Criminal Procedure Commons^™

Eliminating Rule 609 To Provide A Fair Opportunity To Defend Against Criminal Charges: A Proposal To The Advisory Committee On The Federal Rules Of Evidence, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

Federal Rule of Evidence 609 authorizes the admission of prior convictions to impeach criminal defendants who testify. And in this important and uniquely damaging application, the [r]ule’s logic fails, distorting American trials and depriving defendants of a fair opportunity to defend against the charges. The Advisory Committee [on Evidence Rules (the “Advisory Committee”)] should propose the elimination of Rule 609 and prohibit cross-examination with specific instances of a criminal defendant’s past conduct when those instances are unrelated to the defendant’s testimony and unconnected to the case.

This short essay begins by setting out the proposed rule change alongside a proposed …

“A Tale Of National Disgrace”: Applying The Doctrine Of Unconscionability To Establish The Impermissibility Of Secret Non-Prosecution Agreements, Denna Fraley

Journal of Law and Policy

Crime victims are directly harmed by crime and therefore have a stake in, and should be treated as individual participants in the criminal justice process. In recognition of this, Congress passed the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (“CVRA”) in 2004 to enumerate specific rights afforded to crime victims, including the rights to confer with the prosecutor in the case, to be heard at public court proceedings involving a plea or sentencing, to be informed in a timely manner of a plea bargain or deferred prosecution agreement, and to be treated with fairness and respect. Whether the CVRA extends these rights to …

Murder And A Mother’S Love: Understanding Maternal Altruistic Filicide And Reshaping The Legal System’S Approach To Mentally Ill Mothers Who Kill Their Children, Morgan Woodbridge

Journal of Law and Policy

Every year, thousands of children are killed by their parents. Some of these killings are committed by mentally ill mothers who believe that death is in their children's best interest. This category of killings is called maternal altruistic filicide. Numerous studies have found that mothers who commit altruistic filicide are severely mentally ill and have histories of psychiatric illness, trauma, and suicidality. Despite this, mothers who commit altruistic filicide are often railroaded through the criminal legal system without access to adequate mental health care. Traditional legal procedures designed to assist the mentally ill, such as the insanity defense or the …

Women Rebuilding Their Lives Post Incarceration: The Obstacles Of Housing And Employment, Sydney Ward

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

According to a report from The Sentencing Project, "the female incarcerated population stands nearly five times higher than in 1980" and this trend has continued, which means that "at the national level, 47 out of every 100,000 women were in prison in 2020" (“Incarcerated Women and Girls.”). This means that women are leaving prison and beginning their reentry process into society every day, which is much easier said than done. With this reentry process, there are various barriers that each woman must overcome to reestablish their lives. When women are released from incarceration, the first thing they must do is …

Bail At The Founding, Kellen R. Funk, Sandra G. Mayson

Faculty Scholarship

How did criminal bail work in the Founding era? This question has become pressing as bail, and bail reform, have attracted increasing attention, in part because history is thought to bear on the meaning of bail-related constitutional provisions. To date, however, there has been no thorough account of bail at the Founding. This Article begins to correct the deficit in our collective memory by describing bail law and practice in the Founding era, from approximately 1790 to 1810. In order to give a full account, we surveyed a wide range of materials, including Founding-era statutes, case law, legal treatises, and …

The Heavy Mark Of Ptsd The Justice System Leaves On The People Going Through It., Ezavier Miller, Angel Emetuche, Sakina Ahmed

ENGL 1102 Showcase

This is a paper about how the justice system in it's many forms can cause PTSD. Not only to the criminals that go through it but also the children, victims. With many process having extensive repercussion causing PSTD to take hold of the many people that seek the justice system for help or judgement.

Crimes In Different Mediums Of Art, Chloe Milhouse

ENGL 1102 Showcase

There are a few different ways we see crime and art come together as one without even realizing it and there are other topics that showcase crime punishment as well. Crime can be portrayed through music. When certain artists sing about their crime-like behaviors, this can lead to people also doing that same crime because they listened to it in a song. Crime can be derived from art itself, causing people to react emotionally and criminally to something they’ve seen. Lastly it can be represented through film and TV showcasing elements of human behavior for society to see. All of …

The Mosaic Theory In Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence: The Last Bastion Of Privacy In A Camera-Surveilled World, Auggie Alvarado

St. Mary's Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Ordinary Meaning As Last Resort: The Meaning Of "Undue Hardship" In Title Vii, James Phillips

BYU Law Review

Ordinary meaning reigns supreme in modern statutory interpretation. Yet that supremacy can cause an interpreter to miss specialized meaning. And the Supreme Court has never fully clarified when ordinary meaning must give way to specialized or technical meaning.

This Article attempts to provide doctrinal clarification as to when one should use ordinary as opposed to other meanings through putting the doctrinal pieces together in a full and coherent way. That doctrinal clarity leads to a methodological refinement: rather than the starting point, ordinary meaning is the ending point of statutory interpretation.

