Law Commons^™

"I'M Going To Dinner With Frank": Admissibility Of Nontestimonial Statements Of Intent To Prove The Actions Of Someone Other Than The Speaker—And The Role Of The Due Process Clause, Lynn Mclain

All Faculty Scholarship

A woman tells her roommate that she is going out to dinner with Frank that evening. The next morning her battered body is found along a country road outside of town. In Frank’s trial for her murder, is her statement to her roommate admissible to place Frank with her that night? Since the Court’s 2004 Crawford decision, the confrontation clause is inapplicable to nontestimonial hearsay such as this.

American jurisdictions are widely divided on the question of admissibility under their rules of evidence, however. Many say absolutely not. A sizeable number unequivocally say yes. A small number say yes, but …

Unscrambling The Confusion: Applying The Correct Standard Of Review For Rape-Shield Evidentiary Rulings, Robert E. Steinbuch

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Seeking Truth On The Other Side Of The Wall: Greenleaf’S Evangelists Meet The Federal Rules, Naturalism, And Judas, Nancy J. Kippenhan

Faculty Publications and Presentations

An inquiry that seeks truth by accepting only natural answers excludes the possibility of the sacred or supernatural, building a wall that forecloses a complete exploration for the truth it seeks. Without analysis, critics dismiss sources presenting supernatural explanations, and those who believe sacred works have no factual foundation accept without investigation any popular theory that appears attractive. The rules of evidence expressly seek truth, wherever it lies. Noted legal scholar Simon Greenleaf used evidentiary principles to demonstrate the factual credibility of the Gospels in his Testimony of the Evangelists. This Article examines Greenleaf’s analysis, applying current rules of evidence …

When Facts Are Thin On The Ground, Julia Romasevych, Paul Antiss, Nancy Amoury Combs

Popular Media

Fact-finding at the international tribunals is not as precise as we think. Nancy Combs, Professor of Law at William and Mary Law School, explores this in her new book 'Fact-finding without facts: the uncertain evidentiary foundations of international criminal convictions'.

Fact-Finding Without Facts, Nancy Amoury Combs

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Revealing And Thereby Tempering The Abuses Of Government Created Evidence In Criminal Trials, Robert P. Mosteller

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Danger To Confidential Communications In The Mismatch Between The Fourth Amendment's "Reasonable Expectation Of Privacy" And The Confidentiality Of Evidentiary Privileges, Robert P. Mosteller, Kenneth S. Broun

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Individualization Claims In Forensic Science: Still Unwarranted, Jonathan Koehler, Michael J. Saks

Faculty Working Papers

In a 2008 paper published in the Vanderbilt Law Review entitled "The Individualization Fallacy in Forensic Science Evidence," we argued that no scientific basis exists for the proposition that forensic scientists can "individualize" an unknown marking (such as a fingerprint, tire track, or handwriting sample) to a particular person or object to the exclusion of all others in the world. In this special issue of the Brooklyn Law Review, we clarify, refine, and extend some of the ideas presented in Fallacy. Some of the refinements are prompted by Professor David Kaye's paper, also in this issue of the Review, in …

The Exclusionary Rule In Immigration Proceedings: Where It Was, Where It Is, Where It May Be Going, Irene Scharf

Faculty Publications

The case alerted me to the continuing issue concerning the treatment of alleged violations of Fourth Amendment rights in immigration court, with this article the result of research conducted relating thereto. Beyond reviewing the relevant views of the federal courts of appeals; the administrative tribunal that handles appeals of immigration court cases, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA); and even local immigration courts; I consider whether the jurisprudence has remained static since the Supreme Court's watershed opinion on the issue about twenty-five years ago. I also offer suggestions as to how to effectively, fairly, and efficiently resolve the issues raised …

Probability, Individualization, And Uniqueness In Forensic Science Evidence: Listening To The Academies, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

