Criminal Procedure Stories: An In-Depth Look at Leading Criminal Procedure Cases
Author:
Steiker, Carol S.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2005
19 chapters
have results for Criminal Procedure Stories
Introduction 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- It is interesting to speculate why discussion of criminal procedure as a tool of racial equality is so absent from the formal decisions of the Court during the criminal procedure revolution of the 1960s. Perhaps the Court’s decision to regulate the criminal process by incorporation of the criminal procedure provisions of the Bill of Rights through the Due Process Clause seemed to preclude overt reference to issues of racial justice, which the Court tended to address under the rubric of Equal Protection. Perhaps incorporation felt more universal and “colorblind,” or less controversial and “political,” than overtly race-based rulings, given the divisive politics of the time. But it is impossible to read the story and conclude that racial justice could be anywhere but just beneath the surface of the Court’s concerns.
- The most striking theme that emerges from the stories behind the cases—far more than the opinions themselves suggest—is the intersection of the criminal procedure revolution and the struggle for racial equality, especially in the South. It is no accident that the story of the “Scottsboro boys” appears first in this volume and is depicted on its cover, as the Scottsboro case represents the Supreme Court’s first, early foray into the constitutionalization of state criminal procedure in a self-conscious effort to check abuses of the criminal justice process engendered by pervasive racial subordination. The Scottsboro case is almost a caricature of Southern justice run amok: flimsy charges of rape brought against black men by white women lead to quick convictions and death sentences with a minimum of legal process. But other cases that are less frequently recognized as “race” cases reveal themselves to be crucibles of similar struggles.
- CRIMINAL PROCEDURE STORIES: INTRODUCTION
- Close consideration of the stories behind these cases—the individuals, the social and political worlds in which their criminal prosecutions arose, the provenance of their legal claims, the Supreme Court’s internal struggles to resolve the claims, and the human and doctrinal repercussions of the Court’s decisions—offers many rewards. Of course, it is intriguing and entertaining. Teachers of criminal procedure have long relied upon the intrinsic, voyeuristic thrill of studying cops-and-robbers and courtroom drama, and they will not be disappointed by the vivid details unearthed in these tales (John Brady’s journey from death row to a law-abiding life outside of prison; the prosecutor who named his dog “Batson” after his most famous case). But consideration of these stories as a unit also yields powerful and perhaps surprising insights that go beyond mere narrative enrichment.
- The stories I have chosen for inclusion in this volume span roughly equally the divide between police practices and adjudication, and they include many of the cases that will be found in any Criminal Procedure syllabus ( for example), it is because they allow the consideration of themes (the history of racial discrimination in the administration of criminal justice in the South, the limits on the use of racial profiling as a tool of law enforcement, and the constitutional status of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines) that are central to understanding the development of American criminal procedure.
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Criminal Procedure Stories 2 results
Chapter 12. Batson v. Kentucky: The Constitutional Challenges of Peremptory Challenges 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The story of is an interesting story nonetheless. The story of how the Court decided to hear this utterly mundane case opens a window into how the Court chooses “vehicles” for resolving important and recurring questions of constitutional criminal procedure. The story of how the Court decided to resolve on fourteenth amendment rather than sixth amendment grounds sheds light on how doctrinal frameworks interact with practical concerns in shaping the Court’s opinions. And the story of how
- In Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989), the Court announced that federal courts generally should not entertain claims on habeas if deciding in the prisoner’s favor would require them to announce a “new” rule of constitutional criminal procedure. Concomittantly, decisions announcing “new” rules are not applied retroactively to cases on collateral review. The two exceptions to ’s nonretroactivity doctrine concern new rules that place the defendant’s primary conduct beyond the power of the state to proscribe (or to punish in a particular fashion) and “ ‘watershed rules of criminal procedure’ implicating the fundamental fairness and accuracy of the criminal proceeding.” Saffle v. Parks, 494 U.S. 484, 495 (1990) (quoting Teague, 489 U.S. at 311). Clearly,
- By serving a criminal defendant’s interest in neutral jury selection procedures, the rule in may have some bearing on the truthfinding function of a criminal trial. But the decision serves other values as well. Our holding ensures that States do not discriminate against citizens who are summoned to sit in judgment against a member of their own race and strengthens public confidence in the administration of justice. The rule in
- Ironically, for all the celebration of the Warren Court’s criminal procedure revolution, it was the Burger Court that turned out to be more sympathetic to Swain’s plight. In 1972, in light of its decision in
- The twin legacies of the Warren Court were the criminal procedure revolution (that brought us, among other decisions,
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Chapter 5. Miranda v. Arizona: A Modest But Important Legacy 25 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The story of is in large part a doctrinal story centered on the evolution and content of Fourteenth Amendment “due process” and the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination clause. is also, of course, the story of interrogation as an important tool of criminal investigation. More generally, the story is in microcosm the story of the twentieth-century development of policing as a profession.
