Criminal Procedure Commons^™

Mature Adjudication: Interpretive Choice In Recent Death Penalty Cases, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Capital punishment presents a "hard" case for adjudication. It provokes sharp conflict between competing constitutional interpretations and invariably raises questions of judicial bias. This is particularly true in the new Republic of South Africa, where the framers of the interim constitution deliberately were silent regarding the legality of the death penalty. The tension is of equivalent force in the United States, where recent expressions of core constitutional rights have raised potentially irreconcilable conflicts in the application of capital punishment.

Two recent death penalty decisions – the South African Constitutional Court opinions in State v. Makwanyane and the United States Supreme …

Preventive Detention And The Judicial Prediction Of Dangerousness For Juveniles: A Natural Experiment, Jeffery Fagan, Martin Guggenheim

Faculty Scholarship

Since 1970, legislatures have increasingly relied on preventive detention – detention before trial ordered solely to prevent an accused from committing crime during the pretrial period – as an instrument of social control. Prior to this period, detention before trial was usually ordered only to assure an accused's presence at trial or to ensure the integrity of the trial process by preventing an accused from tampering with witnesses. Today, the majority of states and the federal system have changed their laws to allow judges to detain arrestees who pose a risk to society if released during the pretrial period. Half …

Cooperating Defendants: The Costs And Benefits Of Purchasing Information From Scoundrels, Daniel Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Only the most unreflective prosecutor can avoid feeling ambivalent about cooperation. Without the assistance of defendants willing to trade testimony for the expectation of sentencing discounts, many cases worth prosecuting could not be made. But if a prosecutor maintains any distance from these defendants – as he must – he is bound to be troubled by the magnitude of the discounts that the federal system (like other systems) gives to cooperators, many of whom rank as some of the most odious people he has ever met.

The idea of purchasing testimony through sentencing discounts has a long history, of course, …

Cooperating Clients, Daniel Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Indicted on serious narcotics charges, Jose Lopez retained Barry Tarlow to “vigorously defend and try the case.” Tarlow was up to the task but warned Lopez that it was “his general policy not to represent clients in negotiations with the government concerning cooperation,” and that he did not plan to make any exception for Lopez. As Tarlow later explained, he found such negotiations “personally[,] morally and ethically offensive.” This arrangement suited Lopez just fine, until he wavered in his resolution. Encouraged by a co-defendant, worried about his children, and hoping to obtain an early release from prison …

The Sentencing Guidelines As A Not-So-Model Penal Code, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

We are accustomed to thinking about the criminal law, and the procedures for enforcing it, as divided into two separate stages. The first stage – the subject of penal codes and jury trials – concerns the definition of culpable conduct and the adjudication of guilt. The second stage – sentencing – concerns the consequences of conviction for the offender. Only rarely do we acknowledge that the conventional separation of these stages into compartments is highly misleading.

The articles in this Issue of FSR address, in one way or another, the extent to which the concerns of the substantive criminal law …

Taking The Fifth: Reconsidering The Origins Of The Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this essay is to cast doubt on two basic elements of the received historical wisdom concerning the privilege as it applies to British North America and the early United States. First, early American criminal procedure reflected less tenderness toward the silence of the criminal accused than the received wisdom has claimed. The system could more reasonably be said to have depended on self-incrimination than to have eschewed it, and this dependence increased rather than decreased during the provincial period for reasons intimately connected with the economic and social context of the criminal trial in colonial America.

Second, …

On The Moral Irrelevance Of Bodily Movements, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

In the mess of confusions called Anglo-American criminal law, writers commonly refer to the "problem of punishing omissions." There is something untoward, they say, about imposing criminal liability on the bystander who could intervene to save a drowning child and fails to do so. Punishing acts in violation of the law is all right, but there is some special difficulty, never completely understood and clarified, about imposing liability for omissions.

