Policing the Admissibility of Body Camera Evidence

Body cameras are sweeping the nation and becoming, along with the badge and gun, standard issue for police officers. These cameras are intended to ensure accountability for abusive police officers. But, if history is any guide, the videos they produce will more commonly be used to prosecute civilians than to document abuse. Further, knowing that the footage will be available as evidence, police officers have an incentive to narrate body camera videos with descriptive oral statements that support a later prosecution. Captured on an official record that exclusively documents the police officer’s perspective, these statements—for example, “he just threw something into the bushes” or “your breath smells of alcohol”—have the potential to be convincing evidence. Their admissibility is complicated, however, by conflicting currents in evidence law. Oral statements made by police officers during an arrest, chase, or other police-civilian interaction will typically constitute hearsay if offered as substantive evidence at a later proceeding. Yet the statements will readily qualify for admission under a variety of hearsay exceptions, including, most intriguingly, the little-used present sense impression exception. At the same time, a number of evidence doctrines generally prohibit the use of official out-of-court statements against criminal defendants. This Article unpacks the conflicting doctrines to highlight a complex, but elegant, pathway for courts to analyze the admissibility of police statements captured on body cameras. The result is that the most normatively problematic statements should be excluded under current doctrine, while many other statements will be admissible to aid fact finders in assessing disputed events

Arbitrating Identity: Courts and the Politics of Religious-Liberal Reconciliation in the Middle East

The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Eva Bellin is associate professor of political science at City University of New York, Hunter College. She is a comparativist with specialization in the Middle East and North Africa. Her research interests center on issues of democratization and authoritarian persistence, political and economic reform, civil society, religion and politics, and the politics of cultural change. Bellin is the author of Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State Sponsored Development (Cornell University Press, 2002). She is currently working on a second book, Arbitrating Identity: High Courts and the Politics of Cultural Reconciliation in Egypt, Israel, and Pakistan, of which her presentation at the Mershon Center is based. In addition to publishing numerous edited books, Bellin has published in a variety of venues including World Politics, Comparative Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, Foreign Affairs, Middle East Policy. She has served on the editorial board of the journal Comparative Politics since 2005. Bellin has been named a Carnegie Scholar (2006-2008) by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, supporting her research on high courts in the Middle East and Islamic World. She was also named a Fellow (2006-2007) at the Princeton Institute for Regional and International Studies, Democracy and Development Program. Bellin has conducted field work in Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, and Pakistan. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and a B.A. from Harvard University.The Ohio State University. Honors and ScholarsThe Ohio State University. Department of Political ScienceThe Ohio State University. Middle East Studies CenterOhio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, event photo

Waiting for Justice

One man’s seven-year wait for a trial reveals the ways mandatory minimums distort our courts

Attorney Competence in an Age of Plea Bargaining and Econometrics

This Essay explores the concept of attorney competence in a criminal justice system dominated by plea bargaining. It focuses, in particular, on the results of a widely-reported empirical study of Philadelphia murder cases that found “vast” differences in legal outcomes based on the type of defense attorney assigned to the case. The first part of the Essay explores the implications of these empirical findings, which appear to stem from a counter-intuitive form of professional competence, persistence in convincing one’s client to plead guilty. The findings are particularly intriguing in light of the Supreme Court’s recent expansion of ineffective assistance of counsel claims into America’s untidy plea bargaining regime. The second part of the Essay highlights the extraordinary empirical methods employed to unearth the findings described in Part I. As empiricists apply increasingly sophisticated tools to the extraordinarily complex criminal justice system, gaining insight into the advantages and shortcomings of various methodological approaches can be just as important for those interested in criminal justice as any particular study’s substantive contributions

Reconceptualizing the Fifth Amendment Prohibition of Adverse Comment on Criminal Defendants\u27 Trial Sentence

Griffin v. California holds that the Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled self-incrimination prohibits a prosecutor from arguing that a defendant’s failure to testify supports an inference of guilt. In the four decades since Griffin was decided, Griffin’s doctrinal underpinnings have been strongly criticized by prominent jurists and commentators, and even Griffin’s contemporary defenders struggle to place the constitutional prohibition of adverse comment on defendant silence within a coherent doctrinal framework. In light of these largely unanswered criticisms, this Article posits that the current Fifth Amendment-based prohibition of adverse comment is untenable and must be recast in a more narrowly tailored form. Relying on a fairness rationale implicit in existing case law, this Article constructs a limited Fifth Amendment prohibition of adverse comment on defendant trial silence and suggests a mechanism by which this tailored constitutional prohibition could be implemented