Big Budget Productions with Limited Release: Video Retention Issues with Body-Worn Cameras

Since 2013, there has been growing support for police body-worn cameras in the wake of several high-profile and controversial encounters between citizens and law enforcement. The federal government has justified budgetary measures funding body-worn camera programs as a means to facilitate trust between law enforcement and the public through the objectivity of video footage—a sentiment supported by many lawmakers advocating for implementation of this technology. These policy goals, however, are stymied by a deficiency of police department policies and state statutes regulating the retention of footage and close adherence of states to the precedent of Arizona v. Youngblood, which holds that the destruction of potentially exculpatory evidence by the government not committed in “bad faith” does not violate due process. This Note analyzes the current landscape of body-worn camera video retention and argues for reform at the judicial and statutory level on how footage is preserved. It argues that courts should interpret Youngblood as allowing judges to impose the sanction of missing-evidence instructions—even in the absence of bad faith—as a remedy against the destruction of body-worn camera footage that occurs because of police policies and practices that limit protection of such footage. This Note also argues that states should move quickly to create statutes regulating the time periods in which body-worn camera footage must be retained while also balancing the logistical burden that high-volume video storage imposes on police departments

Cyber Bullying and Free Speech: Striking an Age-Appropriate Balance

Cyber bullying has generally been dealt with by the courts using one of two legal analyses: the “true threats” doctrine, or the Tinker substantial disruption test. This law review, the Cleveland State Law Review, recently published Anti-Cyber Bullying Statutes: Threat to Student Free Speech (referred to herein as “the Threat to Speech article”), which addressed these two theories, and argued that the current evolution of cyber bullying legislation simply goes too far. For example, Hayward states Anti-cyber bullying laws are the greatest threat to student speech because they seek to censor it anytime it occurs, using “substantial disruption” of school activities as justification and often based only on mere suspicion of potential disruption. The Threat to Speech article advocates greater protection of student speech. While we recognize that any regulation of speech by the state may raise First Amendment concerns, we are not so quick to conclude that cyber bullying regulations “chill student free speech.” Our analysis of the law leads us to the conclusion that school administrators have relatively broad discretion to regulate student speech, provided those regulations either serve legitimate pedagogical ends or protect the rights of other students and the school environment. Indeed, as we will demonstrate below, the evolution of the Supreme Court’s student free speech jurisprudence has followed the trend of granting more and more leeway to administrators. Contrary to the claims in the Threat to Speech article, in our opinion that leeway clearly extends to allowing regulation of speech which originates off campus but has a reasonable likelihood of making its way on campus. We also believe that, in addition to true threats and the Tinker substantial disruption standard described in the Threat to Speech article, school administrators may also regulate student speech consistent with the Court’s holding in Fraser—which set what we refer to as the “fundamental values standard” —and based on the fighting words doctrine

Cyber Bullying and Free Speech: Striking an Age-Appropriate Balance

Cyber bullying has generally been dealt with by the courts using one of two legal analyses: the “true threats” doctrine, or the Tinker substantial disruption test. This law review, the Cleveland State Law Review, recently published Anti-Cyber Bullying Statutes: Threat to Student Free Speech (referred to herein as “the Threat to Speech article”), which addressed these two theories, and argued that the current evolution of cyber bullying legislation simply goes too far. For example, Hayward states Anti-cyber bullying laws are the greatest threat to student speech because they seek to censor it anytime it occurs, using “substantial disruption” of school activities as justification and often based only on mere suspicion of potential disruption. The Threat to Speech article advocates greater protection of student speech. While we recognize that any regulation of speech by the state may raise First Amendment concerns, we are not so quick to conclude that cyber bullying regulations “chill student free speech.” Our analysis of the law leads us to the conclusion that school administrators have relatively broad discretion to regulate student speech, provided those regulations either serve legitimate pedagogical ends or protect the rights of other students and the school environment. Indeed, as we will demonstrate below, the evolution of the Supreme Court’s student free speech jurisprudence has followed the trend of granting more and more leeway to administrators. Contrary to the claims in the Threat to Speech article, in our opinion that leeway clearly extends to allowing regulation of speech which originates off campus but has a reasonable likelihood of making its way on campus. We also believe that, in addition to true threats and the Tinker substantial disruption standard described in the Threat to Speech article, school administrators may also regulate student speech consistent with the Court’s holding in Fraser—which set what we refer to as the “fundamental values standard” —and based on the fighting words doctrine

Race to Incarcerate: Punitive Impulse and the Bid to Repeal Stand Your Ground

Stand-your-ground laws have come to symbolize, especially for many in the center-to-left, the intense racial injustice of the modern American criminal system. The idea now ingrained in the minds of many racial justice-seekers is that only by narrowing the definition of self-defense (and thereby generally strengthening murder law) can we ensure Trayvon Martin\u27s death was not in vain. However, when the story of Martin\u27s killing first appeared on the national stage, the conversation was not primarily about the overly lenient nature of Florida\u27s self-defense law. It was a multi-faceted dialogue about neighborhood warriors, criminal racial profiling, and especially the racially discriminatory nature of police and prosecutorial discretion. After nearly two years of talking about the case, however, concerns over Florida state actors\u27 racially biased application of the law have virtually evaporated in the face of the throng of arguments that stand your ground is inherently poor criminal policy. The nature of the Zimmerman conversation is now about how stand your ground has exonerated thugs, drug dealers, and vicious killers all over the racial spectrum and the law\u27s correlation with increased homicides. This Article explores why many progressives decided to focus their advocacy efforts away from clear issues of inequality and toward legal reform to make it more difficult for future defendants to plead self-defense. It maintains that at least part of the explanation is a punitive impulse deeply entrenched in American psyche that leads even left-leaning racial justice proponents occasionally to hastily embrace proposals that augment the very police and prosecutorial power they otherwise criticize. It accordingly cautions progressives to be wary of remedying discrimination through programs that bypass nonpunitive social, cultural and economic restructurings in favor of selective carceral management of the few private (non-police) individuals that can be characterized as transgressing the social order

Texas Review of Entertainment & Sports Law

Annual journal containing articles, notes, and other analyses of law and legal cases related to sports and entertainment in the United States