- The Criminal Procedure Revolution
- Margaret Raymond, Rejecting Totalitarianism: Translating the Guarantees of Constitutional Criminal Procedure, 76 N.C. L. Rev. 1193 (1998).
- Joseph D. Grano, Prophylactic Rules in Criminal Procedure: A Question of Article III Legitimacy, 80 N. W. U. L. Rev.100 (1985).
- This was a genuine, full-fledged revolution. Scholars still debate the nature and scope of changes on the ground, but there is no doubt that the Court’s doctrinal moves amounted to a sea change in the capacity and obligation of federal judges to supervise state police practices and state criminal trials. The Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, previously irrelevant to criminal justice in the states, became—almost overnight—a comprehensive “code of criminal procedure.” And the adoption, elaboration and ultimate responsibility for enforcement of this code was placed entirely in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Chapter 7. Katz v. United States: The Limits of Aphorism 15 results (showing 5 best matches)
- arises in part because the case forms a key chapter of three separate, grand narratives of criminal procedure law over the past century: the shifting understanding of what the Fourth Amendment protects; the evolving legal treatment of electronic eavesdropping; and the struggle to apply the language of the Fourth Amendment, framed in response to very particular abuses of the eighteenth century, to the novel challenges of the modern world. Revisiting the story of
- were mirrored in certain other criminal procedure decisions of the 1960s, particularly
- Not surprisingly, the Court pressed him on this point: “So here, it’s a constitutionally protected area. You would say, with the right procedures you might be able to invade this area, but here there were no such procedures?” Schneider resisted “the emphasis on whether or not you have a constitutionally protected area.” But he reiterated his position that “very specific measures,” interposing “a detached magistrate” between law enforcement officers and their targets, could make bugging constitutional.
- First, the Supreme Court had held in 1921 that the Fourth Amendment did not permit search warrants for “mere evidence,” as opposed to contraband, criminal proceeds, or instrumentalities of crime. The idea was that there was something objectionable about confiscating and using property to convict the owner of crime—something analogous to compelling self-incriminating testimony—unless the government or a third party had a superior right to possess the property. A warrant could not be used “solely for the purpose of making search to secure evidence to be used … in a criminal or penal proceeding.”
- gave a shot in the arm to legislative efforts at both the federal and state levels to establish clear procedures for court-ordered electronic eavesdropping. : it requires not only a showing of probable cause, but also strict time limits on authorized monitoring, procedures to minimize interception of unrelated conversations, and prompt notification to the subjects of the investigation following termination of the surveillance.
