Evidence Commons^™

Honesty Without Truth: Lies, Accuracy, And The Criminal Justice Process, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

Focusing on “lying” is a natural response to uncertainty but too narrow of a concern. Honesty and truth are not the same thing and conflating them can actually inhibit accuracy. In several settings across investigations and trials, the criminal justice system elevates compliant statements, misguided beliefs, and confident opinions while excluding more complex evidence. Error often results. Some interrogation techniques, for example, privilege cooperation over information. Those interactions can yield incomplete or false statements, confessions, and even guilty pleas. Because of the impeachment rules that purportedly prevent perjury, the most knowledgeable witnesses may be precluded from taking the stand. The …

Mandating Meaningful Forensic Discovery: A Proposal To Fuel The Engine Of Truthfulness, Marjorie Mcdiarmid

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The "Primary Purpose" Of Children's Advocacy Centers: How Ohio V. Clark Revolutionized Children's Hearsay, Andrew Lentz

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Testimonial Injustice In International Criminal Law, Shannon Fyfe

Scholarly Articles

In this article, I consider the possibilities and limitations for testimonial justice in an international criminal courtroom. I begin by exploring the relationship between epistemology and criminal law, and consider how testimony contributes to the goals of truth and justice. I then assess the susceptibility of international criminal courts to the two harms of testimonial injustice: epistemic harm to the speaker, and harm to the truth-seeking process. I conclude that international criminal courtrooms are particularly susceptible to perpetrating testimonial injustice. Hearers in the international criminal courtroom should practice testimonial justice, but the institution is not structured in a way that …

Cabining Judicial Discretion Over Forensic Evidence With A New Special Relevance Rule, Emma F.E. Shoucair

Michigan Law Review

Modern forensic evidence suffers from a number of flaws, including insufficient scientific grounding, exaggerated testimony, lack of uniform best practices, and an inefficacious standard for admission that regularly allows judges to admit scientifically unsound evidence. This Note discusses these problems, lays out the current landscape of forensic science reform, and suggests the addition of a new special relevance rule to the Federal Rules of Evidence (and similar rules in state evidence codes). This proposed rule would cabin judicial discretion to admit non-DNA forensic evidence by barring prosecutorial introduction of such evidence in criminal trials absent a competing defense expert or …

Character Assassination: Amending Federal Rule Of Evidence 404(B) To Protect Criminal Defendants, Daniel J. Capra, Liesa L. Richter

Faculty Articles

There is a war raging over the admissibility of the prior bad acts of criminal defendants in federal trials. While many circuits treat Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) as a rule of “inclusion” and liberally admit such prior bad-acts evidence with predictably explosive effects on criminal juries, a few circuits are developing rigorous standards designed to foreclose prosecutorial use of such bad-acts evidence. This Article chronicles the well-documented permissive admission of the prior bad acts of criminal defendants notwithstanding the prohibition on such evidence by Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b)(1), as well as recent efforts by some federal circuits to …

Whether The Bright-Line Cut-Off Rule And The Adversarial Expert Explanation Of Adaptive Functioning Exacerbates Capital Juror Comprehension Of The Intellectual Disability, Leona Deborah Jochnowitz

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Not Believe Women In Sexual Assault Cases?: An Engagement With Professors Tuerkheimer, Colb, And Many Others, Dan Subotnik

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Will The Jury System Survive The Peña-Rodriguez Exception To Rule 606(B)?: The Court’S Response To Racial Discrimination By A Juror Leaves The Future Of The American Jury Trial System In Jeopardy, Taurus Myhand

Scholarly Works

The enforcement of no-impeachment rules has been a long-standing tradition in the United States preventing jurors from offering testimony as to impeach their own verdict. In March 2017, the Supreme Court changed course from centuries of jurisprudence and superseded the Federal Rules of Evidence with a new exception to Rule 606(b) in the Court’s decision in Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado. The Court’s effort to “root out” racial bias in the justice system resulted in the debunking of the legislative authority granted to the Congress while creating an exception that does little, if anything, toward eliminating racial bias during jury deliberations. In …

