Constitutional Law Commons^™

Mistreating A Symptom: The Legitimizing Of Mandatory, Indefinite Commitment Of Insanity Acquittees - Jones V. United States, Paul S. Avilla

Pepperdine Law Review

At the end of the 1982 term, in Jones v. United States, the United States Supreme Court upheld a District of Columbia statute requiring the automatic and indefinite commitment of persons acquitted by reason of insanity. While under the D.C. statute the acquittee is periodically given the opportunity to gain release, the practice of involuntarily confining someone who has been acquitted raises serious due process and equal protection issues. This note examines the Court's analysis of these issues, focusing on a comparison of the elements necessary for an insanity defense with the showing required by the due process clause for …

Uncounseled Tribal Court Guilty Pleas In State And Federal Courts: Individual Rights Versus Tribal Self-Governance, Christiana M. Martenson

Michigan Law Review

Indian tribes in the United States are separate sovereigns with inherent self-governing authority. As a result, the Bill of Rights does not directly bind the tribes, and criminal defendants in tribal courts do not enjoy the protection of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. In United States v. Ant, a defendant - without the legal assistance that a state or federal court would have provided - pled guilty to criminal charges in tribal court. Subsequently, the defendant faced federal charges arising out of the same events that led to the tribal prosecution. The Ninth Circuit in Ant barred the federal …

Proposition 8: California Law After In Re Lance W. And People V. Castro, Mark Dyer Klein, Randall A. Cohen

Pepperdine Law Review

Until recently, California provided a relatively high level of constitutional protection to criminal defendants. With the passage of Proposition 8 in 1982, the California voters expressed their desire to decrease this level of protection in order to remove impediments to the effective prosecution of criminally accuseds. This comment will examine two of the major provisions of Proposition 8 and their effect on California law in light of major cases decided by the California Supreme Court in 1985.

The Grand Jury Subpoena: Is It The Prosecutor's "Ultimate Weapon" Against Defense Attorneys And Their Clients?, Tara A. Flanagan

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

New Jersey V. T.L.O.: The Supreme Court Severely Limits Schoolchildrens' Fourth Amendment Rights When Being Searched By Public School Officials, Missy Kelly Bankhead

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Confronting Coventurers: Coconspirator Hearsay, Sir Walter Raleigh, And The Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause, Ben Trachtenberg

Florida Law Review

Using the example of a recent major terrorism prosecution, this Article addresses “coventurer hearsay” in the context of the ongoing Confrontation Clause debate concerning the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Crawford v. Washington. Courts have recently begun admitting hearsay evidence pursuant to a revisionist interpretation of the coconspirator statement exception to the hearsay rule. Under the new “lawful joint venture” theory, a hearsay statement may be admitted as a coconspirator statement if made in furtherance of a “joint undertaking”—defined as pretty much any cooperative activity—even if the “conspiracy” is not illegal. Because this new interpretation of an old …

Thompson V. Oklahoma: Debating The Constitutionality Of Juvenile Executions, Susan M. Simmons

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Coy V. Iowa: A Constitutional Right Of Intimidation, John A. Mayers

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judicial Sentencing Error: Thomas V. Morris And The Double Jeopardy Clause , Paul G. Flynn

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Evidence Of Mental Disorder On Mens Rea: Constitutionality Of Drawing The Line At The Insanity Defense , Harlow M. Huckabee

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Constitutionality Of The Federal Sentencing Reform Act After Mistretta V. United States, Charles R. Eskridge Iii

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Neurotechnologies At The Intersection Of Criminal Procedure And Constitutional Law, Amanda C. Pustilnik

Faculty Scholarship

The rapid development of neurotechnologies poses novel constitutional issues for criminal law and criminal procedure. These technologies can identify directly from brain waves whether a person is familiar with a stimulus like a face or a weapon, can model blood flow in the brain to indicate whether a person is lying, and can even interfere with brain processes themselves via high-powered magnets to cause a person to be less likely to lie to an investigator. These technologies implicate the constitutional privilege against compelled, self-incriminating speech under the Fifth Amendment and the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure …