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Contributors 17 results (showing 5 best matches)
- is Lee S. and Charles A. Speir Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University Law School. Her research focuses on the post-investigative features of the criminal process including plea bargaining, trial, juries, sentencing, double jeopardy, appeals, and post-conviction review. She is co-author of two leading treatises on criminal procedure (Wright, King & Klein, Federal Practice and Procedure, Criminal 3d; LaFave, Israel & King, Criminal Procedure, 2d ed.) as well as the leading criminal procedure casebook. Her work has been cited in decisions of the United States Supreme Court and lower courts. Professor King is a member of the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure for the U.S. Judicial Conference and a former member of Sixth Circuit Rules Advisory Committee. She has testified before the United States Sentencing Commission, and has served on the Governor’s Task Force on Sentencing for Tennessee. She is frequent speaker for the federal judiciary at judicial...
- Criminal Justice in Our Time
- is a Professor at Harvard Law School. He joined Harvard’s faculty in 2000; before that, he was a professor at the University of Virginia for fourteen years. Stuntz has authored more than two dozen law review articles and essays on various aspects of the criminal justice system. His works include an economic analysis of plea bargaining, a history of the “substantive origins” of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, an analysis of the race and class biases that afflict enforcement of America’s drug laws, and an examination of the political and legal sources of overcriminalization. In all of these works, Stuntz emphasizes two connections. The first links substantive criminal law and the law of criminal procedure—the way the steady expansion of the former undermines the latter’s protections of criminal defendants’ rights. The second concerns the interaction of constitutional law and the politics of crime. According to Stuntz, constitutional law contributes to the very political pathologies...
- is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Professor Steiker attended Harvard–Radcliffe Colleges and Harvard Law School, where she served as president of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, she worked as a staff attorney for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she represented indigent defendants at all stages of the criminal process. She has been a member of the Harvard Law School faculty since 1992. She served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 1998–2001, and she currently serves as the Dean’s Special Advisor on Public Service. Professor Steiker is the author of numerous scholarly articles in the fields of criminal law, criminal procedure, and capital punishment, and most recently served on the Board of Editors of the Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice (2nd ed. Macmillan, 2002). She is currently at work on two book-length...
- Karlan’s primary scholarly interests lie in the areas of constitutional law and litigation, voting rights, and criminal procedure. She is the coauthor of several leading casebooks, including (2000), as well as dozens of scholarly articles, including Convictions and Doubts: Retribution, Representation, and the Debate Over Felon Disenfranchisement, 56 Stan. L. Rev. 1147 (2004), and Race, Rights, and Remedies in Criminal Adjudication, 96 Mich. L. Rev. 2001 (1998).
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Chapter 3. Gideon v. Wainwright and Strickland v. Washington: Broken Promises 46 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , no case in constitutional criminal procedure is as well known as , the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision declaring that indigent defendants in serious criminal cases have a right to a lawyer paid for by the state. Gideon’s case was the subject of a popular book by former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, . Lewis’s book was in turn made into a Hollywood movie, with Henry Fonda starring as Clarence Earl Gideon, the drifter whose case made it to the Supreme Court. Indeed, Gideon’s story is so classic that if one didn’t know it was true, one would assume that a Hollywood script writer conjured it up.
- Gideon’s story reaffirms all that is best in the American justice system. Like Horatio Alger, Gideon prevailed over poverty—not by making himself lots of money, but by establishing the most important right in the criminal justice system. His story illustrates that the justice system can work for the most vulnerable among us, and his efforts led to the recognition of a formal constitutional right that makes that possible. And as he was acquitted on retrial, his is the story of an innocent man, wrongly accused, and ultimately vindicated with the help of the most powerful institution in American law.
- The numbers begin to tell the story. Nationwide, we spend more than $146.5 billion annually on criminal justice. More than half of that goes to the police and prosecution, who together investigate, develop, and prosecute criminal cases. Indigent defense, by contrast, receives only 1.3 percent of annual federal criminal justice expenditures, and only two percent of total state and federal criminal justice expenditures. We spend about twice as much on criminal prosecutors as we do on criminal defense counsel. England and Wales spend about $34 per capita on indigent criminal defense; Americans spend only about $10 per capita. Many states impose highly unrealistic caps on reimbursement for criminal defense—Illinois, for example, pays at most $150 for a misdemeanor case, and $1250 to defend a felony, rates so low that virtually no attorney will sign up for the work. In 1990, Kentucky spent an average of only $162 on each indigent criminal case.