Challenges Facing Judges Regarding Expert Evidence In Criminal Cases, Paul W. Grimm

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Debunked, Discredited, But Still Defended: Why Prosecutors Resist Challenges To Bad Science And Some Suggestions For Crafting Remedies For Wrongful Conviction Based On Changed Science, Aviva A. Orenstein

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Flawed science has significantly contributed to wrongful convictions. Courts struggle with how to address such convictions when the mistaken science (such as bogus expert claims about the differences between accidental fires and intentionally set ones) significantly affected the guilty verdict but there is no DNA evidence to directly exonerate the accused. My short piece explores why prosecutors often defend bad science. Mistakes in science tend to serve the prosecution, but there are other more subtle factors that explain prosecutors’ reluctance to address flawed forensic testimony. Such reluctance may arise from fondness for the status quo and a resistance to subverting …

Close Enough For Government Work: Proving Minimal Nexus In A Federal And Firearms Conviction: United States V. Corey, Barbara H. Taylor

Maine Law Review

In United States v. Corey, Alvin Scott Corey was found guilty of possessing a firearm as a felon. Although Corey's possession of a Smith and Wesson shotgun violated Maine law, Corey was prosecuted in the United States District Court under the federal statute 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) and its penalty statute, § 924(e). On appeal, Corey argued that one of the requirements for his conviction, proof of the statute's jurisdictional element, had not been satisfied because that proof rested on expert testimony based, in part, on hearsay. The First Circuit Court of Appeals, in a split decision, affirmed Corey's conviction, …

Scientific Evidence And Forensic Science Since Daubert: Maine Decides To Sit Out On The Dance, Thomas L. Bohan

Maine Law Review

In 1993, the Supreme Court of the United States stated that with the federal adoption of statutory rules of evidence in 1975, the common law rule for determining admissibility of scientific testimony was superseded, and that thenceforth admissibility of scientific testimony was to be determined solely by Federal Rule of Evidence 702 (Rule 702). The Frye standard had been adopted in one form or another by most of the federal circuits and by many of the state courts during the 70 years preceding Daubert. Referred to as the “general acceptance” standard, the Frye standard--although adopted in a variety of forms--had …

Calling Crawford: Minnesota Declares A 911 Call Non-Testimonial In State V. Wright, Alistair Y. Raymond

Maine Law Review

In State v. Wright, 1 the State of Minnesota charged David Wright with possession of a firearm by a felon and two counts of second-degree assault against his girlfriend and her sister. A jury found Wright guilty on all charges and sentenced him to sixty months in jail for each crime, with sentences served concurrently. Wright’s girlfriend, R.R., and her sister, S.R., did not testify against him at trial. The prosecution, however, used the transcript of a 911 call placed by R.R. against Wright in the trial. Although the 911 call was hearsay, the court admitted it under Minnesota’s excited …

A Step Toward Robust Criminal Discovery Reform In Virginia: The Disclosure Of Witness Statements Before Trial, Jennifer Horan

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court's Long And Perhaps Unnecessary Struggle To Find A Standard Of Culpability To Regulate The Federal Exclusionary Remedy For Fourth/Fourteenth Amendment Violations, Melvyn H. Zarr

Maine Law Review

On January 14, 2009, the United States Supreme Court decided Herring v. United States. In Herring, the defendant moved to suppress evidence that he alleged was seized as a result of an arrest that violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court approved the decision below to deny suppression of the evidence. The decision set off a flurry of speculation that the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule would not see its 100th birthday in 2014. A headline in the New York Times of January 31 declared: “Supreme Court Edging Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling.” Another …

State V. Thurston: An Examination Of Assualt, Self-Defense, And Trespass In Relation To Domestic Violence, Megan E. Magoon