This Article applies this doctrine and methodology, as well …

Good Policing Practices Are Difficult, Even For The Avengers, Melanie Reid

Cleveland State Law Review

Policing, as a topic, is complicated. Many have strong views as to what police should or should not be doing and how effectively they are doing it. Too often policing has become polarized with various perspectives disagreeing as to the future of policing. Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, and Policing Abolition movements are on one spectrum compared to the Blue Lives Matter Movement or other mayoral or police union initiatives. This is clearly a time to collaborate and learn from the various perspectives to bring hope and change in the future. Lawyers, academics, community members, and police officers alike …

Pleading For Justice: Analyzing Ohio’S Wrongful Conviction Compensation Statute And The Guilty Plea Disqualification Provision, Paige Betley

Cleveland State Law Review

Innocent until proven guilty? For some who have walked through the criminal justice system, this American adage did not seem to ring true. The criminal justice system has produced many wrongful convictions, which is an unthinkable injustice. These individuals must then fight for compensation to get back on their feet in society after spending years, if not decades, unjustly behind bars. Ohio’s wrongful conviction compensation statute perpetuates this injustice by categorically excluding exonerees who pled guilty to a crime they did not commit from receiving compensation from the State, with no exceptions. This Note critically analyzes the inherent harms from …

Prosecutorial Storytelling Through Intrinsic Evidence, Brian Chen

Pepperdine Law Review

Crimes make for compelling stories. So juries make for an eager audience. Jurors want to—indeed, expect to—learn what the defendant did, how they did it, and why they deserve punishment. Capable prosecutors know how to deliver. Trial narratives empower jurors to link discrete pieces of evidence and infer facts from circumstantial proof. Only then can they render a verdict consistent with their sense of justice. Federal courts thus afford wide leeway for prosecutors to present their case as they please, with the evidence at their disposal. The Federal Rules of Evidence delineates the scope of that discretion. Under Rule 404(b), …

The Unconstitutionality Of Underfunded Public Defender Systems, Braden Daniels

Senior Honors Theses

When a defendant is ineffectively represented by a public defender due to an underfunded public defender system, a defendant whose public defender provides him only cursory representation is entitled to a new trial only if blatantly innocent. The U.S. Supreme Court should follow its precedent and declare systemically underfunded public defender systems unconstitutional, with cases meriting reversal when the underfunding is to blame for unreasonable attorney errors, regardless of prejudice. This stems logically from the Court’s holdings in Gideon v. Wainwright, Strickland v. Washington, and United States v. Cronic. Many have argued for the reversal or modification …

Preview — State V. Wood. First Impressions On Accountability And Cell-Site Location Information, Sarah K. Yarlott

Public Land & Resources Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dual Frames Of Reference And Corruption: Unpacking North Korean Defectors’ Views On Criminal Justice, Jaeyong Choi

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Previous studies have shown that there are several immigrant-specific factors that shape immigrants' perceptions of crime and police (e.g., Correia, 2010; Weitzer, 2014). First, some researchers have found that immigrants evaluate their lives in the host society based on their previous experiences with crime and the criminal justice system in their home country (Sun & Wu, 2018). Second, the social networks that immigrants form in the host society influence their views of crime and police by serving as a source of information for immigrants (Ackah, 2000). Finally, their experiences with crime and the justice system in the host society affect …

Quit Using Acquittals: The Unconstitutionality And Immorality Of Acquitted-Conduct Sentencing, Brenna Nouray

Pepperdine Law Review

This Comment examines the phenomenon of acquitted-conduct sentencing—a practice that allows a sentencing judge to enhance a criminal defendant’s sentence due to conduct for which he has already been acquitted. Seventeen-year-old Dayonta McClinton is one of many criminal defendants who have unjustly suffered at the hands of this practice when he received a thirteen-year enhancement because of conduct for which he already received a verdict of not guilty from a jury. This Comment argues that acquitted-conduct sentencing is unconstitutional, as it violates both the reasonable doubt standard required under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the jury …

The Nonexistent Speedy Trial Right, Colleen Cullen

Pepperdine Law Review

The United States Constitution and all fifty states guarantee a speedy trial right for individuals accused of crimes. The controlling United States Supreme Court case, decided over fifty years ago, described the Sixth Amendment as a fundamental right with Fourteenth Amendment Due Process implications. Although the right to a speedy trial is a universally recognized right, this Article compellingly demonstrates the right is actually nonexistent throughout the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and exacerbated this previously unrecognized problem in courthouses across the country, which has led to news outlets finally covering the issue of the nonexistent speedy trial. This …

Lgbtq+ Youth In The Juvenile Justice System, Matthias B. Pearce, April Terry

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

Many experts agree that the juvenile justice system has flaws, resulting in the need for different modifications. One area of particular concern within the juvenile justice system is the involvement of LGBTQ+ youth. LGBTQ+ youth are grossly overrepresented in both the juvenile and adult systems, including those who are incarcerated. This rate is highest for queer women and trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming individuals (Buist, 2020; Donohue et al., 2021; Hereth & Bouris, 2020). This known pathway clearly depicts a systemic issue—one that warrants attention and remediation. This poster provides background information on the disparities that exist for LGBTQ+ youth …

Big Data Searches And The Future Of Criminal Procedure, Mary Fan

Articles

This Article proceeds in three parts. Part I illuminates the nostalgic Luddism that influences Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and the challenges posed by evolving technologies to this dominant lens. This Part explains the operation of geofence and keyword warrants and how their power to crack cold cases by unidentified perpetrators both tempt and terrify. The confusion in the courts over the constitutionality of geofence and keyword warrants is emblematic of the larger challenges of the Romantic Luddism in Fourth Amendment originalism that has grown in influence over the decades.

Part II frames and theorizes the concepts of collateral impact and collateral …

Reflections Of A Non-Abolitionist Admirer Of The Police Abolition Movement, Corey Stoughton

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

To acknowledge that the abolition movement made reform better is not to reduce the movement to that purpose. For the non-abolitionist, the end of reform is better policing. For the abolitionist, reform is at best “a strategy or tactic toward transformation,” meaning contesting and ultimately eliminating policing. These are not compatible visions. But even if the collaboration between holders of these visions is just a tactical alliance, it is a tactical alliance that is producing good results. Perhaps those good results will lay a foundation for abolition, or perhaps they will seed in abolitionists’ fertile imaginations a positive vision of …