Criminal Procedure Commons^™

Bargained-For-Justice: Lessons From The Italians?, Michael Vitiello

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Crime Victims' Rights, Paul Cassell

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Over the last 40 years, advocates for crime victims have succeeded in enshrining victims’ rights in state constitutions and other enactments. These provisions show that a consensus has developed around the country on certain core victims’ rights. Included in the core are, among other things, the right to notice of court hearings, to attend court hearings, to be heard at appropriate court hearings, to proceedings free from unreasonable delay, to consideration of the victims’ safety during the process, and to restitution. The current challenge for the country is ensuring that these core rights are fully and effectively implemented and that …

A Contextual Approach To Harmless Error Review, Justin Murray

Articles & Chapters

Harmless error review is profoundly important, but arguably broken, in the form that courts currently employ it in criminal cases. One significant reason for this brokenness lies in the dissonance between the reductionism of modern harmless error methodology and the diverse normative ambitions of criminal procedure. Nearly all harmless error rules used by courts today focus exclusively on whether the procedural error under review affected the result of a judicial proceeding. I refer to these rules as “result-based harmlesserror review.” The singular preoccupation of result-based harmless error review with the outputs of criminal processes stands in marked contrast with criminal …

Democratizing Criminal Justice Through Contestation And Resistance, Jocelyn Simonson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dismissals As Justice, Anna Roberts

Faculty Publications

More than a third of our states have given judges a little-known power to dismiss prosecutions, not because of legal or factual insufficiency, but for the sake of justice. Whether phrased as dismissals “in furtherance of justice” or dismissals of de minimis prosecutions, these exercises of judicial power teach two important lessons.

First, judges exercising these dismissals are rebutting the common notion that in the face of over-criminalization and over-incarceration they are powerless to do more than rubber-stamp prosecutorial decision making. In individual cases, they push back against some of the most problematic aspects of our criminal justice system: its …

A New Balance Of Evils: Prosecutorial Misconduct, Iqbal, And The End Of Absolute Immunity, Mark C. Niles

Faculty Publications

Criminal prosecutors wield immense power in the criminal justice system. While the majority of prosecutors exercise this power in a professional manner, there is compelling evidence of a serious and growing problem of prosecutorial misconduct in this country. Although much prosecutorial misconduct results in the violation of the constitutional and other legal rights of criminal defendants, prosecutors are protected from any liability arising from these violations in all but the most exceptional cases by the defense of absolute immunity. The US. Supreme Court has justified the application of absolute prosecutorial immunity, in part, by noting that other means of incentivizing …

Nearsighted And Colorblind: The Perspective Problems Of Police Deadly Force Cases, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

In dealing with the recently publicized instances of police officers' use of deadly force, some reform efforts have been focused on the entities that are central to the successful prosecutions of police–the prosecutor and the grand jury. Some have suggested special, independent prosecutors for these cases so that the process of deciding whether to seek charges against police officers remains untainted by the necessary cooperative relationship between the police department and the prosecutor's office. Others have urged more transparency in the grand jury process so that the public can scrutinize a prosecutor's efforts in presenting evidence for an indictment. Still …

Giving Guidance To The Guidelines, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Throughout the country, we are seeing sentencing reform efforts reshape the way resources are being used to control crime and punish offenders. Fueled mostly by the practical challenges of overcrowded prisons and mounting costs, lawmakers have been willing to amend existing law in order to reduce incarceration for low-level, nonviolent offenders. This same effort at being "smart on crime" has been embraced by the federal government as well. While most of these changes are in the form of changes to mandatory minimum laws, the use of evidence-based sentencing practices, and a focus on diversion and re-entry programs, the role …

Should Death Be So Different?: Sentencing Purposes And Capital Jury Decisions In An Era Of Smart On Crime Sentencing Reform, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

We are in an era of “Smart on Crime” sentencing reform. Several states and the federal government have made major changes to their sentencing policies—from reducing the incarceration of low-level, nonviolent drug offenders to the use of evidence-based sentencing to focus the most severe punishments on those who are at the greatest risk of recidivism. Often, today’s reform efforts are spoken about in terms of being fiscally responsible while still controlling crime. Though such reform efforts do not explicitly acknowledge purposes of punishment—such as retribution, incapacitation, rehabilitation, or deterrence—an undercurrent running through all of these reforms is an effort …

Enhanced Preservation: Modifying The Protect And Preserve International Cultural Property Act To Better Protect Syrian Antiquities, Anthony Prinzivalli

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Fixing Soccer: Changing Fifa's Corporate Governance Structure In Response To The Current Fifa Corruption Scandal, Alexander Mandel