- Although inadequate compensation is no doubt the most significant barrier to effective indigent defense, it is not the only barrier. Most jurisdictions have no experiential qualifications for who may be assigned to represent an indigent defendant. As a result, counsel are routinely appointed with virtually no relevant experience. Charles Bell, facing the death penalty in Mississippi, was represented by a recent law graduate who had never tried a criminal case to final judgment. Donald Paradis’s attorney had passed the bar six months before he was appointed to defend a capital murder case, had never taken criminal law, criminal procedure, or trial advocacy in law school, and had never before represented a criminal defendant. Billy Sunday Birt, on trial for murder in Georgia, was represented by court-appointed counsel who, when asked to identify any criminal law decision from any court with which he was familiar, could name only a criminal case.)
- Yet we have made very little progress in making the promise of effective counsel a reality for the poor. The story of is the story of how and why the Supreme Court has failed to make good on the promise so dramatically made in . The Court is by no means the only culpable actor here; the political process must also bear substantial responsibility. But given the obvious lack of political clout of poor criminal defendants, and the very strong incentives to deny indigent defendants competent lawyers, the Court had a special obligation to ensure that the promise of equality it made in
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Chapter 2. Mapp v. Ohio: The First Shot Fired in the Warren Court’s Criminal Procedure “Revolution” 43 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The Uneasy Relationship Between Criminal Procedure and Criminal Justice
- , 66 Wash.U.L.Q. 11, 12 (1988), observing that in the field of criminal procedure “the ‘real Warren Court’” emerged with the decision in . Some might argue that the Warren Court’s revolution in criminal procedure commenced with Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U.S. 12 (1956), establishing an indigent criminal defendant’s right to a free transcript on appeal, at least under certain circumstances.
- Although Earl Warren ascended to the Supreme Court in 1953, when we speak of the Warren Court’s “revolution” in American criminal procedure we really mean the movement that got underway half-way through the Chief Justice’s sixteen-year reign. It was the 1961 case of and holding that the state courts had to exclude illegally seized evidence as a matter of federal constitutional law, that is generally regarded as having launched the so-called criminal procedure revolution.
- Akhil Amar on Criminal Procedure and Constitutional Law: “Here I Go Down that Wrong Road Again
- “In both situations [coercive police interrogation and illegal searches] the perils arise primarily out of the procedures employed to acquire the evidence rather than from dangers of the incompetency of the evidence so acquired. Furthermore, if the demands of federalism are not such as to deny to the Court power to supervise the interrogating practices of state police officers in the interest of procedures most likely to preserve the integrity of basic individual immunities, such supervision of police practices in the interest of preserving basic rights of privacy seems likewise justifiable. Yet the consequence of the decision [in ] … is rigidly to separate the two problems [searches and confessions] and to create a dubious double standard in the definition of the requirements of due process as they relate to state criminal proceedings.”
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Chapter 13. United States v. Salerno: The Constitutionality of Regulatory Detention 50 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The extent to which criminal procedure had become elaborately constitutionalized played a role as well. As Carol Steiker has noted, with the “revolution in criminal procedure” raising “the cost to government of using the criminal process [,] state and federal legislators and regulators have sought civil avenues to address what might be more plausibly classified as criminal conduct.”
- . at 370–73; Carol Steiker, Punishment and Procedure: Punishment Theory and the Criminal–Civil Procedural Divide, 85 Geo. L.J. 775 (1997).
- In upholding these measures, courts have drawn on the public health model as well, if only by analogy, creating what Edward Richards has called a “jurisprudence of prevention” that applies “traditional public health rationales and procedures to individuals who pose a threat to society.” “In the prevention cases,” Richards observes, “the Supreme Court has transformed the traditional police power to restrict disease carriers into a general power to restrict individuals whose criminal activity poses a threat to society.”