Day in and day out, criminalists testify to positive, uniquely specific identifications of fingerprints, bullets, handwriting, and other trace evidence. A committee of the National Academy of Sciences, building on the writing of academic commentators, has called for sweeping changes in the presentation and production of evidence of identification. These include some form of circumscribed and standardized testimony. But the Academy report is short on the specifics of the testimony that would be legally and professionally allowable. This essay outlines possible types of testimony that might harmonize the testimony of criminalists with the actual state of forensic science. It does …

"You Crossed The Fog Line!"—Kansas, Pretext, And The Fourth Amendment, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

In Whren, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned pretextual traffic stops. In practice the holding of Whren condones police investigations that target certain suspect classes of people, like Hispanics, for increased police scrutiny. In permitting pretextual stops, the Court ignored the risk that such practices will encourage police to distort the truth, overlooked the cost of under-enforcement of the laws, and ignored the consequences to the criminal justice system of race and ethnicity based discrimination.

Kansas law exacerbates these risks by making fog-line stops a model for protecting ulterior motives from a sifting judicial inquiry. In Kansas, it makes …

An Exclusionary Rule For Police Lies, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

Our legal system treats the police as if they are impartial fact gatherers, trained and motivated to gather facts both for and against guilt, rather than biased advocates attempting to disprove innocence, which is the reality. Because of its partiality in favor of officers, the criminal justice system lacks the appropriate structure to expose and effectively deter police lies, which distort the truth about criminal or unconstitutional conduct.

This Article, presented in three parts, argues that the current system should be changed to provide the structure necessary to promote honest police work. Specifically, it urges a modification to the exclusionary …

Hearings, Mark Spottswood

Faculty Working Papers

This article explores a constantly recurring procedural question: When is fact-finding improved by a live hearing, and when would it be better to rely on a written record? Unfortunately, when judges, lawyers, and rulemakers consider this issue, they are led astray by the widely shared—but false—assumption that a judge can best determine issues of credibility by viewing the demeanor of witnesses while they are testifying. In fact, a large body of scientific evidence indicates that judges are more likely to be deceived by lying or mistaken witnesses when observing their testimony in person than if the judges were to review …

Scientific Evidence As Foreign Law, Edward K. Cheng

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Most contemporary debates about scientific evidence focus on admissibility under Daubert and the Federal Rules of Evidence. That bias is quite understandable-after all, it is the framework imposed by the United States Supreme Court. Daubert, however, rests on a fundamental assumption: that courts should treat scientific facts like any other adjudicative facts ultimately left to the jury. Perhaps the involvement of specialized knowledge requires judges to act as gatekeepers to ensure some basic level of reliability, but under Daubert, scientific facts are still just facts. As I will argue, scientific facts fit awkwardly into the conventional framework for conceptualizing and …

Melendez-Diaz And The Right To Confrontation, Craig M. Bradley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em, Or, The Voir Dire In Dallas County, Jeffrey D. Kahn

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Voir dire is Law French for “to speak the truth.” In the United States and a few other common-law countries that still use juries, the term describes the process of selecting jurors who will hear the evidence presented at trial, render a verdict, and sometimes determine punishment. The translation suggests a search for jurors who can render a fair and impartial verdict. Attorneys try to discover and remove jurors who seem unable or unlikely to speak the truth, such as those who nurture irrational prejudices or harbor private grievances.

In most federal courts, the judge is the primary conduit for …

Blind Expertise, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

The United States spends many billions of dollars on its system of civil litigation, and expert witnesses appear in a huge portion of cases. Yet litigants select and retain expert witnesses in ways that create the appearance of biased hired guns on both sides of every case, thereby depriving factfinders of a clear view of the facts. As a result, factfinders too often arrive at the wrong conclusions, thus undermining the deterrence and compensation functions of litigation. Court-appointment of experts has been widely proposed as a solution, yet it raises legitimate concerns about accuracy and has failed to gain traction …

