Criminal Procedure Commons^™

The Case Against The Case Against The Death Penalty, Chad W. Flanders

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Despite the continuing belief by a majority of Americans that the death penalty is morally permissible, the death penalty has few academic defenders. This lack of academic defenders is puzzling because of the strong philosophical justification the death penalty finds in traditional theories of punishment. The three major theories of punishment (the deterrent, the retributive, and the rehabilitative), far from showing that the death penalty is not justified, tend to provide good reasons to favor the death penalty. Indeed, every attempt to show that the major theories of punishment rule out the death penalty either involves smuggling in other assumptions …

Report On Usa, Stephen C. Thaman

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This chapter in the book on transnational inquiries and the protection of fundamental rights in criminal proceedings takes into account the particular, and perhaps unique situation in the United States (US) following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. It explores the laws regulating inquiries by foreign governments who seek evidence in the US to use in criminal proceedings overseas, but primarily the protections recognized by US statutes and jurisprudence when US officials gather evidence abroad. In this respect, the chapter focuses on protections during interrogations, searches, interceptions of confidential communications, and examinations of witnesses and explores when the protection …

Perfecting Criminal Markets, David Jaros

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From illicit drugs to human smuggling to prostitution, legislators may actually be perfecting the very criminal markets they seek to destroy. Criminal laws often create new dangers and new criminal opportunities. Criminalizing drugs creates the opportunity to sell fake drugs. Raising the penalties for illegal immigration increases the risk that smugglers will rely on dangerous methods that can injure or kill their human cargo. Banning prostitution increases the underground spread of sexually transmitted disease. Lawmakers traditionally respond to these “second order” problems in predictable fashion — with a new wave of criminalization that imposes additional penalties on fake drug dealers, …

Separate But Equal: Miranda's Rights To Silence And Counsel, Steven P. Grossman

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Three decades ago, the Supreme Court created a dubious distinction between the rights accorded to suspects in custody who invoke their right to silence and who invoke their right to counsel. This distinction significantly disadvantages those who do not have the good sense or good fortune to specify they want an attorney when they invoke their right to remain silent. This article argues that this distinction was flawed at its genesis and that it has led to judicial decisions that are inconsistent, make little sense, and permit police behavior that substantially diminishes the right to silence as described in Miranda …

Madness Alone Punishes The Madman: The Search For Moral Dignity In The Court's Competency Doctrine As Applied In Capital Cases, J. Amy Dillard

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The purposes of the competency doctrine are to guarantee reliability in criminal prosecutions, to ensure that only those defendants who can appreciate punishment are subject to it, and to maintain moral dignity, both actual and apparent, in criminal proceedings. No matter his crime, the “madman” should not be forced to stand trial. Historically, courts viewed questions of competency as a binary choice, finding the defendant either competent or incompetent to stand trial. However, in Edwards v. Indiana, the Supreme Court conceded that it views competency on a spectrum and offered a new category of competency — borderline-competent. The Court held …

Can The Ceo Learn From The Condemned? The Application Of Capital Mitigation Strategies To White Collar Cases, Todd Haugh

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Ted Kaczynski and Bernie Madoff share much in common. Both are well-educated, extremely intelligent, charismatic figures. Both rose to the height of their chosen professions—mathematics and finance. And both will die in federal prison, Kaczynski for committing a twenty-year mail-bombing spree that killed three people and seriously injured dozens more, and Madoff for committing the largest Ponzi scheme in history, bilking thousands of people out of almost $65 billion. But that last similarity—Kaczynski’s and Madoff’s plight at sentencing—may not have had to be. While Kaczynski’s attorneys tirelessly investigated and argued every aspect of their client’s personal history, mental state, motivations, …

Introduction: Benefits Of Private Enforcement: Empirical Background, Robert H. Lande

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This short piece takes a first step toward providing the empirical bases for an assessment of the benefits of private enforcement. It presents evidence showing that private enforcement of the antitrust laws is serving its intended purposes and is in the public interest. Private enforcement helps compensate victimized consumers, and it also helps deter anticompetitive conduct. This piece demonstrates this by briefly summarizing a more detailed analysis of forty of the largest recent successful private antitrust cases.

To analyze these cases' compensation effects this presents, inter alia, the amount of money each action recovered, what proportion of the money was …

Criminal Courts And Procedure, Stephen C. Thaman

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This chapter provides both a historical and modern perspective on criminal procedure around the world.

