Evidence Commons^™

Efforts To Improve The Illinois Capital Punishment System: Worth The Cost?, Thomas P. Sullivan

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Uncharged Misconduct - The Edge Is Never Dull, David Coombs

Other Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Killing Roger Coleman: Habeas, Finality, And The Innocence Gap, Todd E. Pettys

William & Mary Law Review

For the past fifteen years, the execution of Roger Coleman has served as perhaps the most infamous illustration of the U.S. Supreme Court's determination to help the states achieve finality in their criminal cases. Convicted of rape and murder in 1982, Coleman steadfastly maintained his innocence and drew many supporters to his cause. In its 1991 ruling in Coleman v. Thompson, however, the Court refused to consider the constitutional claims raised in Coleman's habeas petition. The Court ruled that Coleman had forfeited his right to seek habeas relief when, in prior state proceedings, his attorneys mistakenly filed their notice of …

Excluding The Exclusionary Rule: Extending The Rationale Of Hudson V. Michigan To Evidence Seized During Unauthorized Nighttime Searches, Jeffiy R. Gittins

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Can A Jury Believe My Eyes, And Should Courts Let Experts Tell Them Why Not? The Admissibility Of Expert Testimony On Cross-Racial Eyewitness Identification In New York After People V. Young, Jody E. Frampton

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dead Man Talking: A Historical Analysis Of West Virginia's Dead Man's Statute And A Recommendation For Reform, Wesley P. Page

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Sign-Post Without Any Sense Of Direction: The Supreme Court's Dance Around The Inevitable Discovery Doctrine And The Exclusionary Rule In Hudson V. Michigan, David A. Stuart

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Crawford V. Washington And Davis V. Washington'S Originalism: Historical Arguments Showing Child Abuse Victims' Statements To Physicians Are Nontestimonial And Admissible As An Exception To The Confrontation Clause, Tom Harbinson

Mercer Law Review

Under Crawford v. Washington and Davis v. Washington, the Supreme Court has created a new interpretation of the right of confrontation that holds out-of-court testimonial statements inadmissible without cross-examination. In order to determine if statements for purposes of medical diagnosis and treatment should continue to be an exception to confrontation, this Article reviews the historical evidence cited by the Court. The Court's originalist analysis holds that the only exception for what the Court refers to as "testimonial statements" is the exception for dying declarations. This Article establishes that a significant number of confrontation exceptions existed for testimonial statements in …

Independent Judicial Research In The "Daubert" Age, Edward K. Cheng

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court's Daubert trilogy places judges in the unenviable position of assessing the reliability of often unfamiliar and complex scientific expert testimony. Over the past decade, scholars have therefore explored various ways of helping judges with their new gatekeeping responsibilities. Unfortunately, the two dominant approaches, which focus on doctrinal tests and external assistance mechanisms, have been largely ineffective. This Article advocates for a neglected but important method for improving scientific decision making-independent judicial research. It argues that judges facing unfamiliar and complex scientific admissibility decisions can and should engage in independent library research to better educate themselves about the …

Suing Based On Spyware? Admissibility Of Evidence Obtained From Spyware In Violation Of Federal And State Wiretap Laws: O'Brien V. O'Brien As A Paradigmatic Case, Shan Sivalingam

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Early in 2005, a Florida intermediate appellate court ruled that a trial court adjudicating a divorce proceeding had properly excluded evidence that the wife obtained by installing a spyware program on the husband’s computer. The court held that the evidence was an intercepted electronic communication that violated a Florida statute modeled after the Federal Wiretap Act. The Florida court ruled that exclusion fell properly within the discretion of the trial court, despite the fact that the relevant Florida statute did not contain an exclusionary rule for intercepted electronic communications. This Article provides a short overview of the federal and state …

Hudson And Samson: The Roberts Court Confronts Privacy, Dignity, And The Fourth Amendment, John D. Castiglione

ExpressO

This article critically analyzes Samson v. California and Hudson v. Michigan, which were the Roberts Court's first major Fourth Amendment decisions. In Samson, the Court upheld a California law allowing government officials to search parolees without any suspicion of wrongdoing. In Hudson, to the surprise of almost every observer, the Court held that knock-and-announce violations do not carry with them a remedy of exclusion. What was most notable about Hudson was not only that it rejected what every state and every federal court, save one, believed to be the proper remedy for knock-and-announce violations, but that it called into question …

