Case Studies In Criminal Procedures

The study of criminal procedure is the study of constitutional requirements governing criminal prosecution. The Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution sets out guaranteed rights that citizens have relative to the government; four of those first ten amendments deal specifically with rights people have during the course of criminal prosecution. The Fourth Amendment protects us from the police, mandating procedures for lawful searches and seizures. The Fifth Amendment contains the guarantee of due process, a cornerstone of freedom. The Sixth Amendment protects us from the prosecutor, guaranteeing standards for trial. The Eight Amendment protects us from the courts, mandating reasonable bail and fines and prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. Each of these is a critical component of criminal prosecution, with study of the Fourth Amendment surely the most important and the complex. This book is not design as a text. It presumes students are studying criminal procedure and are using a text that sets out the basic constitutional rules that govern the investigation and prosecution of alleged criminal behavior. This collection of cases is designed to help students understand how the constitutional rules work. This book has been successfully used in classroom settings, where students are placed in groups of 4-6 people (groups that are small enough to ensure that each student will participate and large enough to give students the benefit of other's thinking). The students begin by discussing the questions posed at the end of a selected fact pattern. The thinking is this: if the student can clearly articulate the constitutional rile and the student's analysis of how that rule applies to the facts at hand, the student demonstrates understanding of the material. Sometimes students think they understand the material, but they cannot articulate or explain how the principle applies. These exercises force that articulation and illustrate for the student where the ?soft spots? remain. After they have completed their analysis, they read the court's opinion in the case and understand how that court though the reasoning should proceed. These are non-threatening exercises because students are working with one another in an ungraded atmosphere. They may make mistakes and they will help other who make mistakes. And, in doing so, they will learn. Students report that they enjoy working with these cases and find them instructive. Some cases raise a number of issues related to a single subject or related to a number of different subjects. Those cases were selected to illustrate how the various constitutional principles governing criminal procedure influence one another and how a decision with respect to one may impact another. Especially when we are working with exceptions to Forth Amendment protections, we discover that one exception may ?feed? on another. In some if these cases the courts rely on United States Supreme Court precedent. The Supreme Court cases relied upon are cited. Sometimes the courts rely on other lower court opinions. Those lower court opinions are not cited; the text here simply notes an omitted citation with "[*]". We begin with some introductory material, reviewing the concepts of federalism and privacy. Federalism offers citizens constitutional protection in both the federal and state constitutions, and offers the unique opportunity for a defendant to find constitutional protection in the state constitution when that protection is not available under the federal constitution. Privacy is not specifically guaranteed in the Constitution, but it is an important principle in search and seizure law and it is important for students to understand how to determine when a reasonable expectation of privacy exists. We then move to examination of the Fourth Amendment protections. The Fourth Amendment guaranteesJacobs, Susan is the author of 'Case Studies In Criminal Procedures ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780131700444 and ISBN 0131700448.