Let Safety be Your Guide: A Risk Management Perspective on Challenge Course Programming and Instructor Training

The introduction of challenge courses to the public and private education sectors ushered in a new focus on construction and safety standards. The Association for Challenge Course Technologies (ACCT) currently pro.vides a series of standards related to challenge course construction techniques and appropriate materials and is paving the way for national standardization of challenge course practices and instructor training programs. While challenge course safety has improved significantly in the past forty years, there are still antagonists who have claimed these programs lack safety and quality control , (p.65), resulting in a number of potential and actual accidents (Leemon & Erickson, 2000)

Miranda’s Final Frontier—The International Arena: A Critical Analysis of United States v. Bin Laden, and a Proposal for a New Miranda Exception Abroad

In recent years, the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have greatly expanded their presence abroad, investigating everything from narcotics trade and Internet fraud schemes to terrorism. Where this law enforcement activity includes custodial interrogation of non-American citizens abroad, must American law enforcement officials provide Miranda warnings to such suspects? In 2001 in United States v. Bin Laden, a federal district court held that the Fifth Amendment\u27s privilege against self-incrimination applies to non-American citizens interrogated abroad, thus requiring Miranda warnings in this context. This Article criticizes the Bin Laden court\u27s strict application of Miranda and suggests that Miranda should be interpreted as a flexible prophylactic rule that can be modified or discarded abroad where its application is illogical. The Article then argues that the policies behind Miranda do not always support its application abroad in the same way that it is systematically applied in the domestic setting. As a result, an FBI agent abroad should be required to advise a non-American suspect only of the rights that he enjoys in the country where the interrogation takes place, to the extent such rights can be reasonably determined by the agent under the circumstances surrounding the interrogation. In addition, if the FBI agent makes a mistake in interpreting the rights available to a given suspect under foreign law, and does not advise the suspect of a right which he in fact had, the exclusionary rule should not be employed as long as the agent misinterpreted the foreign law in good faith

Privacy and the Growing Plight of the Homeless: Reconsidering the Values Underlying the Fourth Amendment

This Comment will discuss the issue that the Supreme Court of Connecticut declined to decide in Mooney: the Fourth Amendment\u27s inadequate protection of homeless individuals\u27 privacy in their living spaces or homes. Part II will trace the evolution of Fourth Amendment doctrine from its beginnings in 1886 with Boyd v. United States, when privacy was intimately intertwined with private property, through the Warren Court\u27s 1967 decisions in Katz v. United States and Warden, Maryland Penitentiary v. Hayden, which declared that the principal object of the Fourth Amendment is the protection of privacy rather than property, and [we] have increasingly discarded fictional and procedural barriers rested on property concepts. Part III will explore how the subsequent Burger and Rehnquist Courts have dismantled the Warren Court\u27s privacy analysis, quickly returning us to the pre-Katz era and once again placing the emphasis of the Fourth Amendment on property. Specifically, this section will address how the present Court has returned us to property concepts through their skewed application of Harlan\u27s two-prong reasonable expectation test, and will then focus on the present Court\u27s narrow interpretation of the word house in the text of the Constitution. Finally, Part IV will discuss a Fourth Amendment test that is based on privacy instead of property. Additionally, this section will discuss Hegel\u27s personality theory of property and its present uses and manifestations in American law

Shining the Bright Light on Police Interrogation in America

Book review of "Police Interrogation and American Justice" by Richard A. Le

Miranda\u27s Final Frontier - the International Arena: A Critical Analysis of U.S. v. Bin Laden, and a Proposal for a New Miranda Exception Abroad

In recent years, the FBI and other federal law agencies have greatly expanded their presence abroad, investigating everything from narcotics trade and internet fraud schemes to terrorism. This trend will undoubtedly continue in the aftermath of September 11th. A constitutional question that will be of increasing importance in this context is whether, or to what extent, U.S. law enforcement officials (hereinafter FBI ) must provide Miranda warnings to non-U.S. citizens interrogated abroad who will later be tried in the United States. The article first addresses whether future modifications to the Miranda doctrine are permissible after Dickerson. The article concludes that despite the warnings of some scholars that Dickerson has caused Miranda to become frozen in time, Dickerson should be read as creating a prophylactic Miranda rule that is both constitutionally-based and flexible at the same time. Thus, exceptions to the Miranda doctrine can be made, as in Quarles, in new contexts where its application is illogical or where the state\u27s interests outweigh the civil liberties interests involved. The article then argues that the policies behind Miranda do not always support its application abroad in the same way that it is systematically applied in the domestic setting. Indeed, as demonstrated through a series of hypothetical scenarios, a strict application of Miranda abroad would not always further the civil liberties that the doctrine was designed to protect, and would simultaneously undermine U.S. law enforcement interests by freezing out the United States from participating in interrogations in many foreign countries. The article proffers that an FBI agent abroad should be required to advise a non-U.S. citizen suspect only of the rights that he enjoys in the country where the interrogation takes place, to the extent such rights can be reasonably determined by the FBI agent under the circumstances of the interrogation. In addition, if the FBI agent makes a mistake in interpreting the rights available to a given suspect under foreign law, and does not advise the suspect of a right which he in fact had, the exclusionary rule should not be employed as long as the agent misinterpreted the foreign law in good faith

