Softcover

ISBN 10: 013245761X ISBN 13: 9780132457613

Publisher: Pearson, 2010

Using a blend of text and edited cases, CRIMINAL PROCEDURE, 6/e provides up-to-date coverage of constitutional criminal procedure.  Important cases are highlighted using a case and comment approach–complete with analysis, justice quotes, and dissenting opinions. This edition includes 25 important new Supreme Court cases and 70 new citations to Supreme Court decisions. Each chapter is updated to reflect the most recent criminal procedure and new legal puzzles appear in every chapter. With an emphasis on law and society, it provides essential information about the law of constitutional criminal procedure, its social, political, and historical contexts, and the most meaningful Supreme Court cases.

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Criminal procedure is a dramatic subject. Each case tells a story of conflict that pits society's vital need for the communal peace and order that makes life livable, against the right of each individual to be free from unreasonable invasions of privacy and freedom by officers of the state. Criminal procedure is also a technical subject. It encompasses many legal rules and doctrines, not all of which are perfectly logical. The drama of criminal procedure may be conveyed by a book that explores one important case, such as Gideon's Trumpet, Anthony Lewis's classic story of Earl Clarence Gideon's fight for the right to counsel, that took his case to the United States Supreme Court. Simply studying dramatic cases, however, limits the student's exposure to many important topics.

The heart of American law lies in the cases of appellate courts. Textbooks about legal subjects present the subject matter either in a casebook format or in a textbook format. Each has its advantages. Criminal Procedure: Constitution and Society is an effort to present the best of both methods, with additional features that are uniquely tailored to social science students in criminal justice, criminology, sociology, and political science. The unique features of this text will make the study of criminal procedure a comprehensive educational experience.

This text is designed to do three things: (1) provide essential information about the law of constitutional criminal procedure for students of criminal justice; (2) present Supreme Court cases in a format that is sufficiently substantial so as to provide the benefits of the case-method, while adding study aids that make the cases more comprehensible to undergraduate students; and (3) provide materials that help the student to appreciate criminal procedure in its social, political, and historical contexts.

The basic text. The longest portion of this book presents and explains the core knowledge of constitutional criminal procedure. The topics covered are those of greatest interest to criminal justice students. Four chapters are devoted to the Fourth Amendment: the exclusionary rule (Chapter 2), the search warrant and essential Fourth Amendment doctrines such as plain view (Chapter 3), arrest and Terry-stops (Chapter 4), and warrantless searches (Chapter 5). The text is up to date, including discussions of cases decided in early 2004. The chapters are divided into coherent subtopics, giving instructors the flexibility to cover a general area but omit specific topics within it as they see fit.

Throughout the text I attempt to show that in most areas of criminal procedure there is an ongoing dialogue between justices adhering to the Due Process Model and those whose decisions better reflect the Crime Control Model. The late Professor Herbert Packer's great organizing paradigm provides a convenient way for students to grasp the overall subject matter and each case. Thus, both the text and the "Case & Comments" explicate these conflicting approaches.

The purpose of education, of course, is not the rote memorization of rules but understanding. To this end the text includes not just statements of rules, but describes the facts out of which the rules emerge and the often conflicting views of the justices. The relevant historic, social, and political factors that have influenced the decision are frequently provided. On occasion, where a subject is overly complex (e.g., the incorporation doctrine in Chapter 1 or-the automobile search doctrine in Chapter 5), I help students thread their way through the maze by providing an overview of the subject in the form of a list. I have not, however, avoided presenting students with challenging theoretical materials in this text. For example, Chapter 2 includes materials on theories of the exclusionary rule that present students with recent philosophical discussions about the justification for the rule. Instructors who desire to challenge students are invited to cover this section, but it can be omitted without undermining a student's basic understanding of the topic.

The introductory chapter gives the student a broad picture of the context of constitutional criminal procedure. It presents basic information about law and courts that students may have studied in other courses. Chapter 1 helps a student to see that criminal procedure is not a narrow or technical subject, but a part of a liberal arts education. Criminal procedure can be a gateway to the study of history, politics, political theory, judicial biography, human rights, and important societal currents, for all of these influence criminal procedure.

