Law Commons^™

Remapping The Path Forward: Toward A Systemic View Of Forensic Science Reform And Oversight, Jennifer E. Laurin

Jennifer E. Laurin

The 2009 report of the National Academy of Sciences on the state of forensic science in the American criminal justice system has fundamentally altered the landscape for scientific evidence in the criminal process, and is now setting the terms for the future of forensic science reform and practice. But the accomplishments of the Report must not obscure the vast terrain that remains untouched by the path of reform that it charts. This Article aims to illuminate a critical and currently neglected feature of that territory, namely, the manner in which police and prosecutors, as upstream users of forensic science, select …

Remapping The Path Forward: Toward A Systemic View Of Forensic Science Reform And Oversight, Jennifer E. Laurin

Jennifer E. Laurin

The 2009 report of the National Academy of Sciences on the state of forensic science in the American criminal justice system has fundamentally altered the landscape for scientific evidence in the criminal process, and is now setting the terms for the future of forensic science reform and practice. But the accomplishments of the Report must not obscure the vast terrain that remains untouched by the path of reform that it charts. This Article aims to illuminate a critical and currently neglected feature of that territory, namely, the manner in which police and prosecutors, as upstream users of forensic science, select …

Watching The Watchers: The Growing Privatization Of Criminal Law And The Need For Limits On Neighborhood Watch Associations, Sharon Finegan

Sharon Finegan

On the night of February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman, a member of a neighborhood watch program, was patrolling his community in Sanford, Florida when he spotted Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American high school student, walking through the neighborhood. Zimmerman called 911 and indicated that he was following "a real suspicious guy." Zimmerman then disregarded the police dispatcher's request that he discontinue following Martin and approached the teenager. In the resulting confrontation, Zimmerman used his legally-owned semi-automatic handgun to shoot and kill Martin. Martin had been returning from a local convenience store to his father's fiancée's house, where he was spending …

Death Ineligibility And Habeas Corpus, Lee B. Kovarsky

Lee Kovarsky

I examine the interaction between what I call 'death ineligibility' challenges and the habeas writ. A death ineligibility claim alleges that a criminally-confined capital prisoner belongs to a category of offenders for which the Eighth Amendment forbids execution. By contrast, a 'crime innocence' claim alleges that, colloquially speaking, a capital prisoner 'wasn’t there, and didn’t do it.' In the last eight years, the Supreme Court has identified several new ineligibility categories, including mentally retarded offenders. Configured primarily to address crime innocence and procedural challenges, however, modern habeas law is poorly equipped to accommodate ineligibility claims. Death Ineligibility traces the genesis …

Of “Just Systems” And Lotteries: Thoughts And Reflections On Maples V. Thomas, Ryan K. Melcher

Ryan K Melcher

In 2012, the Supreme Court handed down its seven-to-two ruling in the case of Maples v. Thomas, a sad tale of attorney-ethics disasters and a seemingly broken (assuming it ever worked) Alabama criminal-justice system. Although the Court held that the “extraordinary” facts of the case warranted excusing Maples’s procedural default in his federal habeas corpus petition (namely, his failure to file a petition in time), it did not make entirely clear whether this was a one-time-only deal or a “template” (as dissenting Justice Scalia asserted) for future petitioners seeking relief based on similar falters of their post-conviction-level attorneys. This Article …

Reforming The Right To Legal Counsel In Singapore, Jack Tsen-Ta Lee

Jack Tsen-Ta LEE

This is an opinion prepared for the Criminal Law Committee of the Law Society of Singapore on an arrested person’s right to legal counsel in Singapore. Specifically, it deals with the following: (1) it summarizes pertinent aspects of the law relating to the right to legal counsel in Singapore; (2) it surveys a number of ASEAN and Commonwealth jurisdictions to determine how long after apprehension the right to counsel is generally accorded to arrested persons, and compares the legal position in these jurisdictions to the situation in Singapore; and (3) it examines two rights ancillary to the right to legal …

The Politics Of Privacy In The Criminal Justice System: Information Disclosure, The Fourth Amendment, And Statutory Law Enforcement Exemptions, Erin E. Murphy

Erin E Murphy

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 federal code currently contains over twenty separate statutes that restrict both 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 drivers’ licenses, education records, health histories, telephone calls, e-mail 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 …

When The Emperor Has No Clothes Iii: Personnel Policies And Conflicts Of Interest In Prosecutors’ Offices, Carrie Leonetti

Carrie Leonetti

This Article examines and evaluates an alternate cause of overcharging, one that has not received much attention from courts or in the scholarly literature: the extent to which internal personnel policies in prosecutors’ offices create incentives to overcharge. The number and seriousness of convictions and the amount of punishment are the basic standards by which the success of prosecutors is measured. In order to curb overcharging and other forms of prosecutorial misconduct, courts should disqualify prosecutors whose offices explicitly or implicitly determine their job status, compensation, or advancement on the basis of their conviction or sentencing record on the ground …

Crimes, Widgets, And Plea Bargaining: An Analysis Of Charge Content, Pleas And Trials, Kyle F. Graham

Kyle F Graham

This article considers how the composition and gravamen of a charged crime can affect the willingness and ability of the parties in a criminal case to engage in plea bargaining. Most of the prevailing descriptions of plea bargaining ignore or discount the importance of charge content in plea negotiations; in fact, one leading commentator has likened crimes to widgets insofar as plea bargaining is concerned. In developing its counter-thesis, this article reviews seven years (FY2003-FY2009) of federal conviction data, focusing on those crimes that produce the most, and fewest, trials, relative to how often they are alleged; the most, and …

The Problem Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon

Rachel A. Harmon

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 …

Federal Habeas Review Of State Prisoner Claims Based On Alleged Violations Of Prophylactic Rules Of Constitutional Criminal Procedure: Reviving And Extending Stone V. Powell, William A. Schroeder

William A. Schroeder

Prophylactic rules are judge-made rules promulgated by the Supreme Court to help protect underlying Constitutional rights when the Court believes that the right cannot otherwise be adequately protected. It has been said that a rule is prophylactic only when it can be violated without violating the Constitution. Over the course of the last fifty years, prophylactic rules of criminal procedure-and claims based on alleged violations of these rules- have proliferated. At the same time habeas petitions in the federal courts have also proliferated.

Numerous commentators have argued in recent years that “federal habeas review of state criminal convictions is desperately …