Double Jeopardy Deadlock
The Fifth Amendment says a person can’t be prosecuted twice for the same offense. So after a jury comes back with a verdict, if the government doesn’t like that verdict, then too bad, it doesn’t get...
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How the Jury System Defeats Justice
Our jury system is supposed to maximize justice. So how come our system only makes it harder for jurors to do the right thing? Take this example: A judge in Florida today began reading some 100 pages...
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The Holdout
The news is full of reports today about the hung jury in the Blagojevich trial — they found the governor guilty of a single count of lying to federal agents something like five years ago, and hung...
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Nullifying Nullification
In more than a dozen years of conducting and observing felony jury trials, at both the state and federal level, we’ve seen enough jury nullification to know it’s a real phenomenon, and not merely...
View ArticleCross-Examining the He-Said/She-Said Witness: 3 Simple Steps
Plenty of us are familiar with the basic skills of cross-examination: Always lead, Don’t ask that one last question that lets the witness deny the conclusion you want to draw, Don’t ask a question if...
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More Google Mistrials
Back in the infancy of this blog, we wrote a piece called “No More Google Mistrials: A proposal for courts to adapt to modern life.” In it, we lamented that our jurisprudence hadn’t caught up with...
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Making the Jury’s Job Easier – and Better
Anyone who has served on a jury or tried a case knows that the American jury system is pretty stupid. Don’t get us wrong — it is absolutely without a doubt a sacred institution designed to ensure...
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Correct, but Wrong: SCOTUS on Unreliable Eyewitness Identification
In this Information Age, it is hard to grasp sometimes that everybody does not know everything. And yet it is so. It is common knowledge, for example, that dinosaur fossils are the bones of creatures...
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Better Criminal Lawyering through Smart Risk-Taking
Judgment is the criminal lawyer’s stock-in-trade. The ability to assess the risks of a situation, and choose the better course of action, is the value that lawyers bring to the criminal justice...
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More on Brain Scans – Can They Tell Whether You’ll Get Off Lightly?
With a hat tip to our Uncle Ralph, here’s a link to yet another fMRI study bearing on criminal law. Makiko Yamada and colleagues have published in Nature Communications their study “Neural Circuits in...
View ArticleInexpert Testimony
The purpose of a trial is not to discover the truth. Sorry. Whether civil or criminal, bench or jury, the purpose of a trial is to decide on an “official version” of the facts. The purpose of the...
View ArticleA Prosecutor Defends Eyewitness Identification
It’s fairly well-established that eyewitness identification sucks, as a rule. There have been tons of scientific studies going back decades — and more are conducted all the time — on the reliability of...
View ArticleOn Jury Nullification
Over on my comic, reader Martenzo this morning asked: While this is off-topic for the current chapter, I got curious after reading about the recent Bundy acquittal in Oregon. Are you ever going to...
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