Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court in Bullcoming v. New Mexico ruled that it violates the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to permit a forensic report to be introduced at trial by putting on the stand a crime lab analyst who did not do the actual work in the case. The Court, in a majority opinion authored by Justice Ginsburg, reinforced the Court’s 2009 decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, by ruling that putting on such “surrogate testimony” denies the defense an opportunity for cross-examination. Some labs have long put on the stand forensic analysts who were not involved in the particular work done in a person’s case. Perhaps the analyst who actually did the work had left the office. Perhaps that analyst was overworked. Or perhaps one analyst in the lab was especially effective in front of a jury.
Evidence law controls what information will be admissible in court and when, how, and by whom it may be presented. It shapes not only the trial...
A crucial first step in addressing intimate-image abuse is its proper conceptualization. Intimate-image abuse amounts to a violation of intimate...
This casebook aspires to help students understand and think systematically about the techniques of statutory interpretation. It blends exposition with...
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
On January 1, 2022, the most radical change to the American jury in at least thirty-five years occurred in Arizona: peremptory strikes, long a feature...
How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...
Berryessa et al. (2022) consider how prior experience as a criminal prosecutor may influence judicial behaviour, but their concerns about prior...
For several days, former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants in a Georgia election interference case trickled into the Fulton County Jail...
This chapter examines several ways that the United States takes advantage of international law’s permissiveness and ambiguity to extend its criminal...
Virginia adopted a risk assessment to help determine sentencing for sex offenders. It was incorporated as a one-way ratchet toward higher sentences...
Forensic evidence has become a common tool in police investigations and a familiar form of evidence at trial. Forensic scientists are trained to...
Courts routinely use low cash bail as a financial incentive to ensure that released defendants appear in court and abstain from crime. This can create...
A federal grand jury in Florida indicted former President Donald Trump on June 8, 2023, on multiple criminal charges related to classified documents...
We examined how the presentation of risk assessment results and the race of the person charged affected pretrial court actors’ recommendations to...
In our increasingly polarized society, claims that prosecutions are politically motivated, racially motivated, or just plain arbitrary are more common...
The lawyer-client relationship is pivotal in providing access to courts. This paper presents results from a large-scale field experiment exploring how...
As social scientists seek to communicate research about what works in policing to police executives, they overlook important players in determining...
Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false...