- Some have tried a different tack, arguing that the use of dangerousness as a basis for incarceration should be limited to those situations in which the criminal justice system punish—as would be the case for both quarantines (where there is no justification for punishment) or the detention of the dangerous mentally ill who lacking criminal culpability cannot be punished. This is an utterly defensible position. Yet it does leave a contestable gap between the civil and criminal confinement systems when it comes to dangerous agents who are capable of bearing blame after the danger they pose is realized. Is the domain of criminal law so exclusive that the government must always wait until after a crime (however grievous) has been committed, if the perpetrator is mentally capable of standing trial? Giving the government license to lock blameworthy dangerous people without the niceties of a full-blown criminal trial risks whole-sale circumvention of the criminal justice system. But...
- the availability of criminal process cannot be determinative of the power to detain, if for no other reason than that criminal prosecution may well not achieve the very purpose for which detention is authorized in the first place—the prevention of return to the field of battle.
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Chapter 4. Brady v. Maryland: From Adversarial Gamesmanship Toward the Search for Innocence? 27 results (showing 5 best matches)
- is unusual among the great landmark criminal procedure decisions of the Warren Court. requires prosecutors to give criminal defendants evidence that tends to negate their guilt or reduce their punishment. In other words, has sparked little public controversy or commentary. This may be because innocence is an appealing touchstone for criminal procedure, one with enormous potential to transform the adversarial criminal trial into a collaborative search for the truth.
- let guilty criminal defendants walk free, in order to protect broader constitutional principles and values and punish or regulate police misconduct. Suddenly, guilty criminal defendants were the good guys and police were the bad guys, a flip-flop that many people resented. As crime rose in the turbulent 1960s, courts that freed guilty criminal defendants on technicalities seemed to be part of the problem. Richard Nixon successfully campaigned for president against the Warren Court and appointed Warren Burger Chief Justice, partly because Burger was hostile to criminal procedure technicalities.
- Even today, innocence has the potential to transform criminal procedure. DNA testing has documented many wrongful convictions of the innocent. In addition, scholars have highlighted flaws in interrogation and identification procedures and legislatures have considered increasing funding for defense counsel. As habeas corpus review grows ever narrower, compelling new evidence of actual innocence can still unlock the door to the courthouse or win executive clemency.
- The Tradition of Adversarial Criminal Procedure
- As the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure explained, in the course of proposing the 1974 amendments: “[P]rosecution and defense discovery … are related and … the giving of a broader right of discovery to the defense is dependent upon giving also a broader right of discovery to the prosecution.” Fed. R. Crim. P. 16 advisory committee’s note (1974).
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Chapter 6. Hoffa v. United States: Secret Agents in Private Spaces 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Remembering the “Old World” of Criminal Procedure: A Reply to Professor Grano
- Sometimes there is an untold story behind a Supreme Court ruling. The Court’s opinion in fails to reveal the story of the decade-long battle between two of the most famous and controversial men in America. On one side was Bobby Kennedy, brother of the President and hard-charging Attorney General of the United States. On the other side was Jimmy Hoffa, head of the Teamsters Union and considered one of the most powerful (and corrupt, according Kennedy) labor bosses in the country. Kennedy and Hoffa hated each other, or so the public believed.
- Maxine Cheshire told the story of Ethel Kennedy and her children riding near the capitol. At a red light, Ethel points to a building.
- “On the other side, you had a group of criminal defendants prepared to do total and unreserved battle…. That included jury-tampering, bribery, you name it. They had limitless funds and used them, and they didn’t play by the rules. Hoffa didn’t care about lower courts because he could go to a higher court. They were not ordinary criminal defendants. During the Nashville case Hoffa had six high-priced lawyers sitting in a hotel room to consult with the four other lawyers they had in the courtroom. That’s more than the government had working on the trial. He probably spent as much money defending himself as the government spent bringing him to justice. You had to meet that with similar resources and flexibility from the government side.”
