Criminal Law - Contradictory Statements Under Oath as Grounds for Perjury in the Federal Courts

Perjury has frequently been described as one of the more difficult convictions to obtain, and the truth of this saying is no better illustrated than in the case of Harvey Matusow. During the two years in which ex-Communist Matusow served as a professional government witness, he accused 180 or more persons as being members of the Communist Party or Communist sympathizers. This same witness has now described himself as a habitual and perpetual liar and has publicly admitted that all of his previous testimony was false. On the strength of this recantation, motions were filed for a new trial in two cases where Matusow\u27 s testimony had played a key role in gaining a conviction for the government. In both instances, Matusow furnished sworn affidavits and took the witness stand to assert under oath that his former sworn testimony was a mere fabrication. In the Jencks case the motion was dismissed and Matusow was sentenced to three years imprisonment for contempt of court. The other motion has yet to be decided. On the surface this would seem to be an open and shut case of perjury, but the fact that to this date no indictment has been made points up one of the strangest paradoxes of the criminal law

Reply Brief of Appellant Deanna Thomas

Betsy Ginsberg filed a Reply Brief on behalf of Appellant Deanna Thomas

Constitutional Admissibility of Hearsay under the Confrontation Clause: Reliability Requirement for Hearsay Admitted under a Non- Firmly Rooted Exception - Idaho v. Wright

This note discusses the facts of Idaho v. Wright, examines the history of the admissibility of hearsay under the Confrontation Clause, and analyzes the Wright decision. This note concludes that by excluding the use of corroborative evidence in determining the trustworthiness of non-firmly rooted hearsay, the Court enhances Confrontation Clause protection for criminal defendants, but perhaps at the expense of some crime victims, such as sexually abused children

Convicting Lennie: Mental Retardation, Wrongful Convictions, and the Right to a Fair Trial

Lennie refers to Lennie Small, the intellectually disabled character in John Steinbeck\u27s famous novella Of Mice and Men, which tells the story of two Depression-era wandering farmhands, George and Lennie, who dream of getting their own stake and living off the fat of the land. Their dream dies hard when Lennie accidently kills the young, beautiful, and flirtatious wife of a ranch owner\u27s son and then tries to cover it up because he realizes that he has done a bad thing. George, in turn, kills Lennie to prevent him from being lynched or tried for murder. Lennie was doomed because he lived in a fictional world where virtually no one understood the nature and severity of his intellectual disability, and thus people were predisposed to believe that Lennie was a cold-blooded murderer who deserved the ultimate punishment. But how would Lennie fare today--not in Steinbeck\u27s fictional Depression-era America, but in the twenty-first century and in our current criminal justice system? Is the criminal justice system equipped to fairly treat mentally retarded defendants in the quest for truth ? In this article we have argued for a number of procedural protections to safeguard mentally retarded defendants against the heightened risk of wrongful conviction, i.e., providing counsel or an advocate with training in mental retardation, creating safeguards against the admissibility of false confessions, assuring the reliability of informant and codefendant testimony, informing the jury of the heightened risk of error and altering current burdens of proof. We have elected to sketch several procedural protections rather than defend one or another as the most crucial. For any criminal justice system committed to protecting the Lennies of the world against the heigbtened risk of being found guilty of crimes they did not commit, these procedures are a necessary beginning

Hartey v. Vaughn

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvani

Convicting Lennie: Mental Retardation, Wrongful Convictions, and the Right to a Fair Trial

Lennie refers to Lennie Small, the intellectually disabled character in John Steinbeck\u27s famous novella Of Mice and Men, which tells the story of two Depression-era wandering farmhands, George and Lennie, who dream of getting their own stake and living off the fat of the land. Their dream dies hard when Lennie accidently kills the young, beautiful, and flirtatious wife of a ranch owner\u27s son and then tries to cover it up because he realizes that he has done a bad thing. George, in turn, kills Lennie to prevent him from being lynched or tried for murder. Lennie was doomed because he lived in a fictional world where virtually no one understood the nature and severity of his intellectual disability, and thus people were predisposed to believe that Lennie was a cold-blooded murderer who deserved the ultimate punishment. But how would Lennie fare today--not in Steinbeck\u27s fictional Depression-era America, but in the twenty-first century and in our current criminal justice system? Is the criminal justice system equipped to fairly treat mentally retarded defendants in the quest for truth ? In this article we have argued for a number of procedural protections to safeguard mentally retarded defendants against the heightened risk of wrongful conviction, i.e., providing counsel or an advocate with training in mental retardation, creating safeguards against the admissibility of false confessions, assuring the reliability of informant and codefendant testimony, informing the jury of the heightened risk of error and altering current burdens of proof. We have elected to sketch several procedural protections rather than defend one or another as the most crucial. For any criminal justice system committed to protecting the Lennies of the world against the heigbtened risk of being found guilty of crimes they did not commit, these procedures are a necessary beginning