Episode 1.14: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.14: Heads I Win, Tales You Lose. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. Please subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes or your favorite app, but be sure to seek legal advice before listening to this podcast.
In this week’s podcast, Judith Miller, a law professor at the University of Chicago who worked as a federal public defender, joins us to give a public defender’s perspective on our criminal justice system. We discuss some of the criminal and civil protections for police officers, including ways in which the exclusionary rule has been hollowed out.
We also discuss the ways that the defense is handicapped relative to the prosecution, in pre-trial evidence gathering, sentence reduction offers for testimony, permissible bending of the truth, and even penalties for misconduct.
We’ll return in two weeks with This is Fine 1.15, as we discuss the surprisingly relevant criminal foreign policy scandal that did not take down a sitting President, Iran-Contra.
Resources for the podcast (in order of discussion):
- Judith P. Miller, University of Chicago Law School
- Federal Criminal Justice Clinic Moves to Dismiss Cases because ATF Discriminated on the Basis of Race, UChicago Law School (includes Motions to Dismiss and Expert Report of Professor Jeffrey Fagan)
- Jason Meisner and Annie Sweeney, “ATF sting operation accused of using racial bias in finding targets, with majority being minorities,” Chicago Tribune
- “Entrapment - Proving Predisposition,” Offices of the United States Attorneys
- Adam Wisnieski, “Can law enforcement use "fake" crimes to create criminals?” CBS News
- Jeffrey A. Fagan, Columbia Law School
- Jeff Fisher and Rob Arthur, “Inside the Algorithm That Tries to Predict Gun Violence in Chicago,” The Upshot, New York Times
- “Exclusionary Rule,” “Fruit of the Poisonous Tree,” Wex Legal Dictionary, Cornell Law School
- “United States v. Leon,” Oyez
- “Opinion analysis: Reasonable mistakes of law by police do not violate the Fourth Amendment,” scotusblog.com
- Chase Madar, Why It’s Impossible to Indict a Cop, The Nation
- “Qualified Immunity,” Wex Legal Dictionary, Cornell Law School
- Rachel Barkow and Mark Osler, “Designed to Fail: The President's Deference to the Department of Justice in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform,” William & Mary Law Review (linked on SSRN)
- President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, “Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods” Executive Office of the President,
- Rebecca McCray, “Justice Department Says No Thanks to Forensic Science Report,” takepart.org
- “The Case that Challenged Leniency Deals,” Frontline, PBS
- Oren Bar-Gill and Omri Ben-Shahar, “The Prisoners’ (Plea Bargain) Dilemma,” Regulation (linked at cato.org)
- “Prosecuted by her legal counterpart: 'It destroyed my life in so many ways”, The Guardian
- “Orleans DA's office issued 'fake subpoenas' to pressure witnesses: report,” The Times-Picayune
- Eugene Volokh, “Judge Kozinski on prosecutorial misconduct,” Washington Post
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- Cyrus Vance, cyvanceforda.com
- Rebecca Ruiz, “Attorney General Orders Tougher Sentences, Rolling Back Obama Policy,” New York Times