- ’s conclusions about the risks assumed by criminals are a faulty gauge to measure the scope of the Fourth Amendment’s protection. Indeed, in other search and seizure contexts, the Court has recognized that the risk theory utilized in , which focuses on the risks and assumptions of criminals, rather than innocent persons, distorts the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. For example, when deciding whether a police-citizen encounter triggers constitutional scrutiny, the Court has instructed that the intrusiveness of police conduct must be judged from the perspective of the innocent person.
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Chapter 11. Bordenkircher v. Hayes: Plea Bargaining and the Decline of the Rule of Law 51 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Mapp v. Ohio: The First Shot Fired in the Warren Court’s Criminal Procedure “Revolution”
- Powell recounted the story of Hayes’s three felonies, the basis for his life sentence under the habitual criminal law. Powell observed that Hayes had served a little over five years in “a reformatory” for “detaining a female,” an offense committed while he was still a minor, and had served no time at all for robbery.
- . The Supreme Court had held that criminal defendants could not be punished for exercising their constitutional rights. Such punishment was “vindictive,” the Court said, and vindictive punishment was unconstitutional. The habitual-criminal charge against Hayes was filed after, and because, Hayes decided he wanted a jury trial. The right to a jury trial is protected by the Sixth Amendment. The habitual criminal charge thus appeared to be punishment for Hayes’s decision to exercise that right.
- … The disposition of criminal charges by agreement between the prosecutor and the accused, sometimes loosely called “plea bargaining,” is an essential component of the administration of justice. Properly administered, it is to be encouraged. If every criminal charge were subjected to a full-scale trial, the States and the Federal Government would need to multiply by many times the number of judges and court facilities.
- As legislatures added ever more felonies to their criminal codes with ever more severe sentences attached, something else happened. These laws changed their character. Criminal liability rules ceased to define the conduct that leads to a prison term. Too much conduct is prohibited; no prosecutor could possibly enforce her state’s criminal code, and no federal prosecutor can pursue more than a tiny fraction of the crimes to which the federal code applies. Likewise, criminal sentencing rules ceased to define the consequences of particular crimes. Those rules sweep too broadly; they cannot possibly be enforced in all cases to which they apply. Instead, the laws that define crimes and sentences have become a menu—a list of charging and sentencing options that prosecutors may use in order to extract the plea bargains they want from the Paul Hayeses of the world.
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Chapter 8. Duncan v. Louisiana: How Bigotry in the Bayou Led to the Federal Regulation of State Juries 30 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Earlier the Court can be seen as having asked, when inquiring into whether some particular procedural safeguard was required of a State, if a civilized system could be imagined that would not accord the particular protection. … In recent cases, on the other hand, we have proceeded upon the valid assumption that state criminal processes are not imaginary and theoretical schemes but actual systems bearing virtually every characteristic of the common-law system that has been developing contemporaneously in England and in this country. The question thus is whether given this kind of system a particular procedure is fundamental—whether, that is, a procedure is necessary to an Anglo–American regime of ordered liberty…. A criminal process which was fair and equitable but used no juries is easy to imagine. It would make use of alternative guarantees and protections which would serve the purposes that the jury serves in the English and American systems. Yet no American State has undertaken...
- . L.J. 253, 298–301 (1982). For a comprehensive and updated treatment of the incorporation saga in criminal procedure,
- When Constitutional Worlds Collide: Resurrecting the Framers’ Bill of Rights and Criminal Procedure
- Racial Origins of Modern Criminal Procedure
- decision and the cases that followed were products of two of the most powerful forces modern criminal procedure—the quest for equal justice and federalism. Like the facts of so many other criminal cases reviewed by the Court during that period, the circumstances in
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Chapter 9. Terry v. Ohio: The Fourth Amendment Reasonableness of Police Stops and Frisks Based on Less Than Probable Cause 10 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , the routine Cleveland case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, was decided in McFadden’s—in street policing’s—favor. It made him immortal, at least in the annals of constitutional criminal procedure, and it gave Fourth Amendment approval to police conduct that had not previously been subjected to constitutional evaluation.
