Criminal Law And Procedure

This student-friendly text, the only criminal procedure casebook authored by three female law professors of color (who also bring diverse criminal justice system experiences as a former prosecutor, private criminal defense attorney and public defender), highlights social justice issues intertwined with the law of criminal procedure, integrating issues of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation where relevant.

Providing a complete view of U.S. legal principles, this book addresses distinct issues as well as the overlays and connections between them. It presents as a cohesive whole the interrelationships between constitutional principles, statutory criminal laws, procedural law, and common-law evidentiary doctrines. This fully revised and updated new edition also includes discussion questions and hypothetical scenarios to check learning. Constitutional principles are the foundation upon which substantive criminal law, criminal procedure law, and evidence laws rely. The concepts of due process, legality, specificity, notice, equality, and fairness are intrinsic to these three disciplines, and a firm understanding of their implications is necessary for a thorough comprehension of the topic. This book examines the tensions produced by balancing the ideals of individual liberty embodied in the Constitution against society’s need to enforce criminal laws as a means of achieving social control, order, and safety. Relying on his first-hand experience as a law enforcement official and criminal defense attorney, the author presents issues that highlight the difficulties in applying constitutional principles to specific criminal justice situations. Each chapter of the text contains a realistic problem in the form of a fact pattern that focuses on one or more classic criminal justice issues to which readers can relate. These problems are presented from the points of view of citizens caught up in a police investigation and of police officers attempting to enforce the law within the framework of constitutional protections. This book is ideal for courses in criminal law and procedure that seek to focus on the philosophical underpinnings of the system.

This casebook on investigative criminal procedure takes a fresh and uniquely contemporary doctrinal approach. It begins with enough history to enable students to follow the historical arguments that pervade the Supreme Court's great landmarks. Those landmarks receive extensive coverage. Scholarly lower-court opinions, however, often are used as force-multipliers, to synthesize and apply the ever-growing Supreme Court case law. Many of these opinions arose from civil actions, illustrating Section 1983 litigation even before the extensive chapter on constitutional remedies. That chapter deals with the exclusionary rule, but also with 1983 and Bivens suits. Institutional reform injunctions--the most dramatic development in the field in decades--receive extensive treatment. Brief but detailed Notes introduce pertinent academic literature, including empirical findings on stop-and-frisk and institutional reform injunctions, systemic feedback loops, the philosophical basis of the privilege against self-incrimination, and the role of race--past and present--in the law of criminal procedure. Prior books emphasize the Supreme Court's decisions applying the constitutional exclusionary rules. This understandable focus comes at a price. Too little attention is paid to the origins of our constitutional rights or to remedies for institutional violence as distinct from invasions of privacy. The prevailing focus on the e-rule risks devoting the whole course to only part (admittedly a very important part) of the law.

"This text offers a broad and basic survey of Canadian Law and its subdivisions and aims to ensure readers are able to analyze and classify offences and identify possible defences in criminal cases."--

Criminal law is a powerful legal tool in Canadian society consisting of numerous procedural rules but little organization. Provisions of the Criminal Code that are directly relevant to each other are often separated by many different (and usually irrelevant) sections and subsections. The common law rules of criminal procedure, meanwhile, are often established incrementally, in numerous cases decided over a long period of time. With both the Code and common law, it can be difficult and time-consuming to assemble and explain the entire legal framework governing a particular police power or court procedure. This deficiency in the law is what led authors Steve Coughlan and Alex Gorlewski to create a comprehensible resource that clarifies the relationships among the individual statutory provisions and the common law rules of criminal procedure.The Anatomy of Criminal Procedure: A Visual Guide to the Law illustrates the law of criminal procedure through nearly seventy annotated charts and diagrams. Across the whole criminal process -- from search and seizure to appeals and sentencing -- this book consolidates the statutory and common law rules around each step, visually depicts how they fit together, and explains in detailed annotations how the rules work and have been interpreted by courts. This is a valuable text for practitioners who work with the criminal process every day, as well as for students learning it for the first time. Coughlan and Gorlewski aim to outline the law as it was created and implemented by our institutions, while providing the coherence it sometimes lacks yet certainly requires.