Cost As A Sentencing Factor: Missouri's Experiment, Chad W. Flanders

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In sentencing offenders, should judges take into account the different costs of possible punishments? In 2010, Missouri gave sentencing judges, in addition to information about the nature and severity of the offense and the criminal history of the offender, the price tag of various punishments: prison cost about $17,000 a year, compared to probation, which is much cheaper (about $7000 per year). Judges were allowed, even encouraged, to base their sentences on how much it each sentence would cost the state. The move was a subject of considerable national and local controversy.

This essay represents the first sustained look at …

The Penal Order: Prosecutorial Sentencing As A Model For Criminal Justice Reform?, Stephen C. Thaman

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This chapter traces the history of the penal order from its earliest roots through its consolidation as a normal alternative form of procedure in Germany. It compares the types of penal order procedures found in modern criminal procedure codes, and it compares penal orders with other “consensual” procedural modes that also involve considerable prosecutorial influence in determination of the level of guilt and punishment: diversion, pleas and stipulations of guilt, and abbreviated trials based on the contents of the preliminary investigation dossier. Finally, it explores whether the penal order, could eventually become a model for the consensual resolution of all …

The Criminal Class Action, Adam S. Zimmerman, David Jaros

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Over the past ten years, in a variety of high-profile corporate scandals, prosecutors have sought billions of dollars in restitution for crimes ranging from environmental dumping and consumer scams to financial fraud. In what we call “criminal class action” settlements, prosecutors distribute that money to groups of victims as in a civil class action while continuing to pursue the traditional criminal justice goals of retribution and deterrence.

Unlike civil class actions, however, the emerging criminal class action lacks critical safeguards for victims entitled to compensation. While prosecutors are encouraged, and even required by statute, to seek victim restitution, they lack …

And Death Shall Have No Dominion: How To Achieve The Categorical Exemption Of Mentally Retarded Defendants From Execution, J. Amy Dillard

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This article examines the Court’s categorical exclusion of mentally retarded defendants from execution and explores how trial courts should employ procedures to accomplish heightened reliability in the mental retardation determination; it maintains that if a mentally retarded defendant is subjected to a death sentence then the Atkins directive has been ignored. To satisfy the Atkins Court’s objective of protecting mentally retarded defendants from the “special risk of wrongful execution,” the article explores whether trial courts should engage in a unified, pre-trial competency assessment in all capital cases where the defendant asserts mental retardation as a bar to execution and how …

"Sweet Childish Days": Using Developmental Psychology Research In Evaluating The Admissibility Of Out-Of-Court Statements By Young Children, Lynn Mclain

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A three-year-old child, while being bathed by her babysitter, innocently mentions that her “pee-pee” hurts. When the babysitter asks the child how she hurt it, she says, “Uncle Ernie (her mother’s boyfriend) told me not to tell.” A subsequent medical examination reveals that the child has gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease.

By the time of trial, the child is four and-a-half-years old. When questioned by the trial judge, she cannot explain to the judge’s satisfaction, “the difference between the truth and a lie.” Moreover, she has no long term memory of the incident. The judge rules the child incompetent to …

Hot Crimes: A Study In Excess, Steven P. Grossman

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Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. . . . [I]ts nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) restored to; . . . sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten . . . at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such as those in legal and social policy or even …

Comparative Deterrence From Private Enforcement And Criminal Enforcement Of The U.S. Antitrust Laws, Robert H. Lande, Joshua P. Davis

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This article shows that private enforcement of the U. S. antitrust laws-which usually is derided as essentially worthless-serves as a more important deterrent of anticompetitive behavior than the most esteemed antitrust program in the world, criminal enforcement by the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The debate over the value of private antitrust enforcement long has been heavy with self-serving assertions by powerful economic interests, but light on factual evidence. To help fill this void we have been conducting research for several years on a variety of empirical topics. This article develops and then explores the implications of …

Missouri Provides Cost Of Sentences And Recidivism Data: What Does Cost Have To Do With Justice?, Michael A. Wolff