Is Silence Sacred? The Vulnerability Of Griffin V. California In A Terrorist World, Lissa Griffin

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Here Is The Church, Now Who Owns The Steeple? A Revised Approach To Church Property Disputes, Adam E. Lyons

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Article reviews two approaches to the implementation of neutral principles of law--the constitutionally permissible method of resolving property disputes between bodies in a religious hierarchy. Though both approaches may be valid, the formal title approach, as implemented by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Presbytery of Beaver- Butler v. Middlesex Presbyterian Church, leads to problems in application that have been rectified by that court's more recent decision in In re Church of St. James the Less. It is the contention of this Article that future courts and practitioners facing church property disputes can draw guidance from the St. James decision …

A Proposal To Amend Rule 407 Of The Federal Rules Of Evidence To Conform With The Underlying Relevancy Rationale For The Rule In Negligence And Strict Liability Actions, Ralph Ruebner, Eugene Goryunov

ExpressO

The current version of FRE 407 prevents the use of evidence of remedial measures taken after an event that caused an injury or harm in order to prove negligence, culpable conduct, or strict product liability. Our proposal is that the language of Rule 407 be amended to preclude the admissibility of remedial measures which are taken both before and after an injury. This change will implement the relevancy rationale for the rule.

Prosecutors: Factors To Aid Your Filing Decisions With Respect To Fatal Traffic Collisions, Kimberly Rebecca Bird

ExpressO

As you may know, on a fairly regular basis, prosecutors are faced with filing decisions with respect to fatal traffic collisions. Many of them, of course, do not involve criminal negligence and are not prosecuted as crimes. Sometimes, on the other hand, the circumstances are egregious and the decision to be made is whether to file a case as a vehicular manslaughter or as a murder, on an implied malice theory. There are a finite number of California Supreme Court and Court of Appeal cases (beginning with People v. Watson (1981) 30 Cal.3d 290) that have addressed the sufficiency of …

Out To Lunch: Saks & Koehler Reply To Rudin & Imman's Commentary, Jonathan Koehler

Faculty Working Papers

At several points in their comment on our article in Science (1), Rudin & Inman (2, 3) asserted or clearly implied that we had been dishonest in our presentation. In each of those instances Rudin & Inman's charges are groundless, as we demonstrate below.

Had Rudin & Inman examined the actual source [see Fig. 1, right], they would have discovered that the words were indeed those of Moenssens, that they were consistent with the context in which they appeared, that Moenssens was not quoting Zain or anyone else, and that Saks & Koehler had accurately attributed the statement to its …

On The Legal Consequences Of Sauces: Should Thomas Keller's Recipes Be Per Se Copyrightable?, Christopher J. Buccafusco

All Faculty Scholarship

The restaurant industry now takes in over $500 billion a year, but recent courts have been skeptical of the notion that one of its most valuable assets, original recipes, are subject to copyright protection. With more litigation looming and the contours of the debate insufficiently mapped out, this article establishes the appropriate groundwork for analyzing the copyrightability of recipes. I show that, contrary to recent appellate court opinions, recipes meet the statutory requirements for copyrightability. I argue, by analogizing to musical compositions, that written recipes work to satisfy the fixation requirement of copyright law just as musical notation does for …

Probability, Policy And The Problem Of Reference Class, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This short paper focuses on the problem of reference class in evidentiary assessment as it relates to probability and weight of evidence. The reluctance to inject mathematical formalism into the factfinding function is justified. Objective probability requires a reference class from which a proportion is derived. Probability assessments change with the reference class. If a proposition is subject to proportional comparison against two or more different references, their selection is often an inductive process. The advantage of objectivity and methodological rigor is illusory. A legal dispute is the search for a plausible understanding of the truth, and an overtly mathematized …

Who Knew? Admissibility Of Subsequent Remedial Measures When Defendants Are Without Knowledge Of The Injuries, Mark G. Boyko, Ryan G. Vacca

