The rules and practices of criminal procedure assume a clean separation between the interests of the public and the interests of the lone defendant who stands accused. Even the names given to criminal prosecutions often declare this dichotomy, as in jurisdictions such as California, Illinois, Michigan, and New York that caption criminal cases “The People of the State of X v. John Doe.” This Essay argues that this traditional people/defendant...
Criminal Procedure
On any given day, local jails detain nearly half-a-million people who cannot afford bail. Opposition to this status quo, and to monetary conditions of pretrial release more broadly, has reached a fever pitch in recent years. Critics from across the political spectrum decry bail as a wellspring of mass incarceration and acknowledge its profoundly discriminatory effects, particularly within low-income communities of color. Academic studies link bail...
The harmless error doctrine is beset with problems, both theoretical and practical. In Harmless Error and Substantial Rights, recently published in the Harvard Law Review, Professor Daniel Epps proposes a reconceptualization of constitutional criminal procedure rights that is designed to address these problems. Epps argues that those constitutional criminal procedure rights that are capable of being violated by prosecutors...
The American criminal justice system is a system of pleas. Few who know it well think it is working. And yet, identifying plausible strategies for law reform proves challenging, given the widely held scholarly assumption that plea bargaining operates “beyond the shadow of the law.” That assumption holds true with respect to substantive and constitutional criminal law—the two most studied bodies of law in the criminal justice system—neither...
Batson v. Kentucky is widely regarded as a failure. In the thirty-plus years since it was decided by the Supreme Court, the doctrine has been subjected to unrelenting criticism for its inability to stop the discriminatory use of peremptory challenges. The scholarly literature is nearly unanimous: Batson is broken. But this Article approaches Batson from a different perspective, focusing on Batson’s appellate...
There is an aspect of criminal procedure decisions that has for too long gone unnoticed, unrecognized, and unremarked upon. Embedded in the Supreme Court’s criminal procedure jurisprudence—at times hidden in plain sight, at other times hidden below the surface—are asides about what it means to be a “good citizen.” The good citizen, for example, is willing to aid the police, willingly waives their right to silence, and welcomes police...
Recent attention to police brutality has brought to the fore how law enforcement, when they become the subject of criminal investigations, receive special procedural protections not available to any other criminal suspect. Prosecutors’ special treatment of police suspects, particularly their perceived use of grand juries to exculpate accused officers, has received the lion’s share of scholarly and media attention. But police suspects also benefit...