Law Commons^™

Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel In Dna Cases: A Re-Appraisal Of The Effectiveness Of Strickland V. Washington Judges, Albert E. Scherr

Law Faculty Scholarship

The advent of forensic DNA evidence has made possible the prosecution of many crimes that would otherwise be un-prosecutable or that would have been weak cases, if prosecuted. At the same time, forensic DNA technology has raised very substantial concerns about the reliability of evidence previously viewed as the gold standard in proof Wrongful convictions by the Innocence Project and others have established that eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, bad forensics and mistaken guilty pleas occur. The much lesser known but still very troubling concern is with the performance of defense counsel in cases in which the prosecution has forensic DNA …

Liberty And Justice For All?: A Pathfinder On The Use Of Lyrics As Evidence In Civil And Criminal Trial, Stephanie Washington

Upper Level Writing Requirement Research Papers

No abstract provided.

The Prosecutor In The Mirror: Conviction Integrity Units And Brady Claims, Lissa Griffin, Daisy Mason

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that a prosecutor has a due process obligation to disclose exculpatory evidence that is material to guilt or punishment. The failure to fulfill this duty is particularly insidious because it bears directly on both whether an innocent defendant may have been convicted as well as on whether the adjudicatory process was fair. The failure to disclose exculpatory evidence has been characterized as “epidemic” and has been documented to have made a major, outsized contribution in cases that resulted in exonerations. It is not surprising, then, that conviction integrity units in prosecutor’s offices …

Criminal Justice Secrets, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The American criminal justice system is cloaked in secrecy. The government employs covert surveillance operations. Grand-jury proceedings are hidden from public view. Prosecutors engage in closed-door plea-bargaining and bury exculpatory evidence. Juries convict defendants on secret evidence. Jury deliberations are a black box. And jails and prisons implement clandestine punishment practices. Although there are some justifications for this secrecy, the ubiquitous nature of it is contrary to this nation’s Founders’ steadfast belief in the transparency of criminal justice proceedings. Further, the pervasiveness of secrecy within today’s criminal justice system raises serious constitutional concerns. The accumulation of secrecy and the aggregation …

Lawyers' Right Of Professional Self-Defense And Its Limits, Douglas R. Richmond

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Case For The Abolition Of Criminal Confessions, Guha Krishnamurthi

SMU Law Review

Confessions have long been considered the gold standard of evidence in criminal proceedings. But in truth, confession evidence imposes significant harms on our criminal justice system, through false convictions and other violations of defendants’ due process and moral rights. Moreover, our current doctrine is unable to eliminate or even curb these harms.

This Article makes the case for the abolition of confession evidence in criminal proceedings. Though it may seem radical, abolition is sensible and best furthers our penological goals. As a theoretical matter, confession evidence has low probative value, but it is prejudicially overvalued by juries and judges. Consequently, …

The Entity Attorney-Client Privilege Meets The Twenty-First Century: Rethinking Functional Equivalent Analysis In The Time Of A Nonemployee Workforce., Grace M. Giesel

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Courts have struggled with whether an entity’s attorney-client privilege can protect communications between the entity’s lawyer and a nonemployee who has information the entity’s lawyer needs to best advise the entity. The nonemployee might be a former employee. But increasingly in recent times, the nonemployee is an individual who was never an entity employee. Corporations and other entities have incorporated nonemployees in their economic enterprises in all sorts of roles—roles employees may have held in the past. Many courts have accepted that the privilege can apply to communications involving former employees.

When faced with nonemployees who are not former employees, …

Changemakers: Master Of Studies In Law: 'Radical Imagination, Radical Listening', Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Stereotyping Evidence: The Civil Exception To The Federal Rape Shield Law And Its Embedded Sexual Stereotypes, Ramona Albin

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Are The Federal Rules Of Evidence Unconstitutional?, Ethan J. Leib

American University Law Review

The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) rest on an unacceptably shaky constitutional foundation. Unlike other regimes of federal rulemaking—for Civil Procedure, for Criminal Procedure, and for Appellate Procedure—the FRE rulemaking process contemplated by the Rules Enabling Act is both formally and functionally defective because Congress enacted the FRE as a statute first but purports to permit the Supreme Court to revise, repeal, and amend those laws over time, operating as a kind of supercharged administrative agency with the authority to countermand congressional statutes. Formally, this system violates the constitutionally-delineated separation of powers as announced in Chadha, Clinton, and the non-delegation …

Improperly Obtained Evidence In Criminal Proceedings: An Updated Framework, Siyuan Chen, Zhi Jia Koh, Jian Wei Joel Soon

