Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations and Acronyms Used
- 1 Thinking about Error in the Law
- PART I THE DISTRIBUTION OF ERROR
- PART II FLAWED RULES OF EVIDENCE AND PROCEDURE
- 5 Evaluating Evidence and Procedures
- 6 Silent Defendants, Silent Witnesses, and Lobotomized Jurors
- 7 Confessions, Poison Fruit, and Other Exclusions
- 8 Double Jeopardy and False Acquittals: Letting Felons and Judges off the Hook?
- 9 Dubious Motives for Flawed Rules: The Clash between Values
- Index
8 - Double Jeopardy and False Acquittals: Letting Felons and Judges off the Hook?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations and Acronyms Used
- 1 Thinking about Error in the Law
- PART I THE DISTRIBUTION OF ERROR
- PART II FLAWED RULES OF EVIDENCE AND PROCEDURE
- 5 Evaluating Evidence and Procedures
- 6 Silent Defendants, Silent Witnesses, and Lobotomized Jurors
- 7 Confessions, Poison Fruit, and Other Exclusions
- 8 Double Jeopardy and False Acquittals: Letting Felons and Judges off the Hook?
- 9 Dubious Motives for Flawed Rules: The Clash between Values
- Index
Summary
Whenever, and by whatever means, there is an acquittal in a criminal prosecution, the scene is closed and the curtain drops.
– U.K. Solicitor GeneralInsulation [from appealing an acquittal] is an arbitrary windfall to the guilty, not a carefully structured scheme to protect the innocent…. A defendant has no vested right to a legal error in his favor.
– Akhil AmarThe community incurs an incalculable expense when the vast machinery constructed to bring criminals to justice can be felled by the simple error of a single unreviewable judge.
– Scott ShapiroThe Core Problem
The preceding four chapters have examined some rules of evidence that are epistemically counterfeit. We turn now to look at some procedural rules that pose similar kinds of problems. I will focus on what is probably the single largest source of avoidable error in the judicial system: the asymmetry of the appellate process.
As we turn from evidence to procedures, our philosophical criteria of evaluation must likewise shift. Relevance is no longer the guiding metaprinciple since procedural rules do not concern themselves with the admission of evidence perse. As I indicated in Chapter 5, when it comes to the evaluation of procedures, the appropriate meta-rules stress the importance of both maximizing the likelihood that a jury will reach a valid verdict and ensuring that the system is capable of catching and correcting (some of) the mistakes that it does make.
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- Information
- Truth, Error, and Criminal LawAn Essay in Legal Epistemology, pp. 194 - 212Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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