Outsourcing Investigations, Elena Baylis

Articles

This article addresses the International Criminal Court’s reliance on third-party investigations in the absence of its own international police force. In addition to cooperation from sometimes reluctant states, the ICC and other international criminal tribunals have come to rely on a network of NGOs and UN entities focused on postconflict justice work to provide critical evidence. This reliance raised problems in the ICC Office of the Prosecutor's first case against Thomas Lubanga. The use of third-party evidence raises questions regarding confidentiality and disclosure, the integrity of the evidence-gathering process, and the equality of arms between the prosecution and the defense. …

Coconspirators, “Coventurers,” And The Exception Swallowing The Hearsay Rule, Ben L. Trachtenberg

Faculty Publications

In recent years, prosecutors - sometimes with the blessing of courts - have argued that when proving the existence of a “conspiracy” to justify admission of evidence under the Coconspirator Exception to the Hearsay Rule, they need show only that the declarant and the defendant were “coventurers” with a common purpose, not coconspirators with an illegal purpose. Indeed, government briefs and court decisions specifically disclaim the need to show any wrongful goal whatsoever. This Article contends that such a reading of the Exception is mistaken and undesirable. Conducted for this article, a survey of thousands of court decisions, including the …

Adverse Inference About Adverse Inferences: Restructuring Juridical Roles For Responding To Evidence Tampering By Parties To Litigation, Dale A. Nance

Faculty Publications

For at least two centuries, Anglo-American courts have responded to a party's evidence tampering by allowing the opponent to argue to jurors that they should draw an adverse inference against the offending party in deciding the merits of the case. This Article argues that the use of such inferences, and invitations to draw them, should be radically curtailed, not only because of the ambiguities and risks of prejudice that such inferences entail, but more importantly because they reflect and contribute to a confusion of roles in which the jury is enlisted to participate in the management of the pre-trial conduct …

Scientific Fraud, Paul C. Giannelli

Faculty Publications

Although scientific fraud is rare, when it occurs, it needs to be identified and documented. This article discusses two of the most notorious cases in forensic science. Part I focuses on the misconduct of Fred Zain, a serologist with the West Virginia State Police crime laboratory and later with the County Medical Examiner’s laboratory in San Antonio, Texas. Part II examines the misconduct of Joyce Gilchrist, a forensic examiner with the Oklahoma City Police Department.

Scientific Evidence In Criminal Prosecutions - A Retrospective, Paul C. Giannelli

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Federal Philosophy Of Science: A Deconstruction- And A Reconstruction, Susan Haack

Articles

No abstract provided.

Sex, Threats, And Absent Victims: The Lessons Of Regina V. Bedingfield For Modern Confrontation And Domestic Violence Cases, Aviva A. Orenstein

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In 2004, Crawford v. Washington, authored by Justice Antonin Scalia, revolutionized the law of confrontation by requiring that, aside from two discrete exceptions, all testimonial statements (those made with the expectation that they will serve to prosecute the accused) be subject to cross-examination. This new interpretation of the Sixth Amendment confrontation clause has profoundly affected domestic violence cases, making it much harder to prosecute them successfully.

Although Justice Scalia’s approach to confrontation is new, it is strikingly similar to the analysis in Regina v. Bedingfield, a notorious English murder case, which excluded from the evidence an alleged statement by the …

The Future Of Inadvertent Disclosure: The Lingering Need To Revise Professional Conduct Rules, Paula Schaefer

Scholarly Works

In recent years, the American Bar Association and state bars have deferred to lawmakers to create a legal solution to the problems associated with inadvertent disclosure. When Federal Rule of Evidence 502 was enacted in September 2008, lawmakers and commentators praised the new rule as a remedy to costly pre-production privilege review and as an answer to the uncertainties of waiver law.

This article examines the numerous inadvertent disclosure issues that remain unanswered for litigators and transactional attorneys, and considers the new problems created by Federal Rule of Evidence 502. In 2009, transactional attorneys have no practical means to obtain …