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The 2012 amendments to the Evidence Act “significantly broadened the admissibility criteria for expert evidence”; at the same time, the judicial discretion to deny admissibility of relevant expert opinion evidence was also introduced. This article considers the key developments pre- and post-amendments, and in doing so provides an updated framework for prosecutors and defence counsel alike to admit and challenge expert opinion evidence in criminal proceedings. Since it complements earlier articles in this series on similar fact and hearsay evidence, readers are assumed to be broadly familiar with the features of the Evidence Act, such as its admissibility paradigm, the …

[Marked Confidential]: Negative Externalities Of Discovery Secrecy, Gustavo Ribeiro

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Current unprecedented levels of secrecy in civil discovery create significant negative externalities by preventing our adversary system from measuring up to the broad public goals that justify it. First, excessive discovery secrecy undermines the courts and the public’s ability to correct distortions of the truth-seeking function of the adversary system caused by excessive partisanship and confirmation bias. Second, it weakens the adversary system’s promotion of liberal democratic values, such as transparency and self-government. Third, it threatens the adversary system’s role in upholding human dignity, understood either as respect or status. To correct the negative externalities caused by excessive discovery secrecy, …

"You Should Have Known:" The Need For Evidentiary Notice Requirements In Immigration Court, Marisa Moore Apel

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Artificial Intelligence As Evidence, Paul W. Grimm, Maura R. Grossman, Gordon V. Cormack

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

This article explores issues that govern the admissibility of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) applications in civil and criminal cases, from the perspective of a federal trial judge and two computer scientists, one of whom also is an experienced attorney. It provides a detailed yet intelligible discussion of what AI is and how it works, a history of its development, and a description of the wide variety of functions that it is designed to accomplish, stressing that AI applications are ubiquitous, both in the private and public sectors. Applications today include: health care, education, employment-related decision-making, finance, law enforcement, and the legal …

Fake, Andrea M. Matwyshyn, Miranda Mowbray

Cardozo Law Review

The Internet today is full of fake people and fake information. Trust in both technology and institutions is in a downward spiral. This Article offers a novel comprehensive framework for calibrating a legal response to technology “fakery” through the lens of information security. Introducing the problems of Internet “MIST”—manipulation, impersonation, sequestering, and toxicity—it argues that these MIST challenges threaten the future viability of the Internet through two morphed dynamics destructive to trust. First, the arrival of the Internet-enabled “long con” has combined traditional con artistry with enhanced technological capability for data collection. Second, the risk of a new “PSYOP industrial …

The Iron Rule, Jacob Bronsther, Guha Krishnamurthi

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Restoring Causality In Attenuation: Establishing The Breadth Of A Fourth Amendment Violation, Bryan H. Ward

West Virginia Law Review

When the police violate a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights, what often follows is the discovery of incriminating evidence. Sometimes the evidence is discovered directly after the Fourth Amendment violation. In other situations, the evidence comes by a more indirect route and may occur long after the original Fourth Amendment violation. Courts struggle when trying to decide if the discovery of this indirectly obtained evidence was caused by the police misconduct. This causal question is important because causality acts as a limiting principle when deciding when to apply the exclusionary rule. A basic view of the exclusionary rule suggests that evidence …

Law, Fact, And Procedural Justice, G. Alexander Nunn

Faculty Scholarship

The distinction between questions of law and questions of fact is deceptively complex. Although any first-year law student could properly classify those issues that fall at the polar ends of the law-fact continuum, the Supreme Court has itself acknowledged that the exact dividing line between law and fact—the point where legal inquiries end and factual ones begin—is “slippery,” “elusive,” and “vexing.” But identifying that line is crucially important. Whether an issue is deemed a question of law or a question of fact often influences the appointment of a courtroom decision maker, the scope of appellate review, the administration of certain …

Evidentiary Policies Through Other Means: The Disparate Impact Of “Substantive Law” On The Distribution Of Errors Among Racial Groups, Gustavo Ribeiro

Utah Law Review

This Article develops an analytical framework to investigate novel ways in which legal reforms disguised as “substantive” can affect procedural due process safeguards differently among racial groups. Scholars have long recognized the impact evidence rules have on substantive policies, such as modifying primary incentives or affecting the distribution of legal entitlements in society. However, legal scholars have not paid enough attention to the reverse effect: how changes in “substantive law” influence policy objectives traditionally associated with evidence law—“evidentiary policies.”

