Judges & Judicial Process – Page 22 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

US Supreme Court Review: Constitutional Criminal Cases

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:July 3, 2014
Post category:Constitutional Law Criminal Law & Process Judges & Judicial Process Public U.S. Supreme Court

(This is another post in our series, Looking Back at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Term.)

In my previous post, I discussed the Court’s recent Fourth Amendment decisions. Here are this term’s other criminal cases that also center on constitutional issues (excluding habeas decisions):

Kansas v. Cheever, 571 U.S. __ (2013) (prosecutors could use testimony based on court-ordered mental examination of defendant in order to rebut defendant’s intoxication defense).
Hall v. Florida, 572 U.S. __ (2014) (in capital case, state may not categorically limit intellectual disability defense to individuals with an IQ score of 70 or lower — see my earlier post here).
Kaley v. United States, 571 U.S. __ (2014) (when trying to overturn pretrial asset freeze affecting funds to be used for legal representation, defendant may not challenge grand jury’s probable cause determination).
Martinez v. Illinois, 572 U.S. __ (2014) (after jury empaneled and sworn, judge’s grant of defendant’s motion for “directed findings of not guilty” counted as acquittal for double jeopardy purposes and precluded appeal by state).

A notable recurring theme across this set of decisions is the Court’s desire to maintain a particular competitive balance at criminal trials.

US Supreme Court Review: Statutory Interpretation in Criminal Cases

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:June 30, 2014
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Federal Criminal Law & Process Federal Sentencing Judges & Judicial Process Public U.S. Supreme Court

(This is another post in our series, Looking Back at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Term.)

In the first post in this series, I discussed two causation cases in some detail. In this post, I will more briefly summarize the full set of the Court’s criminal statutory interpretation cases from the past term and then offer a few overarching observations.

Here are the cases (excluding habeas corpus decisions):

US Supreme Court Review: Crime and Causation

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:June 27, 2014
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Federal Criminal Law & Process Federal Sentencing Judges & Judicial Process Public U.S. Supreme Court

(This is the first post in our series, Looking Back at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Term. Other posts, when they appear, can be found here.) The Court’s criminal docket this term included two interesting causation cases that came to somewhat different conclusions. The cases were Burrage v. United States, 134 S. Ct. 881, which dealt with criminal responsibility for a drug-related death, and Paroline v. United States, 134 S. Ct. 1710, which dealt with restitution for a child pornography victim. In both cases, the Court had to grapple with tensions between traditional, narrow understandings of causal responsibility in the law and a natural human desire to hold bad actors accountable for tragic harms with which they seem to have some connection, even if that connection is a tenuous or uncertain one.

Burrage nicely illustrates the tension.