An appendix to Chapter 1, on reading and briefing cases, is designed to sharpen the student's skills component of the course. Most students find that their reading comprehension and writing skills are improved with the study of law, better preparing them for professional careers in criminal justice.

The Challenge of 9/11/01. America was transformed in many ways on the morning of September 11, 2001. The terror attack on American soil and the two wars that followed in quick succession have had great repercussions for law enforcement and law. In this edition of Criminal Procedure, Constitution and Society, I have written entirely new sections for nine of the chapters exploring order and liberty in a time of terror. These materials can be helpful in generating class discussions and to sharpen the essential tension between order and liberty. By the time this book is used in classrooms, the legal aspects of the "war on terror" will be in sharper focus, for at the time this preface is written the United States Supreme Court has agreed to decide cases concerning the detention and the processing of American citizens taken into custody for their alleged roles in the terror campaign. The Court's decisions will be historic milestones in the story of liberty. This is a subject that simply has to be confronted by today's criminal justice students.

Case and Comments. A major feature of this book is the "Case & Comments." Reading Supreme Court cases is difficult for first-year law students, let alone undergraduates. The cases selected for the Case & Comments sections are the most important ones that criminal procedure instructors emphasize. They have been carefully edited to provide not just brief snippets of the cases, but a fair amount of the actual reasoning of the justices in their own words. To ensure complete understanding, in most of these cases relevant portions of the dissenting opinions have been added. This helps students to understand the law as a dialectical process.

To help students read and understand the cases, I have added comments identified by bracketed letters keyed to running comments. These critical tools help a student to read the case on his or her own. These comments achieve several goals. They: (1) point out the meaning or importance of technical legal words, (2) highlight disagreements between opposing justices, (3) point out the logical weaknesses or clever arguments, (4) ask pointed questions of the students, (5) highlight underlying value judgments in an opinion, and (6) indicate how the case advances or violates the doctrine of stare decisis.

Law in Society Sections. These sections at the end of each chapter show the "law in action." Statements of legal rights often convey the idea that they are fully effective. Unfortunately, there is a gap between the ideals of law and the reality of its application. Some sections, such as the accounts of police perjury, racial profiling, and prosecutorial misconduct, show criminal justice personnel at their worst. The unmet promise of equal justice (Chapter 6) shows that our society is not willing to pay for justice for indigents. Of course, most police don't commit perjury, most lawyers and prosecutors competently do their jobs, most judges do not buckle under political pressure, and most persons found guilty of crimes are guilty. But this is not always the case. It is important for students to ponder the gap between constitutional ideals and the reality in the courthouse. Several Law in Society sections rely on social science research to indicate the complexity of the criminal process, and that simple statements or beliefs do not capture the full reality of the exclusionary rule, the use of mandatory arrest for domestic violence, or the belief that eyewitnesses who are positive are therefore accurate. In these sections we get to see that innocent people confess to crimes they did not commit despite having been read their Miranda warnings, and see the dark side of undercover policing. Information from news sources and from social science research expands our knowledge of the social reality of law and criminal justice.

Law in the States. This text stresses the provisions of the United States Constitution as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court. This is important because the Court took the lead in increasing the importance of criminal procedure via the incorporation of the Bill of Rights in the 1960s. Nevertheless, state courts have also shaped criminal procedure, most notably where they have departed from interpretations of the Supreme Court by granting state citizens greater individual protections. In this text I alerted students to these cross-currents with "Law in the States" boxes that indicate areas of significant divergence between state and federal law.

Supreme Court Justice Biographies. Beginning students often fail to appreciate the extent to which constitutional law is the product of the particular men and women who sit on the nation's highest court. Knowing the predilections of the justices helps students better understand the cases. The brief biographical sketches following each chapter highlight the contribution of the justices to criminal procedure and describes their general approach to the law. One reference is given for each justice so that an interested student can follow ...