Criminal Procedure Commons^™

Closing Impunity Gaps For The Crime Of Aggression, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

Articles

As stated at Nuremberg, the crime of aggression is the “supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” International instruments clearly and repeatedly have outlawed initiating wars of aggression and other illegal uses of armed force. States parties recently have defined and codified the crime in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and delineated the scope of the ICC’s jurisdiction over aggression. Although the ICC is an important mechanism for accountability and justice, it is not certain when it will be able to adjudicate …

Informant Witnesses And The Risk Of Wrongful Convictions, Jessica A. Roth

Articles

Several studies in the last two decades have revealed that false criminal informant testimony is a leading factor in wrongful convictions, along with false confessions, eyewitness misidentification, and faulty forensic science. Although a great deal more remains to be done, many jurisdictions have implemented evidence-based reforms to these last three categories of evidence. Policy about criminal informants, however, seems to be stubbornly stagnant, and relevant social science is virtually nonexistent. This Article questions the relative lack of attention to informant testimony and suggests that the dangers posed by informant testimony are both greater and different than previously thought. Unlike much …

Fast-Track To Injustice: Rapidly Deporting The Mentally Ill, Aimee L. Mayer-Salins

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

No abstract provided.

International Accountability In U.S. Law: A Call For Legislation, Jonah Diamond

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

No abstract provided.

My Body, My Property, My Baby? The Extension Of Property Rights To Sexual Reproductive Cells And Embryos, Chanel Vegh

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

No abstract provided.

Post-Trial Pleas Bargaining In Capital Cases: Using Conditional Commutations To Remove Weak Cases From Death Row, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Publications

Plea bargaining accounts for over ninety percent of criminal convictions and it dominates the American criminal justice system. Yet, once a defendant is convicted, bargaining almost completely disappears from the system. Even though years of litigation are on the horizon, there is nearly no bargaining in the appellate and habeas corpus process. There are two reasons for this. First, prosecutors and courts typically lack the power to alter a sentence that has already been imposed. Second, even if prosecutors had the authority to negotiate following a conviction, they would have little incentive to do so. Affirmance rates in ordinary criminal …

Gatekeeping Science: Using The Structure Of Scientific Research To Distinguish Between Admissibility And Weight In Expert Testimony, David L. Faigman, Christopher Slobogin, John Monahan

Northwestern University Law Review

Fundamental to all evidence rules is the division of responsibility between the judge, who determines the admissibility of evidence, and the jury, which gauges its weight. In most evidentiary contexts, such as those involving hearsay and character, threshold admissibility obligations are clear and relatively uncontroversial. The same is not true for scientific evidence. The complex nature of scientific inference, and in particular the challenges of reasoning from group data to individual cases, has bedeviled courts. As a result, courts vary considerably on how they define the judge’s gatekeeping task under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and its state equivalents.

This …

Moving Beyond Miranda: Concessions For Confessions, Scott W. Howe

Northwestern University Law Review

The law governing police interrogation provides perverse incentives. For criminal suspects, the law rewards obstruction and concealment. For police officers, it honors deceit and psychological aggression. For the courts and the rest of us, it encourages blindness and rationalization. This Article contends that the law could help foster better behaviors. The law could incentivize criminals to confess without police trickery and oppression. It could motivate police officers involved in obtaining suspect statements to avoid chicanery and duress. And, it could summon courts and the rest of us to speak more truthfully about whether suspect admissions are the product of informed, …

Mason V. State, 132 Nev. Adv. Op. 42 (June 16, 2016), Shannon Diaz

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined that pursuant to NRS 176.035(1), a district court must pronounce aggregate minimum and maximum terms of imprisonment in a defendant’s judgment of conviction.

Sparks V. Bare, 132 Nev. Adv. Op. 43 (Jun. 16, 2016), Emily Haws

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined under NRS 189.030(1) that (1) “a misdemeanor appellant is responsible for requesting transcripts and, if not indigent, paying for those transcripts;” and (2) that “the district court has the inherent authority to dismiss a misdemeanor appeal where the appellant fails to prosecute an appeal or comply with the court’s orders.”

“Criminal Records” - A Comparative Approach, Sigmund A. Cohn

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Erdos V. United States: Expansion Of Extraterritoriality And Revival Of Exterritoriality, Gary I. Strausberg

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Implementing Change In Sentencing And Corrections: The Need For Broad-Based Research, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

None available

Constitutional Retroactivity In Criminal Procedure, Dov Fox, Alex Stein

Washington Law Review

The “watershed” doctrine gives prisoners a constitutional basis to reopen their cases based on a new due process protection that would have made a difference had it been announced before their appeals were exhausted. The Supreme Court has imposed nearly impossible conditions, however, for any new rule of criminal procedure to apply retroactively to a final conviction or sentence. No such rule can be backdated unless it enhances not only the accuracy of criminal verdicts, but also “our very understanding of the bedrock” tenets of fairness in criminal trials. The Court refers to rules that satisfy both these requirements as …

#Guilty? Sublet V. State And The Authentication Of Social Media Evidence In Criminal Proceedings, Elizabeth A. Flanagan

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Pennsylvania Stacks The Deck Against Defendants In Commonwealth V. Alicia, Leaving False Confession Assessments To The Jury, Katherine Reamy

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Rescued From The Grave And Then Covered With Mud: Justice Scalia And The Unfinished Restoration Of The Confrontation Right, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Some years before his death, when asked which was his favorite among his opinions, Antonin Scalia named Crawford v. Washington. It was a good choice. Justice Scalia's opinion in Crawford reclaimed the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution and restored it to its rightful place as one of the central protections of our criminal justice system. He must have found it particularly satisfying that the opinion achieved this result by focusing on the historical meaning of the text, and that it gained the concurrence of all but two members of the Court, from all ideological positions.

