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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Modest Impact Of The Modern Confrontation Clause, Jeffrey Bellin, Diana Bibb
The Modest Impact Of The Modern Confrontation Clause, Jeffrey Bellin, Diana Bibb
Faculty Publications
The Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause grants criminal defendants the right "to be confronted with the witnesses against" them. A strict reading of this text would transform the criminal justice landscape by prohibiting the prosecution's use of hearsay at trial. But until recently, the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Clause was closer to the opposite. By tying the confrontation right to traditional hearsay exceptions, the Court's longstanding precedents granted prosecutors broad freedom to use out-of-court statements to convict criminal defendants.
The Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington was supposed to change all that. By severing the link between the …
The Evidence Rules That Convict The Innocent, Jeffrey Bellin
The Evidence Rules That Convict The Innocent, Jeffrey Bellin
Faculty Publications
Over the past decades, DNA testing has uncovered hundreds of examples of the most important type of trial errors: innocent defendants convicted of serious crimes like rape and murder. The resulting Innocence Movement spurred reforms to police practices, forensic science, and criminal procedure. This Article explores the lessons of the Innocence Movement for American evidence law.
Commentators often overlook the connection between the growing body of research on convictions of the innocent and the evidence rules. Of the commonly identified causes of false convictions, only flawed forensic testimony has received sustained attention as a matter of evidence law. But other …