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For seventy years after the Civil War Amendments were ratified, the Supreme Court sought to nudge Southern courts and legislatures toward racial justice. But the case-by-case messaging was largely lost on the relevant actors. In 1954, the Warren Court struck a systemic blow for racial justice in Brown v. Board of Education. State legal mandates that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. A few years later, the Court sought systemic solutions to racial injustice in the state criminal justice systems. Although reforms like requiring states to provide counsel for indigent defendants would benefit all races, this article argues that the Court saw Black Americans as particularly affected by injustices in state criminal justice system. From 1961 to 1968, the Court decided five landmark criminal procedure cases that sought to advance racial justice. The problem? States found "workarounds" for most of those guarantees. Defendants, including Blacks and other minorities, might be slightly better off today than they were in 1960, but only at the margin. Could the Warren Court have done better? Can courts do better today? The answer is a modest yes, at least as to some protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the career and theories of Samuel H. Pillsbury, a prominent legal scholar and novelist. It focuses on Pillsbury's "defense of value" theory of punishment, which emphasizes the violation of societal norms and disrespect for human value, rather than the inherent badness of the offender. It also discusses Pillsbury's exploration of the problem of evil and the question of free will versus determinism, and his approach to navigate between the two poles.

TABLE OF CONTENTS I. YALE KAMISAR'S CREATION II. MY STUDY III. GETTING INFORMATION ABOUT INTERROGATION IV. THE PROBLEM WITH THE MIRANDA DOCTRINE V. THE STUDY EXPLAINED VI. THE INTERROGATION HYPOTHESES [...]

INTRODUCTION Different Constitutional Worlds For two hundred years, the Supreme Court has been interpreting the Bill of Rights. Imagine Chief Justice John Marshall sitting in the dim, narrow Supreme Court [...]

To be sure, defendants who win Brady cases are presumably more likely to be innocent than the gardenvariety defendant who pleads guilty, but courts are still loath to vacate a conviction of a probably guilty defendant. Police in all fifty states are free to conduct relentless interrogation and deny requests for counsel, as long as the police stay within the spacious confines of the common law voluntariness norm. 4 Fifteen states do not provide lawyers for indigent felony defendants, 5 and the Due Process Clause is not violated unless defendants can show special circumstances that require appointment of counsel. The Court's idealism has also given defendants a right to counsel that might not really change much in terms of the punishment delivered over the universe of indigent defendants, and a right to have the State disclose exculpatory evidence that probably does not actually produce much exculpatory evidence. In addition to Warren and Goldberg, Justices Douglas, Brennan, and either Black or Clark, sometimes both, could be counted on to seek to expand due process protections for state suspects and defendants. Earl Warren would have concluded that the Due Process Clause, as the Court had interpreted it, permitted states to impose the worst of all worlds on defendants - lay defendants, who might be innocent, forced to defend alone against experienced prosecutors aided with evidence obtained by questionable police methods. [Extracted from the article]

The DNA revolution has revealed that, contrary to received wisdom, the conviction of an innocent defendant by the vaunted American criminal justice system is far from a freakish event. The National Registry of Exonerations now lists more than 2,200 cases of wrongful convictions. Of course, 2,200 cases is a minuscule number compared to the roughly 1.5 million felons in state and federal prisons at any given moment. The last quarter century has seen a vigorous debate about the error rate that leads to the conviction of innocent defendants. Estimates have ranged from 0.027% to 15%; most estimates are in the 0.5% to 2% range. This Article presents the first study to draw on an existing data set of actual claims of innocence to estimate the overall error rate in the criminal justice system. The data come from the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, a unique program that allows applications for exoneration from convicted felons. Conservative assumptions about the North Carolina data set produce a likely error rate of 0.125% to 0.5%. Though the estimates of the wrongful conviction rate are thus limited to North Carolina, there is no reason to think that the error rate is materially different in other states. This Article is, in part, a response to Paul Cassell's article, Overstating America's Wrongful Conviction Rate? Reassessing the Conventional Wisdom About the Prevalence of Wrongful Convictions. Though the findings here as to the estimated error rate are higher than Professor Cassell's, we do agree that previous estimates tend to be too high for reasons this Article will explore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paraphrasing Justice Holmes, law is less about logic than experience.(1) Courts and scholars have now had thirty-four years of experience with Miranda v. Arizona,(2) including the Court's recent endorsement in [...]

