4,521 research outputs found
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
On an Intuitionistic Logic for Pragmatics
We reconsider the pragmatic interpretation of intuitionistic logic [21]
regarded as a logic of assertions and their justications and its relations with classical
logic. We recall an extension of this approach to a logic dealing with assertions
and obligations, related by a notion of causal implication [14, 45]. We focus on
the extension to co-intuitionistic logic, seen as a logic of hypotheses [8, 9, 13] and on
polarized bi-intuitionistic logic as a logic of assertions and conjectures: looking at the
S4 modal translation, we give a denition of a system AHL of bi-intuitionistic logic
that correctly represents the duality between intuitionistic and co-intuitionistic logic,
correcting a mistake in previous work [7, 10]. A computational interpretation of cointuitionism
as a distributed calculus of coroutines is then used to give an operational
interpretation of subtraction.Work on linear co-intuitionism is then recalled, a linear
calculus of co-intuitionistic coroutines is dened and a probabilistic interpretation
of linear co-intuitionism is given as in [9]. Also we remark that by extending the
language of intuitionistic logic we can express the notion of expectation, an assertion
that in all situations the truth of p is possible and that in a logic of expectations
the law of double negation holds. Similarly, extending co-intuitionistic logic, we can
express the notion of conjecture that p, dened as a hypothesis that in some situation
the truth of p is epistemically necessary
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
- …