Constitutional Retroactivity In Criminal Procedure, Dov Fox, Alex Stein

Washington Law Review

The “watershed” doctrine gives prisoners a constitutional basis to reopen their cases based on a new due process protection that would have made a difference had it been announced before their appeals were exhausted. The Supreme Court has imposed nearly impossible conditions, however, for any new rule of criminal procedure to apply retroactively to a final conviction or sentence. No such rule can be backdated unless it enhances not only the accuracy of criminal verdicts, but also “our very understanding of the bedrock” tenets of fairness in criminal trials. The Court refers to rules that satisfy both these requirements as …

When Is A Trafficking Victim A Trafficking Victim? Anti-Prostitution Statutes And Victim Protection, Michele Boggiani

Cleveland State Law Review

Victims of sex-market trafficking are often criminalized under anti-prostitution statutes rather than protected under anti-trafficking laws. As a result, trafficking victims suffer ramifications resulting from both the exploitation of their captors and the social stigma of criminalization. The combined hardships make it exponentially more difficult for victims to overcome their past and safely reintegrate into society. This Article first identifies the sources of the double-victimization problem, including the perpetuated stereotypes regarding trafficking victims and the methods of exploitation, inadequate law enforcement training, and statutes that conflate sex-market victims with prostitution. Having identified the source of the problem, the author proposes …

Taming The Wild West: Using Unsecured Bail Bonds In Nevada's Pretrial-Release Program, Hayley E. Miller

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Habeas As Forum Allocation: A New Synthesis, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The scope of habeas relief for state prisoners, especially during the decades before the Supreme Court’s 1953 decision in Brown v. Allen, is a famously disputed question – one of recognized significance for contemporary debates about the proper scope of habeas review. This Essay provides a new answer. It argues that, until the enactment of AEDPA in 1996, state prisoners were always entitled to de novo review of the legal and mixed law/fact questions decided against them by the state courts. Until 1916, such review was provided by the Supreme Court; after 1953, such review was provided by the lower …

Identifying Criminals’ Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick

Faculty Scholarship

There is a 250-year-old presumption in the criminology and law enforcement literature that people are deterred more by increases in the certainty rather than increases in the severity of legal sanctions. We call this presumption the Certainty Aversion Presumption (CAP). Simple criminal decision-making models suggest that criminals must be risk seeking if they behave consistently with CAP. This implication leads to disturbing interpretations, such as criminals being categorically different from law-abiding people, who often display risk-averse behavior while making financial decisions. Moreover, policy discussions that incorrectly rely on criminals’ risk attitudes implied by CAP are ill informed, and may therefore …

The United States Supreme Court (Mostly) Gives Up Its Review Role With Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel Cases, Paul Marcus

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Jurisdiction Of The Irish Courts In The Protection Of The Constitutional Rights Of A Person Accused Of A Crime., Adrian Berski

Reports

Studying the Irish Constitutional Law, requires the understanding of how the Irish Political System was evolved. Montesquieu's tripartite system, adopted by the Republic of Ireland is the judiciary[1] has a particular place in the Irish Constitution in articles 34 - 37[2].

The main purpose of this essay is to analyse the balance between the jurisdiction of the Irish Courts in the protection of the constitutional rights of a person accused of a crime and the functioning of the criminal justice system in protecting Society`s general interest. The first section presents a brief summary of the courts functions …

The Supreme Court Didn't Fix Racist Jury Selection, Kami Chavis

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Juvenile Justice Reform In Texas: The Context, Content & Consequences Of Senate Bill 1630, Sara A. Gordon

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

If You Fly A Drone, So Can Police, Stephen Henderson

Other Faculty Publications

Written for Slate's Future Tense.According to the U.S. Constitution, the more you fly your drone, the more police can fly theirs. “Come on,” you might reply, “that hoary document”—and, yes, sorry to make you the sort who drops words like hoary—“that hoary document surely says nothing about drones.” But in fact it does. At least it does as interpreted by the courts. In particular, it is how they interpret the Fourth Amendment. So, to understand this aspect of drones, we first must understand this provision of the Bill of Rights...

Beyond A Reasonable Disagreement: Judging Habeas Corpus, Noam Biale

University of Cincinnati Law Review

This Article addresses ongoing confusion in federal habeas corpus doctrine about one of the most elemental concepts in law: reasonableness. The Supreme Court recently announced a new standard of reasonableness review for habeas cases, intended to raise the bar state prisoners must overcome to obtain federal relief. This new standard demands that errors in state court decisions be so profound that “no fairminded jurist could disagree” that the result is incorrect. Scholars have decried the rigid and exacting nature of this standard, but very little interpretive work has yet been done to theorize what it means and how it should …

Protecting Public Employee Trial Testimony, Joseph Deloney

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In a number of jurisdictions around the United States, police officers and other public employees that regularly testify as part of their ordinary job duties can be placed in compromising positions. Because these types of employees regularly testify as part of their ordinary job duties, such testimony is considered “employee speech” and therefore unprotected by the First Amendment. Consequently, governmental employers can take adverse employment actions against an employee based on his or her truthful trial testimony without violating the employee’s First Amendment rights. Drawing from the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Lane v. Franks and other circuit court cases, …

West Germany’S Eastern Policy: Legal Claims And Political Realities, Manfred Zuleeg

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.