The text of the Fourth Amendment provides no guidance about what makes a search unreasonable or when warrants are required to make a search reasonable. The Supreme Court has had to craft a doctrine based on intuition, policy goals, and halfhearted stabs at history. This Article argues that the Court's Fourth Amendment doctrine is stable when it roughly tracks the eighteenth-century common law protection of property, privacy, and liberty. When the Court has sought to provide more protection than the common law provided, the result has been an erratic doctrine that has gradually receded almost back to the common law contours. The most recent move away from a robust Fourth Amendment has been to reduce the application of the exclusionary rule. As there was no exclusionary rule at common law, and for over a century after the Fourth Amendment was ratified, further reductions in the rule's application can be expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Miranda v. Arizona on custodial interrogation and the spider web forces tend to produce a desire to cooperate with police. It mentions Court did not consider warnings necessary to obtain voluntary consent include the informal, unstructured interaction between the police officer asking. It also mentions decision of U.S. Supreme Court in the case Ashcraft v. Tennesseeon interrogation rendered a confession inadmissible.

The article discusess Miranda v. Arizona court case. Court held that inculpatory and exculpatory statements made in response to interrogation by a defendant in police custody will be admissible at trial only if the prosecution can show that the defendant was informed of the right to consult with an attorney before and during questioning and of the right against self-incrimination before police questioning, and that the defendant not only understood these rights, but voluntarily waived them.

Much recent scholarship has sharply criticized the pervasive phenomenon of wrongful convictions, but the literature has overlooked an important related injustice: inaccuracy in criminal sentencing. This Article provides the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of judicial sentencing error, which has become widespread in the modern era of both ad hoc revision to criminal codes and increasingly complex criminal sentencing systems that often lack internal coherence or sensible statutory organization. Although nearly always the product of human error, the problem of judicial sentencing error is more aptly characterized as systemic because sentencing judges often face everchanging, overlapping statutory requirements contained in separate parts of the criminal code. We identify both the source and harmful consequences of judicial sentencing error, and then examine constitutional principles implicated by the untimely correction of an erroneous sentence. Focusing particularly on a defendant's interest in finality, we argue that the constitutional guarantees of substantive due process and protection against double jeopardy under the Fifth Amendment should be construed to limit the time to correct an erroneously lenient sentence, with the Double Jeopardy Clause supplying the more potent limiting principle and objective legal standard. We conclude that--by according respect for principles of finality in criminal sentencing--the law could create an effective institutional incentive for the State to ascertain the correctness of sentencing orders at or near the time of punishment, thereby preventing the harm and injustice that occur when the defendant s reasonable expectation offinality has been frustrated for the legitimate but not indomitable sake of accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Gideon v. Wainwright case, in which a unanimous judgment that no indigent defendant should face felony charges without a lawyer. It was known for years that Gideon has fallen far short of the Court's initial vision. Public defense is significantly under-funded and plagued with perverse incentives, leading to huge caseloads for defenders and worse outcomes for defendants.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, American common law, and warrant exceptions in relation to cell phone searches by the police.

The article discusses the Anglo-American law which used voluntariness for testing confession admissibility as 20th century saw an increase in skepticism to determine voluntary and involuntary utterances. It mentions the psychology of suspects who talk to police to escape suspicion, involuntary torture and lengthy interrogation. It debates the above prospects and notes the cases including Miranda v. Arizona, Culombe v. Connecticut and Rhode Island v. Innis.

The article offers opinions and information about the relationship between criminal trials and cultural morality with a focus on a rape case in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1906. Details of the case are provided which involved the trial of Ed Johnson, an African-American man, after the rape of a white woman. The author examines racism, mass media coverage of the trial, and the lynching of Johnson to draw conclusions about morality stories in criminal history.

An essay is presented on the recovery of the term search and seizure in the Fourth Amendment within the eighteenth century context in Texas. It provides a comparison on the enforcement of the common-law search and seizures in the 1971 and the para-military investigative operation. It provides an interpretation of the scope and meaning of the common law rules such as warrants and unreasonable searches and seizures of the Fourth Amendment.