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Excluding Coerced Witness Testimony to Protect a Criminal Defendant’s Right to Due Process of Law and Adequately Deter Police

February 21, 2019October 4, 2017 by admin

Abstract

This Note argues that the Due Process Clause must protect criminal defendants from the admission of an involuntary statement made by a witness. Part I discusses the history of the use of involuntary statements, specifically the justifications for the exclusion of coerced confessions. Part II examines how various courts have addressed the issue and have come to different conclusions. Part III explains why involuntary witness statements should be excluded under the Due Process Clause in criminal trials.

INTRODUCTION

Colin Warner served twenty years in jail for a murder he did not commit his conviction based entirely on the testimony of a scared fourteen year old boy who was coerced by police to implicate Warner Mario Hamilton was shot and killed in April of 1980 in broad daylight near the Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Thomas Charlemagne stated that he had seen what happened, though in fact he had not. Charlemagne was...

Statewide Law Enforcement | Mental Health Efforts

February 21, 2019October 22, 2017 by admin

Introduction

Nationwide, law enforcement agencies in rapidly increasing numbers have embraced specialized policing responses (SPRs, pronounced “spurs”) to people with mental illnesses. These efforts, which prioritize treatment over incarceration when appropriate, are planned and implemented in partnership with community service providers and citizens. The two most prevalent SPR approaches are Crisis Intervention Teams (CITs) and police-mental health co.-responder teams. CITs, pioneered by the Memphis (TN) Police Department, draw on a self-selected cadre of officers trained to identify signs and symptoms of mental illness, to de-escalate any situation involving an individual who appears to have a mental illness, and to connect that person in crisis to treatment. The second approach, co-responder teams, forged by the Los Angeles (CA) Police Department and San Diego County (CA) Sheriff’s Department, pairs officers with mental health professionals to respond to calls involving people in or combined these strategies, but a common...

Criminal Law – Silence as an Admission of Guilt

February 21, 2019October 2, 2017 by admin

Criminal Law-Silence as an Admission of Guilt

The defendant was indicted for robbery, being accused of taking four dollars and ten cents from the person of Oscar Glenn by force and against his will. At the county jail, the night after the robbery, the eight or ten prisoners, among whom was the defendant, were lined up for Glenn's inspection. Glenn pointed out the defendant as the one who had robbed him. The defendant remained silent, and made no denial of the accusation that he was the identical person who committed the robbery. Testimony of this fact was admitted at the trial, over the defendant's objection. He was convicted, and appealed, claiming among other things, the admission of the above testimony as error. Held, that silence in the face of pertinent and direct accusation of crime partakes of the nature of a confession, and is admissible as a circumstance to be...

Crime in Rural Areas: A Review of the Literature for the Rural Evidence Research Centre

February 21, 2019October 11, 2017 by admin

1.1 Background

In August 1999, two men attempted to burgle a house in the village of Enmeth, Norfolk. The owner of the house, Tony Martin, had other ideas and upon entering, shot at the burglars, killing one of them. Martin was jailed for murder the following year (a sentence later reduce to manslaughter). A long-standing rural ideal is that the countryside is a crime-free place to live (Mingay, 1989). However, crime is by no means non-existent in rural areas. Nevertheless, until recently, the criminological literature has almost exclusively focused on cities and urban problems. The Martin case, received a great deal of media attention and prompted concern that rural crime problems were not being adequately addressed (Aust & Simmons, 2002; Jones, 2003; Mawby, 2004). In response, the 2000 Rural White Paper (DETR, 2000) placed crime in rural areas as a high priority area.

1.2 Research aims and objectives

This paper was a...

Crime Scene Behaviors Of Crime Scene Stagers

February 21, 2019October 3, 2017 by admin

Abstract

In an article entitled, "Crime Scene Staging and its Detection," Hazelwood and Napier (2004) defined crime scene staging as “the purposeful alteration of a crime or crime scene in an attempt to mislead investigators and frustrate the criminal justice process” (p. 745). While it is true that crime scene staging can frustrate the criminal justice process specifically, generally speaking, crime scene staging is quite a complex societal problem. Staged crime scenes can potentially threaten public safety, the effective use of public resources, and the adjudication of homicide cases on the very broadest level. Unfortunately, there is very little published empirical research on crime scene behaviors in staged homicide cases that can be applied by scholar-practitioners and law enforcement professionals in the field. Therefore, the identification and analysis of crime scene behaviors of crime scene stagers is necessary in order to build an...