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Representing The United States Government: Reconceiving The Federal Prosecutor's Role Through A Historical Lens, Scott Ingram

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

For nearly 100 years courts and legal scholars have held prosecutors to the “justice” standard, meaning that the prosecutor’s first duty is to ensure that justice is done. With this command, prosecutors have increased their discretion. The modern prosecutor’s power is unrivaled in the criminal justice system. Judges and defense attorneys have ceded some of their power to prosecutors. The prosecutor’s power has led a host of commentators to critique prosecutorial use of power for a variety of reasons. Rather than add to this voluminous literature by defending or critiquing prosecutorial power, this Article challenges the underlying assumption of prosecutorial …

Recent Development: Givens V. State: Preservation Of Allegedly Inconsistent Jury Verdicts In A Criminal Trial Must Be Made By Objection Before The Verdicts Are Rendered Final And The Jury Is Dismissed, Nicholas Mastracci

University of Baltimore Law Forum

The Court of Appeals of Maryland held that a defendant waives review of any issue as to allegedly inconsistent verdicts by failing to object before the verdicts become final and the court discharges the jury. Givens v. State, 449 Md. 433, 486, 144 A.3d 717, 748 (2016). Although the defendant in this case did not request plain error review, the court stated that the alleged inconsistent verdicts were not clear and obvious; therefore the four-factor plain error test was not met. Id. at 482, 144 A.3d at 746.

On November 15, 2011, several people including Dominic Givens ("Givens"), pulled up …

"Make Him An Offer He Can't Refuse"-- Mezzanatto Waivers As Lynchpin Of Prosecutorial Overreach, Christopher B. Mueller

Publications

Plea bargaining is the dominant means of disposing of criminal charges in the United States, in both state and federal courts. This administrative mechanism has become a system that is grossly abusive of individual rights, leading to many well-known maladies of the criminal justice system, which include overcharging, overincarceration, convictions on charges that would likely fail at trial, and even conviction of “factually innocent” persons. Instrumental in the abuses of plea bargaining is the so-called Mezzanatto waiver, which takes its name from a 1995 Supreme Court decision that approved the practice of getting defendants to agree that anything they say …

Firearms In The Family, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article considers firearms prohibitions for domestic violence offenders, in light of recent Supreme Court decisions and the larger, national debate about gun control. Unlike other scholarship in the area, it confronts the costs of ratcheting up the scope and enforcement of such firearms bans and argues that the politicization of safety has come at the expense of a sound approach to gun control in the context of intimate-partner abuse. In doing so, it expands scholarly arguments against mandatory, one-size-fits-all criminal justice responses to domestic violence in a direction that other critics have been reluctant to go, perhaps because of …

The Unreasonable Rise Of Reasonable Suspicion: Terrorist Watchlists And Terry V. Ohio, Jeffrey D. Kahn

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Terry v. Ohio's “reasonable suspicion” test was created in the context of domestic law enforcement, but it did not remain there. This Essay examines the effect of transplanting this test into a new context: the world of terrorist watchlists. In this new context, reasonable suspicion is the standard used to authorize the infringement on liberty that often results from being watchlisted. But nothing else from the case that created that standard remains the same. The government official changes from a local police officer to an anonymous member of the intelligence community. The purpose changes from crime prevention to counterterrorism. …

Is Miranda Good News Or Bad News For The Police: The Usefulness Of Empirical Evidence, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark case of Miranda v. Arizona created a culture in which police officers regularly warn arrestees that they have a right to remain silent, that anything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law, that they have the right to an attorney, and that if they cannot afford one, an attorney will be appointed to them. These Miranda warnings have a number of possible effects. The warnings are meant to inform suspects about negative consequences associated with speaking to the police without the assistance of counsel. In this sense they …

Plea Bargaining And International Criminal Justice, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Over the last two decades, plea bargaining has spread beyond the countries where it originated — the United States and other common law jurisdictions — and has become a global phenomenon. Plea bargaining is spreading rapidly to civil law countries that previously viewed the practice with skepticism. And it has now arrived at international criminal courts.

While domestic plea bargaining is often limited to non-violent crimes, the international courts allow sentence negotiations for even the most heinous offenses, including genocide and crimes against humanity. Its use remains highly controversial, and debates about plea bargaining in international courts continue in court …

Expanding Reach: The Importance Of Batson V. Kentucky Thirty Years On, Melynda J. Price J.D., Ph.D.

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Call To Criminal Courts: Record Rules For Batson, Catherine M. Grasso, Barbara O'Brien

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.