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Of Laws And Men: An Essay On Justice Marshall's View Of Criminal Procedure, Daniel C. Richman, Bruce A. Green
Of Laws And Men: An Essay On Justice Marshall's View Of Criminal Procedure, Daniel C. Richman, Bruce A. Green
Faculty Scholarship
As a general rule, criminal defendants whose cases made it to the Supreme Court between 1967 and 1991 must have thought that, as long as Justice Thurgood Marshall occupied one of the nine seats, they had one vote for sure. And Justice Marshall rarely disappointed them – certainly not in cases of any broad constitutional significance. From his votes and opinions, particularly his dissents, many were quick to conclude that the Justice was another of those "bleeding heart liberals," hostile to the mission of law enforcement officers and ready to overlook the gravity of the crimes of which the defendants …
Brecht V. Abrahamson: Harmful Error In Habeas Corpus Law, James S. Liebman, Randy Hertz
Brecht V. Abrahamson: Harmful Error In Habeas Corpus Law, James S. Liebman, Randy Hertz
Faculty Scholarship
For the past two and one-half decades, the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have applied the same rule for assessing the harmlessness of constitutional error in habeas corpus proceedings as they have applied on direct appeal of both state and federal convictions. Under that rule, which applied to all constitutional errors except those deemed per se prejudicial or per se reversible, the state could avoid reversal upon a finding of error only by proving that the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The Supreme Court adopted this stringent standard in Chapman v. California to fulfill the federal …