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The Missouri Sentencing Advisory Commission in 2010, which has an information-based sentencing information system, added two items of information to its Web-based Automated Sentencing Information feature: (1) the cost of each sentencing option and (2) the recidivism rate for offenders – with similar risk factors – who received sentences for the same offense or category of offenses. Because sentencing decisions in Missouri are discretionary, judges are free to use or to disregard the information. For many offenses, however, it is possible for an advocate to argue or for a judge (or the public) to conclude that a more harsh sentence …

Constitutional Rights In The Balance: Modern Exclusionary Rules And The Toleration Of Police Lawlessness In The Search For Truth, Stephen C. Thaman

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This article explores the tension in modern criminal procedure between the goal of ascertaining the material truth of the criminal charge and the respect for important human rights of criminal suspects during the investigation of the alleged criminal responsibility. It examines two major areas where police run the risk of violating and often do violate the constitutional rights of criminal suspects during interrogations and during invasions of privacy in the form of dwelling searches and interception of confidential communications. The approaches of modern democracies to this dilemma run from the strict exclusion of all direct and indirect evidence (fruits of …

'The Mess We’Re In': Five Steps Towards The Transformation Of Prison Cultures, Lynn S. Branham

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Few dispute that conditions in prisons need to be improved – that, for example, prisoners with mental-health problems need to have those problems addressed, and addressed effectively, while they are confined. But the more fundamental question is whether prisons can be, not just improved, but transformed. Transformation in this context means deep and sustained changes in the ethos of those who work and live in prisons. That ethos would reflect at least four precepts: (1) hope as an imperative; (2) the viability of renewal; (3) the catharsis that attends personal responsibility and accountability; and (4) the duty and call, extending …

Beyond Experience: Getting Retributive Justice Right, Dan Markel, Chad Flanders, David C. Gray

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How central should hedonic adaptation be to the establishment of sentencing policy?

In earlier work, Professors Bronsteen, Buccafusco, and Masur (BBM) drew some normative significance from the psychological studies of adaptability for punishment policy. In particular, they argued that retributivists and utilitarians alike are obliged on pain of inconsistency to take account of the fact that most prisoners, most of the time, adapt to imprisonment in fairly short order, and therefore suffer much less than most of us would expect. They also argued that ex-prisoners don't adapt well upon re-entry to society and that social planners should consider their post-release …

"I'M Going To Dinner With Frank": Admissibility Of Nontestimonial Statements Of Intent To Prove The Actions Of Someone Other Than The Speaker—And The Role Of The Due Process Clause, Lynn Mclain

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A woman tells her roommate that she is going out to dinner with Frank that evening. The next morning her battered body is found along a country road outside of town. In Frank’s trial for her murder, is her statement to her roommate admissible to place Frank with her that night? Since the Court’s 2004 Crawford decision, the confrontation clause is inapplicable to nontestimonial hearsay such as this.

American jurisdictions are widely divided on the question of admissibility under their rules of evidence, however. Many say absolutely not. A sizeable number unequivocally say yes. A small number say yes, but …

Unfettered Discretion: Criminal Orders Of Protection And Their Impact On Parent Defendants, David Jaros

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The last two decades have witnessed an astonishing increase in the use of the criminal justice system to police neglectful parents. Recasting traditional allegations of neglect as criminal charges of endangering the welfare of a child, prosecutors and the police have involved criminal courts in the regulation of aspects of the parent child relationship that were once the sole province of family courts. This Article explores the legal implications of vesting judges in these cases with the unfettered discretion to issue protective orders that criminalize contact between a parent and her child. I argue that procedures for issuing protective orders …

A Typology Of Consensual Criminal Procedures: An Historical And Comparative Perspective On The Theory And Practice Of Avoiding The Full Trial, Stephen C. Thaman

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In the words of Clifford Geertz, this chapter engages in “an exercise of intercultural translation” in order to understand the reality of plea bargaining and other forms of consensual resolution of criminal cases. It provides a history of consensual and alternative forms of criminal procedure around the world. It also provides a comprehensive discussion on alternatives to a full trial in modern penal systems and issues that arise with those alternatives.