A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls And Potential Of The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court issued a landmark non-decision in United States v. Jones. In that case, officers used a GPS-enabled device to track a suspect’s public movements for four weeks, amassing a considerable amount of data in the process. Although ultimately resolved on narrow grounds, five Justices joined concurring opinions in Jones expressing sympathy for some version of the “mosaic theory” of Fourth Amendment privacy. This theory holds that we maintain reasonable expectations of privacy in certain quantities of information even if we do not have such expectations in the constituent parts. This Article examines and …

Drugs, Dignity And Danger: Human Dignity As A Constitutional Constraint To Limit Overcriminalization, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Scholarly Articles

This Article proposes a constitutional constraint to limit criminalization of victimless crimes and, particularly, to alleviate the pressures on the criminal justice system emanating from its continuous “war on drugs.” To accomplish this goal, the Article explores the concept of human dignity, a fundamental right yet to be invoked in the context of substantive criminal law. The U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence invokes conflicting accounts of human dignity: liberty as dignity, on the one hand, and communitarian virtue as dignity, on the other. However, the Court has not yet developed a workable mechanism to reconcile these competing concepts in cases where …

Florida V. Jardines: The Wolf At The Castle Door, Timothy C. Macdonnell

Scholarly Articles

The purpose of this article is to examine the controversy regarding the application of the contraband exception to the home and the potential impact of the Florida v. Jardines decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. The article will begin by examining the cases that make up the Supreme Court's contraband exception and some of the Court's precedent regarding the home and warrantless searches. Next, the article will examine the Florida Supreme Court's holding in Jardines and discuss how the Florida court arrived at the conclusion that the canine sniff in that case was a search. This section will compare the …

Justice Kennedy’S Sixth Amendment Pragmatism, Stephanos Bibas

McGeorge Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of Justice Kennedy’S Eighth Amendment Jurisprudence On Categorical Bars In Capital Cases, Linda Carter

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Regression To The Mean: How Miranda Has Become A Tragicomical Farce, Alfredo Garcia

St. Thomas Law Review

In my original article, I examined Miranda's historical and social background, discussed its precursors, traced the evolution of the case, and documented the dismantling of the Miranda doctrine. I also argued that the doctrine's "seductive appeal" lulled defense counsel into a false sense of security, thereby deflecting reliance on the "voluntariness" standard as a failsafe to Miranda. Further, I maintained that a waiver of Miranda in some instances served to sanitize an otherwise involuntary confession. Finally, I proposed to "do away" with Miranda, to return to the voluntariness standard with one caveat: that the government be precluded from relying on …

The Procedural Due Process Rights Of The Stigmatized Prisoner, Lindsey Webb

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses the role of stigma in procedural due process claims brought by prisoners. In particular, the Article focuses on inmates whom prisons have classified as sexual offenders although they have never been convicted of a sex offense. Prisons label these inmates—identified here as the “branded class”—as sexual offenders based on information outside of the inmates’ conviction histories, including charges that ended in dismissal or acquittal. As a result of the sex offender classification, prisons impose upon the branded class a wide range of sex offender-specific conditions, including mandatory treatment and sex offender registration.

In addressing procedural due process …

Clever Contraband: Why Illinois’ Lockstep With The U.S. Supreme Court Gives Police Authority To Search The Bowels Of Your Vehicle, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 425 (2013), Jason Cooper

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Subverting Brady V. Maryland And Denying A Fair Trial: Studying The Schuelke Report, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Schuelke Report about the ill-fated federal prosecution of the late-Senator Ted Stevens is an extraordinary contribution to criminal procedure. No other official documentation or investigative study of a criminal prosecution to my knowledge has dissected and analyzed as carefully and thoroughly the sordid and clandestine actions of a team of prosecutors who zealously wanted to win a criminal conviction at all costs. In examining this Report, one gets the feeling that as the investigation and prosecution of Senator Stevens unfolded, and the prosecution’s theory of guilt unraveled, the prosecutors became indifferent whether the defendant was really guilty; they just …