The confusion about omissions has suffered unnecessary compounding by the organization of one of the leading casebooks on criminal law. Apparently not quite sure where to locate their cases on …

Brutality In Blue: Community, Authority, And The Elusive Promise Of Police Reform, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

In January 1994, President Clinton invited Kevin Jett, a thirtyone-year-old New York City police officer who walks a beat in the northwest Bronx, to attend the State of the Union Address. Jett stood for Congress's applause as the President called for the addition of 100,000 new community police officers to walk beats across the nation. The crime problem faced by Officer Jett and community police officers like him, the President said, has its roots "in the loss of values, the disappearance of work, and the breakdown of our families and communities." According to the Clinton administration, however, the police – …

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

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 …

Blackmail: The Paradigmatic Crime, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The ongoing debate about the rationale for punishing blackmail assumes that there is something odd about the crime. Why, the question goes, should demanding money to conceal embarrassing information be criminalized when there is nothing wrong with the separate acts of keeping silent or requesting payment for services rendered? Why should an innocent end (silence) coupled with a generally respectable means (monetary payment) constitute a crime? This supposed paradox, however, is not peculiar to blackmail. Many good acts are corrupted by doing them for a price. There is nothing wrong with government officials showing kindness or doing favors for their …

Reel Time/Real Justice, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

Like the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings a few months before, the Rodney King beating, the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who "restrained" him and the subsequent civil unrest in Los Angeles flashed Race across the national consciousness and the gaze of American culture momentarily froze there. Pieces of everyday racial dynamics briefly seemed clear, then faded from view, replaced by presidential politics and natural disasters.

This Essay examines in more depth what was exposed during the momentary national focus on Rodney King. Two main events – the acquittal of the police officers who beat King and the civil …

Lawyers At The Prison Gates: Organizational Structure And Corrections Advocacy, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of the public interest law movement ushered in an era of intense debate over the best way to provide legal representation to those unable to afford private counsel. This debate has involved two related dimensions of public interest representation. First, advocates and observers of public interest practice disagree over the proper role of lawyers acting on behalf of poor and underrepresented clients. They offer competing visions of representation spanning a continuum, from providing equal access to the courts for as many poor people as possible, to attacking the causes and effects of poverty and powerlessness.

The second dimension …

The Reasonable Woman And The Ordinary Man, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

Nineteen ninety-one was a seismic year for sexual harassment. The first localized shift occurred in January, when the Ninth Circuit established that the standard by which sexual harassment in the workplace would be judged was no longer the reasonable man or even the reasonable person but rather the reasonable woman. In October a larger audience felt a much stronger jolt when Anita Hill spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Hill testified that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her while she worked for him at the Department of Education and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Her testimony …

Conference On The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Panel 3: The Allocation Of Discretion Under The Guidelines, Daniel J. Freed, Gerard E. Lynch, Steven M. Salky, Maria Rodriguez Mcbride, Vincent L. Broderick

Faculty Scholarship

The guidelines have shifted the locus of discretion from the judge to the prosecutor. This transfer has drastically changed sentencing because the prosecutor's role is very different from the judge's role.

Before the guidelines, the prosecutor's role in sentencing was minimal. The prosecutor could put a cap on the sentence by accepting a plea to a charge with a low maximum, but there was virtually no instance in which the charge would put a floor under the judge's sentence. The judge, on the other hand, could sentence however he liked. Not only was the judge's decision correct because it was …

The Individualized-Consideration Principle And The Death Penalty As Cruel And Unusual Punishment, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits infliction of "cruel and unusual punishments." The Supreme Court established the basic principles applying this amendment to the death penalty during a six-year period in the 1970's. First, in 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the Court invalidated all then-existing death penalty statutes. Second, in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia and its companions, the Court upheld some of the statutes promulgated in response to Furman but invalidated others. Finally, in 1978, in Lockett v. Ohio, the Court invalidated an Ohio statute because it failed to give the sentencer a sufficient …