Confessions and Admissions

February 21, 2019October 4, 2017 by admin

EVER since the terms "confession and admission" were coined for evidentiary use, courts have attempted to draw clear distinctions between them, and all too frequently, judicial opinions have mirrored slavish obedience to the authority of mechanical definitions. For the sake of clarity, a succinct, well-put definition may serve a utilitarian purpose in establishing ready comprehension of a segment of human experience, but, when detached from actual fact, and the many variables that fact situations produce, this same definition may stifle the imagination and inhibit appreciation of practical considerations. Stock definitions of admissions and confessions lead one to believe that the distinguishing characteristics are sharply outlined, and if one were to accept this impression as an absolute verity, problems of admissibility would rarely beg solution. It may be unfortunate that experience dictates otherwise, but it will readily be seen that a workable rule of admissibility will require...

Everyone’s Neighborhood: Addressing “Not in My Backyard” Opposition to Supportive Housing for People with Mental Health Disabilities

February 21, 2019October 21, 2017 by admin

Chapter 1: Introduction

Organizations that provide housing and supportive services to people with mental health disabilities have their work cut out for them. It is enough of a challenge to identify housing sites, obtain necessary funding, arrange for services, navigate complex administrative systems and secure scarce funding sources if neighbors and local government support the project. But the process becomes much more difficult when neighbors start complaining about housing “those people” in “our” neighborhood. This paper discusses efforts that housing developers, advocates and local governments have made to promote supportive housing for people with mental health disabilities, suggests strategies for bolstering community support, and provides tools for addressing neighborhood opposition if it does arise. “Not In My Backyard” – or NIMBY1 – opposition to affordable and supportive housing “has deep roots in fear, racism, classism, ableism, and growing antidevelopment reactions. ....

Modeling Criminal Distance Decay

February 21, 2019October 11, 2017 by admin

Criminal distance decay is the fundamental notion that a relationship exists between the distance from an offender’s home base to a potential target location and the likelihood that the offender chooses to offend in that location. This relationship is important both for its operational effect on police agencies and on models for offender behavior. A number of factors influence the distance decay function of an offender, including the local geography and the offender’s decision making process.This article addresses a study of the interactions between the two-dimensional offense distribution that describes how offenders select targets and the corresponding one-dimensional distance decay function. It also present the calculation of the coefficient of variation for 324 residential burglary series in Baltimore County, Maryland. These data do not support the notion that the distance decay behavior of an individual offender is governed by a number of common choices for distance decay, including the negative ...

History Of Child Psychiatry

February 21, 2019 by admin

How soon can a child go mad?” asked Henry Maudsley in his 1895 textbook The Pathology of Mind, “Obviously not before it has got some mind to go wrong, and then only in proportion to the quantity and quality of mind which it has”, alluding to the widespread belief, even at the end of the 19th century, that children’s minds were not developed and stable enough to be able to show much psychopathology.

The history of child psychiatry—a term that can mean a collection of services, a body of knowledge, and a profession is inextricably linked to the history of childhood; recognising childhood as a distinct period of development is a prerequisite to acknowledging child psychiatry as a discipline (a full chapter, J.9, is dedicated to the history of childhood in this book). Thus, the history of child psychiatry is interlocked with our understanding of development, child-rearing practices, the place of children in society, and with non-medical fields such as juvenile justice and education. For example, some...

The Sexological Construction Of SexualDysfunction

February 21, 2019October 23, 2017 by admin

ABSTRACT

In a range of modern literature on human sexuality, ’sexual dysfunctions’ are largely taken for granted as self-evident physiological impairments of normal sexual functioning. This conceptualisation increases the likelihood they will be subsumed (or remain within) the jurisdiction of sexologists. The central argument of this paper is that sexual dysfunctions are not self-evident disorders discovered through the value-neutral methods of scientific sexology but are socially constructed as problems with reference to hegemonic masculine standards and patterns of normal sexual functioning and interaction. In this account, sexology operates as an institution of social control which in promoting conformity to such standards contributes to the perpetuation of social inequality. Scientific’ sexology is a veritable Trojan horse : appearing to be modernity’s gift to mankind in its struggle for freedom and dignity, it is, in fact, just another strategy for its pacification and enslavement (Szasz, 1981, xii)...

