Law Commons^™

Error Aversions And Due Process, Brandon L. Garrett, Gregory Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

William Blackstone famously expressed the view that convicting the innocent constitutes a much more serious error than acquitting the guilty. This view is the cornerstone of due process protections for those accused of crimes, giving rise to the presumption of innocence and the high burden of proof required for criminal convictions. While most legal elites share Blackstone’s view, the citizen-jurors tasked with making due process protections a reality do not share the law’s preference for false acquittals over false convictions.

Across multiple national surveys, sampling more than 10,000 people, we find that a majority of Americans views false acquittals and …

The Death Penalty And The Fifth Amendment, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

Can the Supreme Court find unconstitutional something that the text of the Constitution “contemplates”? If the Bill of Rights mentions a punishment, does that make it a “permissible legislative choice” immune to independent constitutional challenges?

Recent developments have given new hope to those seeking constitutional abolition of the death penalty. But some supporters of the death penalty continue to argue, as they have since Furman v. Georgia, that the death penalty must be constitutional because the Fifth Amendment explicitly contemplates it. The appeal of this argument is obvious, but its strength is largely superficial, and is also mostly irrelevant …

Justice On Appeal In Criminal Cases: A Twentieth-Century Perspective, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

Criminal appeals was a hot topic in the 1970s, reflecting the politics of the Great Society and the development of the constitutional requirements of due process. There was then widespread agreement that the function of the criminal appeal was to assure that the appropriate judges were giving visible attention to all convictions to assure that they were justified. This paper will pose the question: what has become of that vision of a former generation?

Procedural Justice: Tempering The State’S Response To Domestic Violence, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part I of this Article documents the recent legal reforms implemented on behalf of battered women in the criminal and civil justice systems. These include warrantless arrest, mandatory arrest laws, and no-drop prosecution policies, as well as civil protection order statutes and statutory modifications recommended by the Model State Code on Domestic and Family Violence. Part II describes the ways in which these reforms have improved the state's responsiveness to victims, yet simultaneously entailed serious costs by diminishing batterers' perceptions of procedural justice. Part III defines the building blocks of procedural justice and reviews the social science data demonstrating its …

Essential Elements, Nancy J. King, Susan Riva Klein

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Court has struggled for well over a century with the issue of who has final authority to define what is a "crime" for purposes of applying procedural protections guaranteed by the Constitution in criminal cases. Just as labeling an action "civil" may allow the government to circumvent constitutional criminal procedure entirely, so labeling a fact an "affirmative defense" or a "sentencing factor" instead of an element of the offense may allow the government to escape constitutional criminal procedure selectively, bypassing the burden of proof, pleading, and jury requirements that would otherwise apply to an offense element. In its decision …

Parole Revocation And The Right To Counsel, Paul W. Grimm

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.