Paradigms Lost: The Blurring Of The Criminal And Civil Law Models – And What Can Be Done About It, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Ken Mann's professed goal is to "shrink" the criminal law. To realize this worthy end, he advocates punitive civil sanctions that would largely parallel criminal sanctions, thereby reducing the need to use criminal law in order to achieve punitive purposes. I agree (heartily) with the end he seeks and even more with his general precept that "the criminal law should be reserved for the most damaging wrongs and the most culpable defendants." But I believe that the means he proposes would be counterproductive – and would probably expand, rather than contract, the operative scope of the criminal law as an …

A Reply: Imperfect Bargains, Imperfect Trials, And Innocent Defendants, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

To understand what is and is not wrong with plea bargaining, one must understand the relationship of bargains to trials. Unsurprisingly, we disagree with much of what Judge Frank Easterbrook and Professor Stephen Schulhofer say about that relationship. Most of those disagreements need not be rehearsed here; readers attentive enough to wade through their essays and ours will pick up the key points readily enough. But there is one point where the dispute is at once sharp and hidden. It has to do with the fact that both trials and bargains are flawed.

That fact might seem obvious, but the …

Plea-Bargaining As A Social Contract, Robert E. Scott, William J. Stuntz

Faculty Scholarship

Most criminal prosecutions are settled without a trial. The parties to these settlements trade various risks and entitlements: the defendant relinquishes the right to go to trial (along with any chance of acquittal), while the prosecutor gives up the entitlement to seek the highest sentence or pursue the most serious charges possible. The resulting bargains differ predictably from what would have happened had the same cases been taken to trial. Defendants who bargain for a plea serve lower sentences than those who do not. On the other hand, everyone who pleads guilty is, by definition, convicted, while a substantial minority …

Judgment And Reasoning In Adolescent Decisionmaking, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Few people believe that five year olds and fifteen year olds think, act or make decisions in the same way. The question is whether and how the law should respond to developmental differences. Traditionally, childhood and adulthood have been two dichotomous legal categories, demarcated by the age of majority. This conception has been contested in recent years, as has the premise that all minors are incompetent to make decisions and function as legal actors. Fueled by the controversy over adolescent access to abortion, an advocacy movement has emerged that challenges the authority of parents and the state over the lives …

The Ethics Of Criminal Defense, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

A large literature has emerged in recent years challenging the standard conception of adversary advocacy that justifies the lawyer in doing anything arguably legal to advance the client's ends. This literature has proposed variations on an ethic that would increase the lawyer's responsibilities to third parties, the public, and substantive ideals of legal merit and justice.

With striking consistency, this literature exempts criminal defense from its critique and concedes that the standard adversary ethic may be viable there. This paper criticizes that concession. I argue that the reasons most commonly given to distinguish the criminal from the civil do not …

Self-Defense As A Justification For Punishment, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

There are few legal ideas as basic as the principle of legitimate self-defense. Every individual, it is said, has the right to defend his or her person, property or living space against wrongful aggression and, if necessary, to kill the aggressor. This principle is so deeply ingrained in our legal thinking that it is difficult to imagine a legal system that did not acknowledge it. The concept of having rights would be virtually toothless unless we could use force to vindicate our rights against aggression.

The notion of having rights is less well-accepted in Jewish law than are the ideas …

A Conceptual, Practical, And Political Guide To Rico Reform, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

RICO is nearing its twentieth birthday, but it may not be a happy one. In fact, 'tis the season for critics of RICO to be, if not jolly, at least highly active. A House subcommittee and the Senate Judiciary Committee have held hearings on RICO reform, the popular and business press has published numerous debates and criticisms involving fairly arcane points of civil and criminal law, scholars and lawyers have filled law reviews and legal newspapers with articles often critical of the statute, and the pressure has been building for statutory changes.