Balancing Liberty, Dignity And Safety: The Impact Of Domestic Violence Lethality Screening, Margaret E. Johnson

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This Article undertakes the first ever analysis of the consequences of the justice and legal system’s extensive use of lethality assessment tools for women subjected to abuse. An increasing number of states are now requiring their police, prosecutors, civil attorneys, advocates, service providers, and court personnel to assess women in order to obtain a score that indicates the woman’s lethality risk because of domestic violence. The mandated danger assessment screen of all women subjected to violence focuses only on the risk of homicide and thereby limits the definition of what is domestic violence. In addition, the accompanying protocol for the …

Retribution And Reform, Chad Flanders

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What is the relationship of punishment theory to punishment practice? What should this relationship be? The last twenty years have seen an amazing rise in sophisticated and elegant theories of retributive justice of a Kantian, and more recently, an expressivist variety - a “retributivist revival.” As pure philosophical theorizing goes, this must surely be counted as real progress. But, those same twenty years have also seen increases in the length of criminal sentences, in the amount of activity subject to criminal sanction, and in the sheer number of people behind bars. Professor James Q. Whitman has famously said that we …

'Fruits Of The Poisonous Tree' In Comparative Law, Stephen C. Thaman

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This article gives a brief review of the types of exclusionary rules articulated in modern codes, constitutions, and jurisprudence, and explores how these rules are interpreted when excluding the derivative “fruits” of constitutional violations of the right to silence and human dignity during police interrogations and the right to privacy in one’s home and confidential communications. It shows, whether a country begins with a seemingly airtight categorical exclusionary rule for serious constitutional violations, or allows judges great discretion in deciding whether to use fruits of unconstitutional police behavior, the search for truth has largely triumphed over constitutional rights. As a …

What Is Changing? 'The Future Is Not What It Used To Be', Michael A. Wolff

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The editors of the Federal Sentencing Reporter asked a number of experts on sentencing in 2008 to write short pieces on what they expected after a "change" election. In 2010 the editors asked: what changed? Judge Wolff’s response, which concentrates on the states, is that the states’ dire financial conditions and the effect of the California marijuana legalization proposition, which gathered serious support but failed, have affected the public’s perceptions of sentencing policy. The public and their representatives are trying more to be smart on crime rather than tough on crime, and the public is becoming increasingly skeptical of the …

Bentham On Stilts: The Bare Relevance Of Subjectivity To Retributive Justice, Dan Markel, Chad Flanders, David C. Gray

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In recent work, various scholars have challenged retributive justice theorists to pay more attention to the subjective experience of punishment, specifically how punishment affects the experiences and well-being of offenders. The claim developed by these “subjectivists” is that because people’s experiences with pain and suffering differ, both diachronically and inter-subjectively, their punishments will have to be tailored to individual circumstances as well.

Our response is that this set of claims, once scrutinized, is either true, but of limited significance, or nontrivial, but unsound. We don’t doubt the possibility that different people will react differently to the same infliction of punishment. …

Stop The Killing: Potential Courtroom Use Of A Questionnaire That Predicts The Likelihood That A Victim Of Intimate Partner Violence Will Be Murdered By Her Partner, Amanda Hitt, Lynn Mclain

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Judges in domestic cases often underestimate the risk to a mother and her children that an angry and abusive father or other intimate partner poses. In a recent Maryland case, for example, two judges refused to deny a father visitation or require that visitation be supervised, despite the fact that the father had threatened suicide. During the father’s unsupervised visitation, he drowned all three of his children, then attempted to kill himself.

The Danger Assessment tool (the D.A.) developed by a Johns Hopkins Nursing professor and validated by herself and other social scientists shows how much the father’s thoughts of …

The Stockley Verdict: An Explainer, Chad Flanders

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The purpose o f this document is to help explain some o f the existing Missouri law that Judge Wilson used in his opinion. It does not take a side on the opinion itself. At the end o f the day, the decision Judge Wilson made was based on his call on various disputed factual questions. The law was not, for the most part, at issue. I attempt only to describe the legal framework within with Judge Wilson decided the case; not to support or to criticize his verdict. Each person will ultimately have to make his or her own …

Dan Freed: My Teacher, My Colleague, My Friend, Ronald Weich

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At a recent meeting of the National Association of Sentencing Commissions, Yale professor Dan Freed was honored during a panel discussion titled "Standing on the Shoulders of Sentencing Giants," Dan Freed is indeed a sentencing giant. but he is the gentlest giant of all. It is hard to imagine that a man as mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and self-effacing as Dan Freed has had such a profound impact on federal sentencing law and so many other areas of criminal justice policy, Yet he has.

I've been in many rooms with Dan Freed over the years — classrooms, boardrooms, dining rooms, and others. …