Maine Law Review

Darrell Thurston and Suzanne Harmon were romantically involved on an intermittent basis for five years and had one child together. As a result of an altercation that took place at Harmon’s home in Sullivan, Maine, on September 27, 2007, between Thurston and Harmon, Thurston was charged with assault, criminal mischief, and obstructing report of crime or injury. The testimony during the trial illuminated the major factual differences between Thurston’s and Harmon’s accounts of the night the incident took place. Thurston requested a self defense jury instruction based on his version of what had happened, which the trial court ultimately denied. …

Findings Of Fact Vs. Conclusions Of Law: How The Law Court Complicated The Case Of State V. Connor, Christopher S. Boulos

Maine Law Review

In State v. Connor, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, upheld a trial judge’s denial of a motion to suppress evidence. Although the evidence presented in the suppression hearing seemed adequate to support the denial of the motion, the trial judge failed to clearly state his conclusions of law when denying the motion. However, the Law Court mistook the ambiguous conclusions of law as ambiguous findings of fact. Because the findings of fact were ambiguous in the court’s view, the majority and dissenting opinions spent the bulk of their energies discussing how the court should review …

Criminal Law—When The Pillow Talks: Arkansas's Rape Shield Statute Bars Dna Evidence Excluding The Defendant As The Source Of Semen. Thacker V. State, 2015 Ark. 406, 474 S.W.3d 65., Lacon Marie Smith

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Local Rules Revolution In Criminal Discovery, Daniel S. Mcconkie

Cardozo Law Review

Over the last few decades, federal district court judges throughout the country have used local rules to greatly expand pretrial criminal disclosure obligations, especially for prosecutors. These local criminal discovery rules both incentivize prosecutors to act as ministers of justice and empower judges to manage prosecutorial disclosures. This quiet revolution is now well underway, and the time has come to amend the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to bring these innovations to all the districts.

Commentators have long recognized that neither Supreme Court precedent nor the Federal Rules effectively require prosecutors to provide the defense with enough discovery to properly …

"I'Ve Got My Mind Made Up": How Judicial Teleology In Cases Involving Biologically Based Evidence Violates Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Michael L. Perlin

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article critiques the teleological reasoning employed by judges in cases involving biologically-based evidence, particularly in mental disability law. It argues that judges often prioritize pre-determined outcomes over evidence, leading to decisions that neglect valid scientific data and violate the principles of therapeutic jurisprudence.

Discovering Forensic Fraud, Jennifer D. Oliva, Valena E. Beety

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay posits that certain structural dynamics, which dominate criminal proceedings, significantly contribute to the admissibility of faulty forensic science in criminal trials. The authors believe that these dynamics are more insidious than questionable individual prosecutorial or judicial behavior in this context. Not only are judges likely to be former prosecutors, prosecutors are “repeat players” in criminal litigation and, as such, routinely support reduced pretrial protections for defendants. Therefore, we argue that the significant discrepancies between the civil and criminal pretrial discovery and disclosure rules warrant additional scrutiny.

In the criminal system, the near absence of any pretrial discovery means …

The Unintended Consequences Of California Proposition 47: Reducing Law Enforcement’S Ability To Solve Serious, Violent Crimes, Shelby Kail

Pepperdine Law Review

For many years, DNA databases have helped solve countless serious, violent crimes by connecting low-level offenders to unsolved crimes. Because the passage of Proposition 47 reduced several low-level crimes to misdemeanors, which do not qualify for DNA sample collection, Proposition 47 has severely limited law enforcement’s ability to solve serious, violent crimes through California’s DNA database and reliable DNA evidence. This powerful law enforcement tool must be preserved to prevent additional crimes from being committed, to exonerate the innocent, and to provide victims with closure through conviction of their assailants or offenders. Proposition 47’s unintended consequences have led to devastating …

Adjudicated Juveniles And Collateral Relief, Joshua A. Tepfer, Laura H. Nirider

Maine Law Review

Collateral relief is a vital part of the American criminal justice system. By filing post-conviction petitions after the close of direct appeal, defendants can raise claims based on evidence outside the record that was not known or available at the time of trial. One common use of post-conviction relief is to file a claim related to a previously unknown constitutional violation that occurred at trial, such as ineffective assistance of counsel. If a defendant’s trial attorney performed ineffectively by failing to call, for instance, an alibi witness, then that omission is unlikely to be reflected in the trial record—but in …