As the pressure for change has intensified, and …

"Carrot And Stick" Sentencing: Structuring Incentives For Organizational Defendants, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The new "Draft Guidelines for Organizational Defendants" released by the U.S. Sentencing Commission on October 25, 1990, explicitly adopt a "'carrot and stick' approach" to sentencing. While the boldly instrumental use made of sentencing penalties and credits in these guidelines will trouble some, the larger question is whether the Commission's social engineering will work. Two issues stand out: First, is the Commission's carrot mightier than its stick? At first glance, this may seem a surprising question because the "stick" in the Commission's guidelines seemingly packs a Ruthian wallop: fines under the draft guidelines are based on a multiple of the …

More Than "Slightly Retro:" The Rehnquist Court's Rout Of Habeas Corpus Jurisdiction In Teague V. Lane, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Someone I know, more a student of contemporary fashion than I, sometimes describes people dressed in uniformly dark clothing as "slightly retro." I am not sure of the allusion, but what I can discern leads me to think that the Supreme Court's nonretroactivity decisions beginning with Teague v. Lane are – puns aside – more than just "slightly retro."

The Court's innovation may be stated as follows: For 160 years, Congress empowered federal judges to order state officials to release or retry individuals held in custody in violation of federal law as those federal judges, and not the state officials, …

Determinants Of Judicial Waiver Decisions For Violent Juvenile Offenders, Jeffrey Fagan, Elizabeth Piper Deschens

Faculty Scholarship

The selection of jurisdiction for adjudicating juvenile crime today is one of the most controversial debates in crime control policy, reflecting differences in assumptions about the causes of crime and philosophies of jurisprudence and punishment. For adolescent offenders, especially violent youth whose behaviors may pose particular social danger, critics view the traditional goals of the juvenile court and the "best interests of the child" standard as being at odds with public concerns for retribution and incapacitation of criminals. The choice between jurisdictions is a choice between the nominally rehabilitative dispositions of the juvenile court and the explicitly punitive dispositions of …

Standards For Organizational Probation: A Proposal To The United States Sentencing Commission, John C. Coffee Jr., Richard Gruner, Christopher D. Stone

Faculty Scholarship

This proposal was prepared by the authors in their capacities as consultants to the United States Sentencing Commission. It has not been adopted or endorsed by the Commission. If adopted, the proposal would constitute Part D(2) of the Sentencing Commission's Organizational Sentencing Guidelines (to be continued in Chapter 8 of the Commission's Guidelines Manual).

Mistake In The Model Penal Code: A False False Problem, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

No solution seems more gratifying to the modern theorist than to claim that an apparently serious problem is not really a problem at all. By branding nonfalsifiable propositions as nonsense, the Vienna circle of logical positivists discovered that the metaphysical concerns of others were really false problems. By ridding philosophy of false problems, Wittgenstein thought that he could let the fly escape from the bottle; he could release the philosophical spirit from its confounding constraints. Brainerd Currie brought this method to the law with his justly famous theory of false conflicts in the conflicts of laws. There was no need …

A Reply To Michael Goldsmith, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

I am grateful for Professor Michael Goldsmith's response to my discussion of RICO. It is always gratifying to find that one's writings have stimulated thought and debate.

Professor Goldsmith's criticisms of my discussion come in three parts. First, he claims that I have misread the history of RICO's adoption. Second, he objects to my criticisms of its scope. Third, he argues that the statute as now drafted serves prosecutorial purposes that would not be captured by the proposals I make for its replacement. Professor Goldsmith's arguments are not persuasive.

The Unmet Challenge Of Criminal Theory, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The last several decades have witnessed an outpouring of serious articles bringing to bear the methods of analytic philosophy to the issues of substantive criminal law. J. L. Austin, a philosopher and not a lawyer, may have been the first to demonstrate the potential of probing legal concepts such as mistake and accident, justification and excuse, for their philosophical potential. H.L.A. Hart carried forward the literature with several path breaking essays on criminal law. It is only in the last few years, however, that we have encountered an explosion of interest in the basic questions of criminal law. As the …