Evidence Commons^™

Framing The Prosecution, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

The enormous value of Dan Simon’s In Doubt lies not just in its nuanced exploration of the challenges to accurate criminal factfinding, but also in its challenge to us to rethink trials themselves. Even as we endeavor to give criminal defendants the means and license to raise reasonable doubts, we need to think more about when and how those doubts can be allayed. Just because most jurisdictions have not come out of the first round of play – the one in which defendants get the tools to poke holes in the cases against them – does not mean it is …

Redesigning The Science Court, Justin Sevier

Scholarly Publications

Scientific evidence is a field in crisis. The validity and reliability of forensic techniques have been criticized by nearly every actor in the legal community—by attorneys, judges, the legal academy, and even the National Academy of Sciences—and high-profile cases of scientific evidence gone awry have garnered national attention. Policymakers have suggested many solutions to the scientific evidence crisis, including a controversial proposal to remove complex scientific cases from state and federal dockets and to hear those cases instead in a specialized “science court.”

Science court proposals face one substantial hurdle: they have become exceedingly unpopular. But …