Criminal Procedure Commons^™

Jury Trials In Japan, Robert M. Bloom

ExpressO

The Japanese are seeking to involve their citizens in the judicial system. They are also establishing a check on the power of the judiciary. Towards these goals, they have enacted legislation to create jury trials. These remarkable ambitions envision adopting a mixed-jury system, slated to take effect in 2009. In this mixed-jury system, judges and citizens participate together in the jury deliberation.

This article first explores the differences between mixed-juries and the American jury system. It then suggests why the Japanese opted for a mixed-jury system. The article explores psychological theories surrounding collective judgment and how dominant individuals influence group …

Victims And Perpetrators: An Argument For Comparative Liability In Criminal Law, Vera Bergelson

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This article challenges the legal rule according to which the victim’s conduct is irrelevant to the determination of the perpetrator’s criminal liability. The author attacks this rule from both positive and normative perspectives, and argues that criminal law should incorporate an affirmative defense of comparative liability. This defense would fully or partially exculpate the defendant if the victim by his own acts has lost or reduced his right not to be harmed.

Part I tests the descriptive accuracy of the proposition that the perpetrator’s liability does not depend on the conduct of the victim. Criminological and victimological studies strongly suggest …

Rethinking The Involuntary Confession Rule: Toward A Workable Test For Identifying Compelled Self-Incrimination, Mark A. Godsey

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

For more than a century, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Bill of Rights as prohibiting the police from obtaining involuntary confessions from suspects through the use of coercion. If asked whether this involuntary confession rule is an understandable and workable doctrine, however, a noticeable percentage of judges, prosecutors, police officers, criminal defense attorneys and law professors would answer with an unequivocal no.

Basic questions concerning voluntariness and free will - whether it exists, and if so, when it exists, etc. - have puzzled philosophers for centuries and represent one of history's Gordian knots. Not surprisingly, judges have fared no …

Private Military Contractor Liability And Accountability After Abu Ghraib, 38 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1237 (2005), Mark W. Bina

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

American Courts Are Drowning In The "Gene Pool": Excavating The Slippery Slope Mechanisms Behind Judicial Endorsement Of Dna Databases, 39 J. Marshall L. Rev. 115 (2005), Meghan Riley

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taking Miranda's Pulse, William T. Pizzi, Morris B. Hoffman

Publications

No abstract provided.

Duress Is Not A Justification, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

No abstract provided.

Mental Disorder And The Civil/Criminal Distinction, Grant H. Morris

University of San Diego Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series

This essay, written as part of a symposium issue to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the University of San Diego Law School, discusses the evaporating distinction between sentence-serving convicts and mentally disordered nonconvicts who are involved in, or who were involved in, the criminal process–people we label as both bad and mad. By examining one Supreme Court case from each of the decades that follow the opening of the University of San Diego School of Law, the essay demonstrates how the promise that nonconvict mentally disordered persons would be treated equally with other civilly committed mental patients was made and …

Fletcher's Rethinking: A Memoir, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

No abstract provided.

Unraveling Unlawful Entrapment, Anthony M. Dillof

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Citizens Of An Enemy Land: Enemy Combatants, Aliens, And The Constitutional Rights Of The Pseudo-Citizen, Juliet P. Stumpf

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Entrapment And The Problem Of Deterring Police Misconduct, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

Many the states currently use a version of the entrapment defense known as the “objective test,” which focuses solely on the extent of police overreaching in the case, and seeks to deter police misconduct by acquitting the defendant. Acquitting defendants as a means of deterring undercover police misconduct, however, is a public policy fraught with problems, and these problems have not been adequately addressed in the literature to date. This article applies the insights of modern deterrence theory to wrongful activity by police in undercover operations. In doing so, three general problems emerge. First, the objective test relies on an …

Immaturity, Normative Competence, And Juvenile Transfer: How (Not) To Punish Minors For Major Crimes, David O. Brink

ExpressO

This essay critically examines the national trend to get tough on juvenile crime by making it easier to transfer juvenile offenders to adult criminal court. It assesses this trend in light of different rationales for punishment, arguing that immaturity provides retributive, deterrent, and corrective reasons to punish juvenile crime differently than otherwise similar adult crime. Insofar as retributive concepts determine whom to punish and how much to punish, it is especially important that immaturity involves diminished normative competence and, hence, diminished responsibility. In defending a traditional approach to juvenile criminal justice against the reforms embodied in the transfer trend, the …

The Domestic Security Enhancement Act Of 2003: A Glimpse Into A Post-Patriot Act Approach To Combating Domestic Terrorism, 38 J. Marshall L. Rev. 327 (2004), Timothy Scahill

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Remaining Silent: A Right With Consequences, 38 J. Marshall L. Rev. 649 (2004), Jeffrey D. Waltuck

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Loose Not The Floodgates, Benjamin J. Cooper

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article examines the implications of the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down sodomy laws, arguing that while the ruling was necessary, it raises concerns about the broader regulation of sexual conduct outside marriage. The author contends that such laws, despite rare enforcement, serve societal functions, including protecting marriage and providing moral boundaries that deter harmful behavior, particularly among young people.