- In the realm of modern constitutional criminal procedure, which has come to be a collection of doctrinal categories,
- By 1968, McFadden recognized that constitutional criminal procedure had developed generally to prohibit his practice of taking someone into custody based merely on his reputation.
- Chilton and Terry obtained fine legal representation. Their attorney Louis Stokes (also a black man) had been a lawyer for ten years and by 1963 he was one of Cleveland’s leading criminal defense attorneys.
- These police practices—seizing a person by stopping him on the street, and doing so in the absence of the probable cause that would legally justify his real, full-blown arrest for engaging in criminal activity, and then perhaps also searching him to the extent of patting down the outer surfaces of his clothing—are the issues that the Supreme Court addressed in
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Chapter 1. Powell v. Alabama: The Supreme Court Confronts “Legal Lynchings” 34 results (showing 5 best matches)
- It was no accident that modern American criminal procedure was born in cases involving southern black defendants. For the Supreme Court to begin monitoring the state criminal process required a departure from 150 years’ worth of tradition and legal precedent grounded in federalism concerns. The justices were not prepared to take that step in cases of marginal unfairness, but only where the trial had been a complete sham. Such legal travesties occurred most frequently in the South in cases involving black defendants charged with interracial rape or murder.
- The criminal procedure cases that reached the Supreme Court did so only because of outside financial assistance. Incidents such as the race riot in Phillips County, Arkansas, and the alleged rapes and ensuing trials at Scottsboro captured national attention. Because the criminal trials deriving from these incidents revealed Jim Crow at its worst, they provided outstanding fund-raising opportunities for the NAACP and the ILD, respectively. However, the NAACP took relatively few criminal cases, and the association was absent from most of the rural South and thus could not intervene in cases when it would have done the most good—when the trial record was being created. Thus, in run-of-the-mill criminal cases, indigent black defendants were represented not by elite legal talent hired by these organizations, but by court-appointed lawyers, who could not invariably be counted upon to aggressively defend their clients’ rights because of the “personal odium” that attached to those...
- The trials in such cases were so egregiously unfair that national public opinion probably endorsed the Court’s interventions. Even within the South, these rulings had many supporters, as they simply bound southern states to behavioral norms that they usually had embraced on their own. Thus, these early criminal procedure rulings probably do not represent the sort of countermajoritarian judicial decision making one often associates with landmark decisions such as .... In the early decades of the twentieth century, southern courts had become more committed to procedural fairness, even in cases involving black defendants charged with serious interracial crimes. Yet in cases that generated outside criticism of the South or that were perceived to pose broader challenges to white supremacy, southern appellate courts regressed. Cases that might otherwise not have reached the U.S. Supreme Court slipped through the state system uncorrected and provided the occasion for landmark criminal...
- Considered against the backdrop of the Court’s other contemporaneous race decisions, these early criminal procedure rulings demonstrate that not all Jim Crow measures were of a piece. During this era, the Court unanimously affirmed the constitutionality of public school segregation, the white primary, and the poll tax. The justices apparently thought it one thing to segregate and disfranchise blacks, quite another to execute possibly innocent blacks after farcical trials.
- suggests that the justices believed they had already taken enormous strides toward eliminating race discrimination from southern criminal justice. They had not. Their accomplishments were fairly trivial—more a change in form than in substance. To the extent that the justices and their admirers were deluded into thinking otherwise, these criminal procedure rulings may have caused actual harm to the interests of southern blacks.
