Law Commons^™

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 …

The Innocence Effect, Avishalom Tor, Oren Gazal-Ayal

Avishalom Tor

Nearly all felony convictions - about 95 percent - follow guilty pleas, suggesting that plea offers are very attractive to defendants compared to trials. Some scholars argue that plea bargains are too attractive and should be curtailed because they facilitate the wrongful conviction of innocents. Others contend that plea bargains only benefit innocent defendants, providing an alternative to the risk of a harsher sentence at trial. Hence, even while heatedly disputing their desirability, both camps in the debate believe that plea bargains commonly lead innocents to plead guilty. This Article shows, however, that the belief that innocents routinely plead guilty …

Innocence, Privacy, And Targeting In Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence, Sherry F. Colb

Sherry Colb

No abstract provided.

Rate Of False Conviction Of Criminal Defendants Who Are Sentenced To Death, Samuel Gross, Barbara O'Brien, Chen Hu, Edward Kennedy

Edward H. Kennedy

The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to …

The Supreme Court And The Politics Of Death, Stephen F. Smith

Stephen F. Smith

This article explores the evolving role of the U.S. Supreme Court in the politics of death. By constitutionalizing the death penalty in the 1970s, the Supreme Court unintentionally set into motion political forces that have seriously undermined the Court's vision of a death penalty that is fairly administered and imposed only on the worst offenders. With the death penalty established as a highly salient political issue, politicians - legislators, prosecutors, and governors - have strong institutional incentives to make death sentences easier to achieve and carry out. The result of this vicious cycle is not only more executions, but less …

Proportional Mens Rea, Stephen F. Smith

Stephen F. Smith

No abstract provided.

White Collar Over-Criminalization: Deterrence, Plea Bargaining, And The Loss Of Innocence, Lucian Dervan

Lucian E Dervan

Overcriminalization takes many forms and impacts the American criminal justice system in varying ways. This article focuses on a select portion of this phenomenon by examining two types of overcriminalization prevalent in white collar criminal law. The first type of over criminalization discussed in this article is Congress’s propensity for increasing the maximum criminal penalties for white collar offenses in an effort to punish financial criminals more harshly while simultaneously deterring others. The second type of overcriminalization addressed is Congress’s tendency to create vague and overlapping criminal provisions in areas already criminalized in an effort to expand the tools available …

The Innocent Defendant’S Dilemma: An Innovative Empirical Study Of Plea Bargaining’S Innocence Problem, Lucian Dervan, Vanessa Edkins

Lucian E Dervan

In 1989, Ada JoAnn Taylor was accused of murder and presented with stark options. If she pleaded guilty, she would be rewarded with a sentence of ten to forty years in prison. If, however, she proceeded to trial and was convicted, she would likely spend the rest of her life behind bars. Over a thousand miles away in Florida and more than twenty years later, a college student was accused of cheating and presented with her own incentives to admit wrongdoing and save the university the time and expense of proceeding before a disciplinary review board. Both women decided the …

The Practice Of Criminal Defence: Why We Fight And Defend Those Most Imperilled, Every Day, Beau James Brock

Beau James Brock

Being a criminal defense attorney is a special calling. Aside from dealing with the human element, they also fight daily to see the government acts within the bounds established by the Bill of Rights.

The Law And Economics Of The Exclusionary Rule, Tonja Jacobi

Tonja Jacobi

The exclusionary rule is premised on behavioral assumptions about how the law shapes police conduct. Using a law and economics approach, this Article draws out the implications of these assumptions. It shows: first, that in attempting to deter police violations, the rule actually encourages police harassment of ordinary citizens, particularly minorities; and second, when applied at trial, the rule decreases the benefit of the doubt that defendants who are most likely to be actually innocent can receive. Judicial attempts to mitigate these costs of the exclusionary rule in fact exacerbate them. The manifold jurisprudential rules that make up this area …

Innocent And Found Guilty: In An Imperfect Justice System, Responsiveness And Disclosure Can Help Prevent Wrongful Convictions, Leonard N. Sosnov

Leonard N Sosnov

No abstract provided.

The Right To Effective Assistance Of Capital Postconviction Counsel: Constitutional Implications Of Statutory Grants Of Capital Counsel, Celestine Richards Mcconville

Celestine Richards McConville

The problem of incompetent counsel in capital cases is hardly a secret. Much of the attention, however, has focused on incompetent capital trial counsel. This article, by contrast, addresses the problem of incompetent capital counsel at the state and federal postconviction levels. Like the trial and direct review phases, the capital postconviction phase is critical to an accurate and reliable determination of guilt and death-eligibility. Thus, competent counsel is just as necessary during capital postconviction proceedings as it is during capital trial and direct review proceedings.

The Supreme Court, however, has made clear that there is no constitutional right to …