Law Faculty Scholarship

Federal Rule of Evidence 407 prohibits the introduction of subsequent remedial measures for the purposes of demonstrating negligence, culpable conduct, or product defect. But the rule breaks down, in application and purpose, when a defendant undertakes the new safety measure after the plaintiff's injury, but before the defendant had knowledge of the loss. Such a situation is not uncommon. Would-be defendants frequently improve their products and product safety for a variety of reasons. Toxic exposure cases, where exposure often predates diagnosis of the injury by a decade or more, represent a prime example of cases where defendants are likely to …

Everything New Is Old Again: Brain Fingerprinting And Evidentiary Analogy, Alexandra J. Roberts

Law Faculty Scholarship

Brain Fingerprinting uses electroencephalography to ascertain the presence or absence of information in a subject's brain based on his reaction to particular stimuli. As a new forensic tool, Brain Fingerprinting technology stands poised to exert a tremendous impact on the presentation and outcome of selected legal cases in the near future. It also provides a fertile case study to examine the role of analogical reasoning in the process by which lawyers, experts, judges, and the media influence how factjinders perceive and evaluate unfamiliar types of proof When juridical metaphor disguises, distorts, or destroys ideas, it ceases to serve as an …

Comment: Experts Who Don't Know They Don't Know, Jonathan Koehler

Faculty Working Papers

Sadly, the conclusion reached by Green and Armstrong (2006) – that experts should not be used for predicting the decisions that people will make in conflicts – comes as no surprise. Decades ago, Armstrong himself taught us that expertise beyond a minimal level does not improve judgmental accuracy across a variety of domains (Armstrong, 1980). More recently, Tetlock (2006) drove home the point in a study of hundreds of political experts who made thousands of forecasts over many years. Like Green and Armstrong (2006), Tetlock (2006) found that that expert forecasts were frequently inaccurate. In a nod to Armstrong's previous …

Brady And Jailhouse Snitches, Paul C. Giannelli

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wiretapping And Eavesdropping: Surveillance In The Internet Age, 3rd Ed., Anne T. Mckenna, Clifford S. Fishman

Books

The third edition of the seminal “Fishman & McKenna” Wiretapping treatise analyzes federal and state law and the rapidly evolving civil and criminal legal issues and privacy issues surrounding the Internet, computers, cellular devices, electronic location tracking, drones, and biometrics. Since its publication, this treatise has been cited in multiple published federal and state judicial opinions, including by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in August 2010 and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in August 2014. The third edition is a well-known resource for attorneys working in private practice and in …

Chimeras: Double The Dna - Double The Fun For Crime Scene Investigators, Prosecutors, And Defense Attorneys?, Catherine Arcabascio

Faculty Scholarship

This article first explores the mythological origins of the term "chimera." It then explores the causes and scientific explanations of chimerism and the various conditions covered by the term chimera in the area of genetics. Although this article will discuss the various chimeric conditions that are thought to exist, its primary focus is on chimerism that is the result of the fusing of embryos in utero. Next, the article will discuss recent cases of chimerism - and of alleged chimerism - and how the genetic differences between chimeras and the general population came to light. It also will discuss …

Expert Testimony Disclosure Under Federal Rule 26: A Proposed Amendment, 41 J. Marshall L. Rev. 117 (2007), Keith H. Beyler

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Should Statements Made By Patients During Psychotherapy Fall Within The Medical Treatment Hearsay Exception? An Interdisciplinary Critique, 41 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1 (2007), Philip K. Hamilton

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Peer Review And Publication: Lessons For Lawyers, Susan Haack

Articles

No abstract provided.

After Thirty Years, Is It Time To Change The Vehicle Inventory Search Doctrine?, Nicholas B. Stampfli

Seattle University Law Review

Part II of this Comment will describe the inventory search as it has developed in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence in order to provide background and understanding of the procedure as it stands today. Part III will address the difficulties in applying the Supreme Court's approach by comparing the differences in police department policies. Part IV will then closely examine Washington's somewhat laudable approach to inventory searches, the limits the state has placed on the scope of inventory searches, and the steps the state has taken to impose a consent requirement. Last, Part V will suggest much needed reforms for Washington …

Finding The Golden Mean With Daubert: An Elusive, Perhaps An Impossible, Goal, Robert P. Mosteller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Idealizing Science And Demonizing Experts: An Intellectual History Of Expert Evidence, Jennifer L. Mnookin

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.