Commissioning Innocence And Restoring Confidence: The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission And The Missing Deliberative Citizen, Mary Kelly Tate

Maine Law Review

Since 1989, the United States has witnessed 289 DNA exonerations, with exonerees serving an average of thirteen years in prison. Although DNA an its unmatched power for the conclusive results is what brought popular attention to wrongful convictions, the scope of the problem is vastly larger than the number of known DNA exonerations. The actual number of convicted individuals who are factually innocent is unknown. The state of North Carolina has recently responded to this national crisis via a newly created state agency. This essay applauds North Carolina’s response, but urges that ordinary citizens, qua jurors, be active participants in …

Pre- And Post- Conviction Dna Collection Laws In The United States: An Analysis Of Proposed Model Statutes, Xiaochen Hu, Mai E. Naito, Rolando V. Del Carmen

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

DNA is one of the most powerful molecular tools being widely used in criminal investigations today. Pre- and post-conviction DNA collection laws govern when DNA must be collected, where it is stored, and who has access to the information. Currently, all fifty states have post-conviction DNA collection laws, but only thirty states have enacted pre-conviction DNA collection laws. Details of the procedures and requirements in state statutes vary by state. This study analyzes the current statutes to identify strengths and weaknesses and propose a model statute to standardize DNA collection laws nationwide. By using Herbert Packer’s two models for criminal …

Physical Match: Unique Fracture Patterns In Wooden Popsicle Sticks, Yiu Ming Sunny Lau

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

Physical match (or physical fit) evidence was considered reliable in court for years, until the Daubert case, which required standardized scientific methodology on all forensic evidence. Physical matching faces the same criticism as other forms of physical evidence (specifically, that it lacks a scientific foundation). Physical matching is based on the idea that when an object is fractured, the shape of each fragment is unique and it is not possible to recreate a fragment that is identical to any other. In this study, fifty wooden popsicle sticks were broken in half, the pieces were mixed, and then reconstructed using physical …

"A Middle Temperature Between The Two": Exploring Intermediate Remedies For The Failure To Comply With Maryland's Eyewitness Identification Statute, Marc A. Desimone Jr.

University of Baltimore Law Review

This article addresses what remedies should be available to a criminal defendant in Maryland who has been identified in an extrajudicial identification procedure that does not comply with the present statutory requirements. Part II of this article provides an overview of the present due process test for evaluating the admissibility of extrajudicial eyewitness identifications, the present Maryland iteration of that test, and alternatives to that approach that have been adopted in other jurisdictions. Part III reviews recent legislative reforms to extrajudicial identification procedures, which are required in Maryland as of January 1, 2016. Section IV.A of this article argues why …

Manipulation Of Suspects And Unrecorded Questioning, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Fifty years after Miranda, courts still do not have clear guidance on the types oftechniques police may use during interrogation. While first-generation tactics (a.k.a. the third degree) are banned, second-generation tactics such as those found in the famous Reid Manual continue to be used by interrogators. The Supreme Court has sent only vague signals as to which of these second- generation techniques, if any, are impermissible, and has made no mention of newly developed third-generation tactics that are much less reliant on manipulation. This Article divides second-generation techniques into four categories: impersonation, rationalization, fabrication, and negotiation. After concluding, based on …

The Miranda Case Fifty Years Later, Yale Kamisar

Articles

A decade after the Supreme Court decided Miranda v. Arizona, Geoffrey Stone took a close look at the eleven decisions the Court had handed down “concerning the scope and application of Miranda.” As Stone observed, “[i]n ten of these cases, the Court interpreted Miranda so as not to exclude the challenged evidence.” In the eleventh case, the Court excluded the evidence on other grounds. Thus, Stone noted, ten years after the Court decided the case, “the Court ha[d] not held a single item of evidence inadmissible on the authority of Miranda.” Not a single item. To use …