A Brief Guide to Writing the Psychology Paper

February 21, 2019October 18, 2017 by admin

The Challenges of Writing in Psychology

Psychology writing, like writing in the other sciences, is meant to inform the reader about a new idea, theory or experiment. Toward this end, academic psychologists emphasize the importance of clarity and brevity in writing while minimizing descriptive language and complex sentence structure. The best writers of psychology have the ability to make complex ideas understandable to people outside of their area of expertise. When you write a psychology paper, you are, above all, writing to convey factual knowledge that is supported by research. You are striving to be precise, and thus you should expect every word you write to be read literally. Psychology writing can be very dense, with many references to previous research. Writers of psychology almost never directly quote a source. Instead, they distill the essence of the idea or finding, and cite the appropriate source. In the...

Claims Of Crime-Related Amnesia In Forensic Patients

February 21, 2019October 8, 2017 by admin

Abstract

Many authors assume that crime-related amnesia arises from the stressful nature of crimes and/or drug intoxication at the time crimes are committed. The current study examined prevalence and correlates of crime-related amnesia in a German (n=180) and a Dutch (n=128) sample of forensic inmates. More specifically, patients claiming amnesia and control patients were compared with regard to their intelligence, criminal backgrounds, and psychiatric diagnoses. In contrast to the popular stress-dissociation interpretation, stressful features of the crime were not found to be related to claims of amnesia. Neither alcohol nor drug intoxication, nor psychotic episodes could fully account for claims of memory loss. Interestingly, amnesia claims were especially prevalent among recidivists. This suggests that such claims are the product of a learning process. Thus, it may well be that those who are familiar with the penal system may have experienced the advantages of claiming amnesia.

Admitting Mental Health Evidence To Impeach The Credibility Of A Sexual Assault Complainant

February 21, 2019October 17, 2017 by admin

INTRODUCTION

The 1970 edition of Wigmore on Evidence offers the proposition that every female complainant in a rape prosecution should be subject to a psychiatric examination and echoes turn-of-the century psychoanalysts in its explanation: “The unchaste (let us call it) mentality finds incidental but direct expression in the narration of imaginary sex incidents of which the narrator is the heroine or victim.” In other words, some women falsely accuse men of rape because, either intentionally or inadvertently, they have confused a sexual fantasy with a violent crime. The focus of this Comment, and the focus of considerable controversy and difficulty in rape trials, is evidentiary procedure when the defendant claims that the complainant consented to the intercourse. Putting aside the philosophical problem of defining consent, in the absence of physical injuries the only relevant evidence of the crime will be testimony from the defendant,,

Sexual (Lust) Homicide Definitional Constructs, Dynamics, and Investigative Considerations

February 21, 2019October 13, 2017 by admin

Abstract

This chapter discusses the historical definitional origins of sexual homicide (lust murder), the dynamics of sexual homicide injury, offense definition constructs and their limitations, and key presumptions of injuries associated with sexual homicide offense models. The chapter concludes by arguing for the clarification of concepts, characterizations, linkages, and research into the offense dynamics and offender motivations of sexual (lust) homicides.

INTRODUCTION

Violent interactions in which people are engaged are based on experiences and expectations of reality. For that reason, an understanding of violence and its extremes must consider the offender’s construct of reality. As Skrapec noted, “behavior is the product of one’s own sense of reality regardless of the degree to which that reality matches the objective facts of that person’s life” (1, p. 51–52). The mental representations of an offender’s realities are acted upon and acted out, and they may be presumed to be detectable and specifiable in the...

Mating Success In Lekking Males:a Meta-Analysis

February 21, 2019October 23, 2017 by admin

Traits that are correlated with mating success are likely to be subject to sexual selection. In lekking species, a male's mating success can be estimated as the number of females that he copulates with. Earlier reviews of sexual selection in lekking species have been inconclusive, suggesting that different traits may be important in different species. To obtain a more complete understanding of the outcome of sexual selection in this mating system, we performed a meta-analysis in which we combined the results from different studies across a wide variety of taxa. Our aim was to synthesize available information about correlates of male mating success in lekking species. We found that behavioral traits such as male display activity, aggression rate, and lek attendance were positively correlated with male mating success. Further, territory position was negatively correlated with male mating success, such that males with territories close to...