Lafler And Frye: A New Constitutional Standard For Negotiation, Rishi Batra

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

The Sixth Amendment guarantees "[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense." In 1984 the Supreme Court in Strickland v. Washington established the standard for ineffective assistance of counsel that is a violation of this right. In a pair of decisions handed down in 2012, Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye, the Supreme Court extended the holding in Strickland to cover ineffective assistance by defense counsel in the plea-bargaining phase. Recognizing that pleas account for ninety-five percent of all criminal convictions, the court stated that "the negotiation …

After United States V. Jones, After The Fourth Amendment Third Party Doctrine, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the proposition that the Government can surreptitiously electronically track vehicle location for an entire month without Fourth Amendment restraint. While the Court's three opinions leave much uncertain, in one perspective they fit nicely within a long string of cases in which the Court is cautiously developing new standards of Fourth Amendment protection, including a rejection of a strong third party doctrine. This Article develops that perspective and provides a cautiously optimistic view of where search and seizure protections may be headed.

More detail:

United States v. Jones, in which the …

“The Lady Of The House” Vs. A Man With A Gun: Applying Kyllo To Gun-Scanning Technology, Sean K. Driscoll

Catholic University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Brady, Arkansas Rule 17.1, And Disclosure Of Scientific Evidence And Expert Opinion, J. Thomas Sullivan

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

The United States Constitution as well as state procedural rules require prosecutorial authorities to disclose evidence to the defense as a means for ensuring fairness in the prosecution of individuals charged with criminal offenses. When prosecutorial authorities fail to disclose evidence as required, the integrity of the criminal justice system is threatened and the defense is unable to adequately prepare for trial. This threat is illustrated and magnified by the substantiation of prosecutorial misconduct claims in high profile trials where prosecutors have been unable to resist the temptation not to disclose evidence that could damage the prosecution's case, or, where …

Reclaiming Equality To Reframe Indigent Defense Reform, Lauren Sudeall Lucas

Faculty Publications By Year

Equal access to resources is fundamental to meaningful legal representation, yet for decades, equality arguments have been ignored in litigating indigent defense reform. At a time when underfunded indigent defense systems across the country are failing to provide indigent defendants with adequate representation, the question of resources is even more critical. Traditionally, advocates seeking indigent defense reform have relied on Sixth Amendment arguments to protect the rights of indigents in this context; however, the Sixth Amendment approach suffers from a number of shortcomings that have made it a poor tool for systemic reform, including its exclusive focus on attorney performance …

Qualified Immunity Developments: Not Much Hope Left For Plaintiffs, Karen Blum, Erwin Chemerinsky, Martin A. Schwartz

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Right To Plea Bargain With Competent Counsel After Cooper And Frye: Is The Supreme Court Making The Ordinary Criminal Process Too Long, Too Expensive, And Unpredictable In Pursuit Of Perfect Justice, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

In Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye, the Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of criminal defendants who were deprived of a favorable plea offer because of their lawyers’ professional lapses. In dissent, Justice Scalia complained that “[t]he ordinary criminal process has become too long, too expensive, and unpredictable,” because of the Court’s criminal procedure jurisprudence; that plea bargaining is “the alternative in which...defendants have sought relief,” and that the two new decisions on the Sixth Amendment right to effective representation in plea bargaining would add to the burden on the criminal process. This essay examines several aspects of …

Why Strickland Is The Wrong Test For Violations Of The Right To Testify, Daniel J. Capra, Joseph Tartakovsky

Washington and Lee Law Review

A criminal accused has a constitutional right to testify in his own defense. The right has an undisputed place alongside the most important “personal” rights, like the right to remain silent or the right to represent oneself. But in the 1990s, courts began to apply the ineffective-assistance test of Strickland v. Washington to evaluate claims by a defendant that his right to testify was abridged. In practice this nullifies the right. Moreover, the Strickland test is inapposite because it focuses on counsel and not the defendant’s right to testify. This Article proposes a new test to better secure and enforce …

Watching The Watchers, Ronald J. Bacigal

Law Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the threat that increasingly sophisticated technology can pose to individual privacy. However, the author would like to provide the “yin to the yang” and point out the obvious: technology itself is not the culprit, because it is a double-edged sword, a tool that can be used to protect as well as invade privacy. We need not endorse the single-minded approach of WikiLeaks to recognize the benefits that occur when technology discloses government cover-ups or simply provides accurate information where none previously existed.