Criminal Procedure: The Adjudication Process

This book is what you might think of as a Marie Kondo version of criminal procedure: happiness by decluttering. Many of the leading criminal procedure textbooks are crowded with pages upon pages of notes and unanswered (and sometimes unanswerable) hypotheticals. We understand this impulse. The field of criminal procedure raises countless interesting questions that scholars would love to explore in great depth. However, we do not believe that law school casebooks should be designed for scholars. Rather, law school casebooks are for students who do not yet have an elementary understanding of the subject. After all, that is why they are in the class! To use another metaphor, we intend this book to be about the forest, not the trees, so that students can see the big picture more clearly.This criminal procedure textbook is first and foremost designed to be accessible to students. How did we do that? First, we have largely eliminated notes and questions except where they directly reinforce the doctrine or where they eliminate the need to include a lengthy excerpt. For instance, the double jeopardy chapter does not have notes about fascinating (but esoteric) mistrial issues. Rather, we include only a few problems that help students to practice and better understand the complicated Blockburger same offense test.Second, we have tried to make cases readable. The Supreme Court – especially the modern Court – is often verbose. When possible, we have cut unnecessary verbiage and eliminated concurrences and dissents that do not add essential context. To be sure, we have included some historic and important dissents. For instance, no discussion of the Batson test for peremptory challenges would be complete without Justice Marshall’s powerful dissenting opinion objecting to the prejudice prong. We think Justice Marshall’s dissent is the exception not the rule. Whenever possible, we have erred on the side of teaching law more succinctly.Third, we have not relied exclusively on Supreme Court decisions to teach the law. Where possible, we have opted for lower-court cases – both federal and state -- that clearly set out the law. Just as importantly, we have excerpted many federal and state statutes, as well as the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, because students can learn much simply by reading the statutes. In addition to a broader set of cases and statutes, we have also excerpted guidance documents that lawyers turn to every day. These documents -- for instance, the U.S. Attorney’s Manual or state bail schedules -- do not have the force of law but criminal lawyers rely on them on a daily basis. Guidance documents can sometimes teach us as much about how criminal law works as statutes and court decisions. Finally, we have sought to include important parts of the criminal justice process that other textbooks often pass over. For instance, there are more than 4.7 million people in the United States on probation and parole. And in any given year courts revoke the probation or parole of hundreds of thousands of those individuals. See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Probation and Parole in the United States (2015). Because community supervision is an enormous part of the criminal justice system, we have devoted a chapter to “Leaving and Returning to Custody” that analyzes the process of both granting and revoking parole and probation.