Evidence of past false complaints of sexual offenses by an alleged victim of a sexual offense is not within the scope of this rule and is not objectionable when otherwise admissible.
Appendix 22, p. A22-36, Manual for Courts-Martial, United States (2012).
Pennsylvania Public Defenders Rebel Against Crushing Caseloads.
In Faison v. Belcher, a prisoner at the USDB sought to get the federal district court in Kansas to grant a habeas for several issues, including a Fosler issue.
NOTE: “If you Have a Zero-Tolerance Policy, Why Aren’t You Doing Anything?: Using the Uniform Code of Military Justice to Combat Human Trafficking Abroad, 80 Geo Wash L. Rev. 1255 (2012).
There are a number of resources available to counsel for research beyond what is in the red book.
The National Criminal Justice Reference Service is just one: https://www.ncjrs.gov/
Thanks to a colleague for pointing out a new publication that may assist the defense in particular.
There have been discussions from time to time how convening authorities refer odd-ball or arguably frivolous cases to trial.
Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School
June 10, 2012
Washburn Law Journal, Vol. 51, 2012
Abstract:
Every day, all across America, prosecutors charge people with crimes that the criminal justice system is not sufficiently funded to handle. Most of the accused are indigent citizens forced to rely on the services of over-burdened public defenders. In a system that lacks the resources to resolve these cases at trial, or even to spend the requisite capital at the pre-trial stage, prosecutors have found creative ways to process the vast majority of these cases without the expense associated with providing the accused actual justice. With an ever-expanding list of behaviors and actions deemed criminal, and increasingly harsh sentencing options for these offenses, prosecutors are able to put pressure on most criminal defendants to give up many of their most fundamental Constitutional rights and plead guilty to avoid potentially draconian outcomes. While many prosecutors see this as a cheap and effective way to justly punish wrongdoers, this course of action has largely replaced our reliance on principles of justice such as the right to counsel, the right to trial by jury, and the role of an independent judiciary determining a punishment that fits the crime. By undermining basic principles of justice so crucial to our legal system, one might ask whether this way of handling criminal cases is antithetical to the prosecutor’s critical role as minister of justice.
This article argues that when a prosecutor charges more cases than he knows the system can justly resolve due to resource limitations, he violates his ethical obligation to seek justice. It further argues that many prosecutors fail to appreciate how they violate their duty to justice because of a culture that promotes this behavior. Finally, it suggests that prosecutors must be trained to resist these systemic pressures, and to act in accordance with values consistent with justice, if they are to fulfill their intended role in the criminal justice system.
As we all know the military does not have the nolo contendre or Alford plea. Thanks to Prof. Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy, here is an intriguing study. If you go back many years you will see reflections of the Milgram experiments, and the other experiments that turned college students into jailors and prisoners. The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of notable social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Some of this is the basis for false confession theory.
Southern Illinois University School of Law, Vanessa Edkins, Florida Institute of Technology
May 31, 2012
Abstract:
In 1989, Ada JoAnn Taylor was accused of murder and presented with stark options. If she pleaded guilty, she would be rewarded with a sentence of ten to forty years in prison. If, however, she proceeded to trial and was convicted, she would likely spend the rest of her life behind bars. Over a thousand miles away in Florida and more than twenty years later, a college student was accused of cheating and presented with her own incentives to admit wrongdoing and save the university the time and expense of proceeding before a disciplinary review board. Both women decided the incentives were enticing and pleaded guilty.
That Taylor and the college student both pleaded guilty is not the only similarity between the cases. Both were also innocent of the offenses for which they had been accused. After serving nineteen years in prison, Taylor was exonerated after DNA testing proved that neither she nor any of the other five defendants who pleaded guilty in her case were involved in the murder. As for the college student, her innocence is assured by the fact that, unbeknownst to her, she was actually part of an innovative new study into plea bargaining and innocence. The study, conducted by the authors, involving dozens of college students, and taking place over several months, not only recreated the innocent defendant’s dilemma experienced by Taylor, but revealed that plea bargaining’s innocence problem is not isolated to an obscure and rare set of cases.
Strikingly, the authors’ study found that over half of the participants were willing to falsely admit guilt in return for a perceived benefit. This finding not only brings finality to the long-standing debate regarding the possible extent of plea bargaining’s innocence problem, but also ignites a fundamental constitutional question regarding an institution the Supreme Court reluctantly approved of in 1970 in return for an assurance it would not be used to induce innocent defendants to falsely admit guilt.
Southern Methodist University – Dedman School of Law
May 10, 2012
Abstract:
Much of the recent commentary on the Confrontation Clause focuses on the past. Commentators (and Supreme Court Justices) evaluate the evolving jurisprudence by comparing the confrontation right articulated in Crawford v. Washington and its progeny to the right that existed in 1791. This Symposium Essay shifts the focus to the future, exploring how the Supreme Court’s new Confrontation Clause jurisprudence will operate in a world where communication is increasingly informal and electronic.
The inability to remember in court, what about it?
If the witness testifies in court that the traffic light was green, and in a prior statement to police they said it was red. That’s a prior inconsistent statement. The witness may be impeached. Asked the “on x to officer X, did you say red,” get the yes, move on; or get the no and offer the inconsistent statement.
But what if the witness says I don’t remember or I think it was amber, and you have a prior statement that the witness told the police officer it was red.
Paul C. Giannelli (Case Western Reserve University School of Law) has posted The 2009 NAS Forensic Science Report: A Literature Review (48 Crim. L. Bulletin 378 (2012)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In February 2009, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released its report on forensic science: Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward (2009). The popular press immediately trumpeted the report’s release, with headlines such as (1) “Report Urges Overhaul of Crime Lab System,” (2) “Real-life Police Forensics Don’t Resemble ‘CSI’: Reliability is ‘Low or Non-existent,’ Report Finds” and (3) “Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs.”
Within three months of its publication, Justice Scalia cited the report in a Supreme Court decision, writing: “Forensic evidence is not uniquely immune from the risk of manipulation. . . Serious deficiencies have been found in the forensic evidence used in criminal trials.” Both the Senate and the House held hearings, and a bill was introduced in Congress. In addition, the President appointed a committee on forensic science.
Several law schools held conferences on the report, and a number legal journals published symposia. Law review articles variously described the report as a “blockbuster,” “a watershed,” “a scathing critique,” “a milestone,” and “pioneering.” This essay briefly discusses some of these articles as well as aspects of the congressional hearings.
Court-Martial Trial Practice Blog