Righting Victim Wrongs: Responding To Philosophical Criticisms Of The Nonspecific Victim Liability Defense, Aya Gruber

Publications

Modern criminal law is intensely one-sided in its treatment of victims and defendants. Crime victims and criminal defendants do not enter the trial process on an equal moral footing. Rather, from the beginning victims are assumed blameless, truthful, and even beyond doubt, while defendants are guilty, not worthy of credence, and immoral. This one-sided view of victims, however, is a fiction. As any other people, victims differ in their characterizations. Some are indeed trustworthy, truthful, blameless and ultimately innocent. Others, however, are bad actors themselves, have memory failures, falsely identify, provoke, and even lie. Some victims are in fact, and …

On Aristotelian Criminal Law: A Reply To Duff, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

No abstract provided.

Aedpa's "Adjudication On The Merits" Requirement: Collateral Review, Federalism, And Comity, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

The modern law of federal habeas corpus is a labyrinth of counterfactuals and arcane procedural hurdles that few state petitioners manage to navigate-as Justice Blackmun once wrote less charitably in dissent, "a Byzantine morass of arbitrary, unnecessary, and unjustifiable impediments to the vindication of federal rights." The convoluted inquiries required arise from the need to reconcile three developments of the past four decades that remain in tension with one another: first, the Warren Court's expansion of federal habeas relief, identified with Fay v. Noia and its progeny; second, the Burger and Rehnquist Courts' curtailment of that expansion, identified with Wainwright …

United States V. Bean: Shoveling After The Elephant?, Pannal A. Sanders

ExpressO

Thomas Bean’s felony conviction in Mexico implicated provisions of federal law that preclude certain persons, including specified felons, from owning or trading in firearms and ammunition which have been transported in interstate commerce. 18 USC Sec. 922. Affected persons can seek relief from the federal firearms disability by invoking procedures established in 18 USC Sec. 925(c) under the Dept of Treasury, Director of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (“ATF”). Beginning in 1992, Congress has enacted provisions annually in the ATF’s appropriations laws that ban it from investigating or acting upon Sec. 925(c) applications from individuals. Section 925(c) contains provisions for judicial …

Dignity And Desert In Punishment Theory, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

No abstract provided.

Exonerations Change Judicial Views On Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel, Adele Bernhard

Articles & Chapters

Law evolves more slowly than pop culture or public attitude. Because most exonerations have not resulted in written legal opinions, their impact is slowly seeping into case law. However, courts are influenced by the same news that sways the rest of us. Even without explicitly referring to innocence or wrongful convictions, modern trial courts are undoubtedly more likely to admit expert testimony on the question of eyewitness identification because they are painfully aware of just how easily such witnesses - no matter how honest or passionate - can be wrong. They are certainly more inclined to view confessions suspiciously, especially …

The Self-Incrimination Clause Explained And Its Future Predicted, Ronald J. Allen

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Canadian Fundamental Justice And American Due Process: Two Models For A Guarantee Of Basic Adjudicative Fairness, David M. Siegel

ExpressO

This paper traces how the Supreme Courts of Canada and the United States have each used the basic guarantee of adjudicative fairness in their respective constitutions to effect revolutions in their countries’ criminal justice systems, through two different jurisprudential models for this development. It identifies a relationship between two core constitutional structures, the basic guarantee and enumerated rights, and shows how this relationship can affect the degree to which entrenched constitutional rights actually protect individuals. It explains that the different models for the relationship between the basic guarantee and enumerated rights adopted in Canada and the United States, an “expansive …

In The Wake Of Kyllo V. United States: The Future Of Thermal Imaging Cameras, 36 J. Marshall L. Rev. 507 (2003), Paul Kleppetsch

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dialectic And Revolution: Confronting Kelsen And Gadamer On Legal Interpretation, Hans Lindahl

Cardozo Law Review

This paper examines the general structure and conditions of legal interpretation that arise from confronting Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics with a determinate conception of legal interpretation suggested by Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law. The Gadamerian question, "What defines legal interpretation as interpretation?", suggests that Kelsen's reference to legal norms as "schemes of interpretation" must be radicalized: a hermeneutic circularity or dialectic is at work in the law, such that the legal interpretation of reality also changes, to a lesser or greater extent, the principle of interpretation - the legal norm. The Kelsenian question, "What defines interpretation as legal interpretation?", suggests …

Ten Years Of Payne: Victim Impact Evidence In Capital Cases, John H. Blume

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

A little over a decade ago, in Payne v. Tennessee, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for capital sentencing juries to consider “victim impact evidence” (VIE). Reversing its prior decisions in Booth v. Maryland and South Carolina v. Gathers, a six to three majority of the Court held that “if the State chooses to permit the admission of victim impact evidence and prosecutorial argument on that subject, the Eighth Amendment erects no per se bar.” Part I of this Article will discuss the Court’s prior decisions in Booth and Gathers, and Parts II and III will …

Justice White And Judicial Review, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Warren Court, Criminal Procedure Reform, And Retributive Punishment, Darryl K. Brown

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

How The Supreme Court Delivers Fire And Ice To State Criminal Justice, Ronald F. Wright

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.