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Chapter 14. United States v. Mistretta: The Constitution and the Sentencing Guidelines 46 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , the Supreme Court reconsidered and greatly expanded the rights of criminal defendants in the investigatory and trial stages of a criminal prosecution, and in the sentencing stage as well in capital cases; these are the cases canvassed in the other stories of this volume. Yet
- But this story is primarily about the missed, the third section sets forth in some depth the Sentencing Guidelines’ radical transformation of both federal sentencing law and federal criminal law and practice more generally. The fourth section explores ’s arguments and holdings, especially the failure of the parties or the Court to recognize, much less address, any of the transformations noted above. The story ends with a consideration of
- Of greatest significance to the story of The statute provided for seven voting Commissioners, at least three of whom had to be federal judges and no more than four of whom could belong to the same political party. The Commission was given the task of writing rules to govern the realm of criminal sentencing in federal courts. Congress’ vision was broad and ambitious, almost utopian. The Guidelines were to “reflect, to the extent practicable, advancement in knowledge of human behavior as it relates to the criminal justice process.”
- 488 U.S. at 383. The second argument was a throw-away, for the Court had approved judges’ role under the Rules Enabling Act and other statutes in promulgating the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, of Criminal Procedure, and of Evidence,
- Of even greater moment, the Guidelines changed the content of federal criminal law itself. Prior to the advent of the Guidelines, there was a clear demarcation between “crime” and “punishment”—that is, between the adjudicatory phase of the criminal law and the sentencing phase. The Constitution speaks directly to the adjudicatory phase, requiring that “in all criminal prosecutions,” the crime must be charged and proved in accordance with the requirements laid out in the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments—including the right to a jury trial and proof beyond a reasonable doubt of every element of the crime. Criminal law theorists even posited different justifications for criminal prohibitions, on the one hand, and criminal punishments, on the other.
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Chapter 10. United States v. Brignoni-Ponce and United States v. Martinez-Fuerte: The Road to Racial Profiling 15 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The trailhead on the road to racial profiling, though, begins back on the dirt roads and interstates near the Mexican border—at the road blocks, INS checkpoints, and roving border patrols policing illegal border crossings. By starting the story at the border, the Supreme Court effectively opened the door at the most sensitive location—a place where ethnicity and appearance were at their most salient. Let’s start the story, then, on the Mexican border.
- The cornerstone of this society, indeed of any free society, is orderly procedure. The Constitution, as originally adopted, was therefore, in great measure, a procedural document. For the same reasons the drafters of the Bill of Rights largely placed their faith in procedural limitations on government action. The Fourth Amendment’s requirement that searches and seizures be reasonable enforces this fundamental understanding in erecting its buffer against the arbitrary treatment of citizens by government…. [A]s Mr. Justice Frankfurter reminded us, “[t]he history of American freedom is, in no small measure, the history of procedure.”
- The Development of Criminal Profiling in the 1970s
- In this sense, border policing in the 1970s reflected the larger turn to criminal profiling in law enforcement. The first criminal profiles
- had an important impact not only on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, but on border patrol and policing more generally. The decisions signaled a green light to criminal profiling—including racial profiling. The Court had given law enforcement a clear message that the use of a multiple factor profile, including as one factor race or ethnicity, were constitutional and legitimate police techniques. At the national level, the DEA began implementing criminal profiling, especially the drug-courier profile, with vigor. The original Detroit experiment was deemed a success, and the program went nationwide after
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- Publication Date: April 20th, 2006
- ISBN: 9781587789830
- Subject: Criminal Procedure
- Series: Law Stories
- Type: Overviews
- Description: Unlike casebooks, this title provides rich narrative detail of the human stories — and the social, political, and legal contexts — of notable Supreme Court cases on criminal justice. It includes details not available elsewhere, and offers the insights of respected scholars who are experts on the particular cases and issues they address. This book will greatly enhance the teaching both of police practices (a.k.a "Cops and Robbers") and of criminal adjudication (a.k.a "Bail to Jail").