The New Frontier of Constitutional Confession Law - the International Arena: Exploring the Admissibility of Confessions Taken by U.S. Investigators from Non-Americans Abroad

This Article is part two in an ongoing series. Part I, published at 51 DUKE L. J. 1703 (2002), argued that Miranda warnings should not be strictly required when U.S. agents interrogate non-U.S. citizens abroad. This Article picks up where the first left off, and asks the question: In the absence of Miranda, do any provisions in the Bill of Rights restrict the ability of U.S. agents to obtain confessions from non-Americans abroad? The Article begins by examining the back up or default rules to Miranda in the domestic setting. These rules are the due process involuntary confession rule, which holds all involuntary confessions inadmissible, and the Privilege Against Compulsory Self-Incrimination, which similarly bans compelled confessions. Due to the Supreme Court\u27s preference for the due process rule, the contours of the Privilege have not been fully developed in the interrogation context post-Miranda. As a result, many courts and scholars assume that the test for admissibility under the Privilege is identical to the due process rule, and that both doctrines prohibit the introduction of involuntary confessions. It is a central thesis of this Article that the two doctrines are different, and that each should demand a distinct test for confession admissibility.The Article proffers that the due process involuntary confession rule is inapplicable during interrogations by U.S. agents of non-Americans abroad. This is because the due process rule, after Colorado v. Connelly, should be interpreted as a freestanding civil liberty that is violated at the time that the coercive interrogation takes place. Thus, the due process rule mirrors the 4th Amendment, which is violated at the time that the search takes place, and not when the evidence seized is admitted into evidence at trial. When analyzing confession admissibility under the due process rule, an involuntary confession obtained from a non-American abroad would be admissible at trial in the United States because the constitution violation would have occurred entirely outside of the United States when the interrogation took place in the foreign country in question. Under the Supreme Court\u27s holding in U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez, therefore, a non-American cannot claim protection of the Bill of Rights when the constitutional violation occurs entirely beyond the borders of the United States.The Article then notes, however, that the Privilege Against Compulsory Self-Incrimination is different than the due process involuntary confession rule. The Privilege is a trial right, a violation of which occurs not at the time of the interrogation, but only when the compelled confessions is introduced into evidence at trial in the United States. Thus, because a violation of the Privilege occurs within the borders of the United States, non-Americans interrogated abroad but tried in America can claim protection of the Privilege and its ban on compelled confessions.This raises the next question: Is the Privilege\u27s ban on compelled confessions different than the ban on involuntary confessions under the due process rule? While conventional wisdom might suggest these two doctrines are identical, the Article proffers that history, text, precedent and policy all suggest a different test for the Privilege. A confession should be considered compelled under the Privilege whenever interrogators impose an objective penalty on a suspect to provoke speech or punish silence. The Article then briefly describes how this new test for compulsion would operate in the interrogation context.The theories in this Article are a precursor to Part III, a work in progress, which will assert that the due process involuntary confession rule and its voluntariness test are illegitimate vestiges of legal errors and now obsolete political maneuvers made by the Supreme Court in past decades. The proper test for confession admissibility both abroad and at home should be grounded solely in the Privilege Against Compulsory Self-Incrimination. The test should be objective, should focus solely on the police conduct rather than the state of mind of the suspect, and should ask whether or not the interrogators employed compulsion to obtain a confession. Part III will then examine the historical origins of the Privilege, the text of the Privilege, the policies supporting the Privilege, and how the Privilege has been interpreted in the non-interrogation context to expand on the objective penalties test for compulsion first set forth in Part II

Book Review: Angle of Attack: Air France 447 and the Future of Aviation Safety

This review provides insight on the content and a review of the quality of the recent release of Angle of Attack: Air France 447 and the Future of Aviation Safety from Lexographic. This review does not reflect the views of IJAAA or ERAU. This work was not peer reviewed