants, Michael L. Rich
Lessons Of Disloyalty In The World Of Criminal Informants, Michael L. Rich
Michael L Rich
Without informants, policing would grind to a halt. The majority of drug and organized crime prosecutions hinge on the assistance of confidential informants, and white collar prosecutions and anti-terrorism investigations increasingly depend on them. Yet society by and large hates informants. The epithets used to describe them – “snitch,” “rat,” and “weasel,” among others – suggest the reason: the informant, by assisting the police, is guilty of betrayal. And betrayal is, in the words of George Fletcher, “one of the basic sins of our civilization.” But identifying disloyalty as the reason for society’s disdain raises more questions than it answers. …
Truth Or Consequences: Self-Incriminating Statements And Informant Veracity, Mary Bowman
Truth Or Consequences: Self-Incriminating Statements And Informant Veracity, Mary Bowman
Mary N. Bowman
Courts treat self-incriminating statements by criminal informants as a significant factor favoring the reliability of the informant’s information when making probable cause determinations for the issuance of search warrants. Courts do so even though admissions of criminal activity usually undercut, rather than support, credibility. In using self-incriminating statements to support the informant’s reliability, courts tend to rely on a theory with significant theoretical flaws. Furthermore, recent United States Supreme Court jurisprudence in other contexts undercuts the reliability of using self-incriminating statements to support the veracity of other information. If courts adequately scrutinize the informant’s self-incriminating statements and the circumstances surrounding …