The Right to Appointed Counsel: Argersinger and Beyond

Half a generation ago the Supreme Court in Gideon v. Wainwright found the Sixth Amendment right to counsel fundamental and essential to a fair trial. Mr. Justice Black, speaking for an unanimous Court, referred to lawyers as necessities, not luxuries. He said the noble ideal of fair trials cannot be realized if the poor man charged with crime has to face his accusers without a lawyer to assist him, and declared that any person hauled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him. One might therefore have expected per curiam reversals, following Gideon, of criminal convictions where assistance of counsel was denied. Instead, several courts upheld such convictions for\u27misdemeanors, and the Court repeatedly denied certiorari

Civil Procedure

The Second Circuit during the 1977-78 term decided a number of significant cases comfortably contained within the conventional rubric of civil procedure. I had intended to comment on one or more in depth in this commentary, but found myself preempted by the student comments that follow. Moreover, in reading over the court\u27s work for a term in search of an overlooked judicial gem upon which I might hope to add a little polish, and dipping lightly into the court\u27s statistics in search of inspiration, I became a born-again convert to the relatively new discipline unhappily labelled judicial administration. 1 Since all civil cases involve civil procedure, and criminal cases have a strong impact upon the process of deciding civil cases, I doubt that I have gone too far astray from the assigned topic in making a few comments on that subject

Does Miranda Protect the Innocent or the Guilty?

Miranda v. Arizona\u27 is probably the most widely recognized court decision ever rendered. Thanks to movies and television, people the world over know about Miranda rights. Governments around the globe have embraced Miranda-like rights. Suspects in South Korea must receive their Miranda warning before being interrogated. So must those in Mexico, Canada, and most European countries. Miranda\u27s notoriety surely has something to do with the decision\u27s kaleidoscopic symbolism. To some, Miranda embodies the respect due to criminal suspects. To others, it represents the professionalism of the police. Still others regard Miranda as a glaring example of the Supreme Court\u27s ambivalence toward law enforcement, its lack of respect for victims, and its willingness to coddle criminals. Constitutional lawyers cite Miranda as an example of judicial usurpation of the legislative domain.9 And so on

Legality in the Second Circuit

In his highly regarded treatise, The Limits of the Criminal Sanction, the late Professor Herbert Packer reminded us that [t]he :first principle [of criminal law] is that conduct may not be treated as criminal unless it has been so defined by an authority having the institutional competence to do so before it has taken place. This is the principle of legality. According to Professor Packer, there is all-but-universal compliance with it ... in this country. Apart from prohibitions against retroactivity, the two doctrines by which the courts keep the principle of legality in good repair are the void-for-vagueness doctrine and the doctrine requiring strict construction of penal statutes. Each is a contiguous segment of the same spectrum

A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words: Conversational versus Eyewitness Testimony in Criminal Convictions

Scholars and practitioners alike share a widespread belief that the single greatest cause of wrongful conviction is erroneous eyewitness testimony. This conventional wisdom is almost certainly wrong. Conversational testimonydescribing earlier conversations or statements-is more common, more likely to be inaccurate, more likely to be believed by jurors, and more likely to produce irreversible errors than eyewitness testimony. Nonetheless, the dangers to the innocent posed by conversational testimony have been largely unrecognized. This Article highlights the case for further psychological and legal attention to conversational witnesses by comparing how the psychological processes and legal responses differ between eyewitness and conversational testimony. The Article concludes with implications for reform that may minimize the ongoing and unrecognized miscarriages of justice which result from erroneous conversational testimony

The use of standardized patients for mock oral board exams in neurology: a pilot study

BACKGROUND: Mock oral board exams, fashioned after the live patient hour of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology exam, are commonly part of resident assessment during residency training. Exams using real patients selected from clinics or hospitals are not standardized and do not allow comparisons of resident performance across the residency program. We sought to create a standardized patient mock oral board exam that would allow comparison of residents' clinical performance. METHODS: Three cases were created and then used for this mock oral boards exercise utilizing trained standardized patients. Residents from the University of Cincinnati and Indiana University participated in the exam. Residents were scored by attending physician examiners who directly observed the encounter with the standardized patient. The standardized patient also assessed each resident. A post-test survey was administered to ascertain participant's satisfaction with the examination process. RESULTS: Resident scores were grouped within one standard deviation of the mean, with the exception of one resident who was also subjectively felt to "fail" the exam. In exams with two faculty "evaluators", scores were highly correlated. The survey showed satisfaction with the examination process in general. CONCLUSION: Standardized patients can be used for mock oral boards in the live patient format. Our initial experience with this examination process was positive. Further testing is needed to determine if this examination format is more reliable and valid than traditional methods of assessing resident competency

The Opportunity Cost of the Conservation Reserve Program: A Kansas Land Example

The effects of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) on farmland values is investigated using a set of parcel-level data for land sales in Kansas over the period 1998 to 2014. The sales data are used to estimate a hedonic model of land values that allows for the opportunity cost of CRP enrollment to vary across space and time. Factors impacting the opportunity costs include the relative productivity of land, returns to farming, and the time remaining under the CRP contracts. We find that the discount associated with having land under CRP contract averages 7%

Perinatal and Socioeconomic Risk Factors for Variable and Persistent Cognitive Delay at 24 and 48 Months of Age in a National Sample

The objective of this paper is to examine patterns of cognitive delay at 24 and 48 months and quantify the effects of perinatal and sociodemographic risk factors on persistent and variable cognitive delay. Using data from 7,200 children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), multiple logistic regression models identified significant predictors of low cognitive functioning at 24 and 48 months. Additional multiple logistic models predicting cognitive delay at 48 months were estimated separately for children with and without delay at 24 months. Of the nearly 1,000 children delayed at 24 months, 24.2% remained delayed by 48 months; 7.9% of the children not delayed at 24 months exhibited delay at 48 months. Low and very low birthweight increased cognitive delay risk at 24, but not 48 months. Low maternal education had a strongly increasing effect (OR = 2.3 at 24 months, OR = 13.7 at 48 months), as did low family income (OR = 1.4 at 24 months, OR = 7.0 at 48 months). Among children delayed at 24 months, low maternal education predicted delay even more strongly at 48 months (OR = 30.5). Low cognitive functioning is highly dynamic from 24 to 48 months. Although gestational factors including low birthweight increase children’s risk of cognitive delay at 24 months, low maternal education and family income are more prevalent in the pediatric population and are much stronger predictors of both persistent and emerging delay between ages 24 and 48 months