To fill this gap, this Article discusses three related evidentiary policies. The first is accuracy, which courts and scholars consider a …

Bad Law Or Just Bad Timing?: Post-Pandemic Implications Of Managed Care Advisory Group, Llc V. Cigna Healthcare, Inc.’S Ban On The Use Of Virtual Technology For Taking Non-Party Evidence Under Section 7 Of The Federal Arbitration Act, Latoya C. Brown

University of Miami Law Review

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous socio-economic impact globally. To continue operations, the legal field, like other sectors, has had to adapt to the exigencies of the pandemic by, inter alia, becoming increasingly reliant on remote technologies to conduct business. Yet, only a few months before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, the Eleventh Circuit ruled in Managed Care Advisory Group, LLC v. CIGNA Healthcare, Inc., 939 F.3d 1145 (11th Cir. 2019), that Section 7 of the Federal Arbitration Act (the “FAA”), 9 U.S.C. § 7, prohibits prehearing discovery and does not allow a summonsed witness to appear in locations …

The Courts Discretionary Role In Testimony, علاء الدين عبابنة

Jerash for Research and Studies Journal مجلة جرش للبحوث والدراسات

There is no doubt that evidence by testimony came as a sign that legislator wants to give judges full power to weigh the evidence, unlike the situation in other kind of evidences where the judge is restricted upon a kind of evidence.

This article shows that even the law has given wide authority to the judge upon testimony; the extent of this authority differs from legislation to another in different countries according to the adopted principle of evidence. Accordingly, this article has been divided into three sections; the first examines the judge's authority upon evidence by testimony, while the second …

Can Speech Act Theory Save Notice Pleading?, Susan E. Provenzano

Indiana Law Journal

Countless scholars have debated—and lower courts have attempted to apply—the plausibility pleading regime that the Supreme Court introduced in Twombly and Iqbal. Iqbal took Twombly’s requirement that a complaint plead plausibly and turned it into a two-step test. Under that test, the life or death of a lawsuit rests on the distinction between “well-pleaded” and “conclusory” allegations. Only the former are assumed true on a motion to dismiss. Seven decades of pleading precedent had taken a sensible, if unstable, approach to the truth assumption, making a single cut between factual contentions (assumed true) and legal conclusions (ignored). But Iqbal redrew …

The District Of South Carolina's Approach To Post-Removal Damage Stipulations: The Need For One Less "Controversy" In The Amount-In-Controversy Analysis, Samuel C. Williams

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Inadequacy Of The Impossible: Obtaining Post-Conviction Dna Testing In Alabama, Trena Riley

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law Enforcement Perspectives On Public Access To Misconduct Records, Rachel Moran, Jessica Hodge

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

One Or Many? Critiquing New York’S "Unfortunate Event" Test For Determining Occurrences In Light Of The Passage Of The New York Child Victims Act, Kharis Lund

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Confrontation's Multi-Analyst Problem, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Confrontation Clause in the Sixth Amendment affords the “accused” in “criminal prosecutions” the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against” them. A particular challenge for courts over at least the last decade-plus has been the degree to which the Confrontation Clause applies to forensic reports, such as those presenting the results of a DNA, toxicology, or other CSI-type analysis. Should use of forensic reports entitle criminal defendants to confront purportedly “objective” analysts from the lab producing the report? If so, which analyst or analysts? For forensic processes that require multiple analysts, should the prosecution be required to produce …

Technological Tethereds: Potential Impact Of Untrustworthy Artificial Intelligence In Criminal Justice Risk Assessment Instruments, Sonia M. Gipson Rankin

Washington and Lee Law Review

Issues of racial inequality and violence are front and center today, as are issues surrounding artificial intelligence (“AI”). This Article, written by a law professor who is also a computer scientist, takes a deep dive into understanding how and why hacked and rogue AI creates unlawful and unfair outcomes, particularly for persons of color.

Black Americans are disproportionally featured in criminal justice, and their stories are obfuscated. The seemingly endless back-to-back murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and heartbreakingly countless others have finally shaken the United States from its slumbering journey towards intentional criminal justice reform. Myths about …

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law 04-2021, Michael M. Bowden, Barry Bridges, Political Roundtable

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Presumption Of Conviction In Criminal Legislation: A Comparative Study, Mohamad Nawaf Alfawareh

UAEU Law Journal

It is known that the accused is innocent until proven guilty by a final judicial decision providing that the claimant submits evidence that he/she is innocent. The above comes as a result of the presumption of the innocence principle that is applicable in most international and national laws. However, the former principle is not absolute; the comparative criminal legislation created an exception to this principle which is designed to exchange roles and make some of the burden of proving the facts rest with the defendant, in the sense that the accused is convicted until he proves his/her innocence and this …