Recent Developments Criminal Law: Second Circuit Holds Cautionary Instructions Insufficient to Cure Potential Prejudice Resulting from Admission of Co-conspirator's Confession
نویسنده
چکیده
United States v. Bozza' has seemingly departed from the heretofore existing rule that a proper cautionary instruction in a multi-defendant trial can cure the prejudicial effect of one defendant's out-ofcourt confession on co-defendants. The appellants were convicted of various crimes related to the burglary of several post offices and the subsequent receipt and transportation of stolen stamps. The prosecution's case was presented principally by an accomplice, A, who was a major participant in each burglary. He testified that the crimes were committed by various combinations of twelve persons, six of whom were defendants in the instant case. To substantiate A's testimony regarding the participation of one defendant, J, the Government introduced into evidence J's post-arraignment confession, which was read to the jury with the word "blank" replacing the name of each defendant except that of A and the declarant. The jury was carefully instructed to assess the statement only against the declarant and not to speculate how the confession might otherwise be read to implicate any of the other co-defendants. Notwithstanding these "sufficiently clear" instructions,2 the Second Circuit, with .one judge dissenting, reversed the convictions because it found that the co-defendants were prejudicially affected by the admission of the confession. General rules of evidence, applied in both state and federal courts, have been firmly settled regarding the admissibility of outof-court statements rendered by co-conspirators. Thus, assertions made prior to the termination of the conspiracy may be used against all the conspirators because the declarations are deemed part of the common purpose for which they all share a collective responsibility.3
منابع مشابه
Recent developments in configuration design and optimization of mineral separation circuits; A Review
The present research reviews two basic approaches for the separation circuit configuration analysis. The first approach is to optimize the circuit configuration. In this method, after a circuit modeling, a variety of search algorithms and mathematical optimization methods are used. Previous works show that this approach has more application in the flotation process. The second approach called t...
متن کاملTemporal discounting: the differential effect of proximal and distal consequences on confession decisions.
Drawing on the psychological principle that proximal consequences influence behavior more strongly than distal consequences, the authors tested the hypothesis that criminal suspects exhibit a short-sightedness during police interrogation that increases their risk for confession. Consistent with this hypothesis, Experiment 1 showed that participants (N = 81) altered how frequently they admitted ...
متن کاملCriminal Abolition and its Impact on Justice as an Ethical Component
Background: Abolitionism has been one of the most influential ideas in criminal law in recent decades. Abolitionism is based on the belief in a moral conviction that life in the community cannot, in fact, be effectively regulated by criminal law, and that the role of the criminal justice system must be significantly reduced, while others have a chance to deal with problem situations, unfinished...
متن کاملChild sexual abuse: a case study in community collaboration.
OBJECTIVE This is an exploratory study that describes the process and outcomes of a Midwestern US community's approach to case management of child sexual abuse. METHOD Data were abstracted from 323 criminal court files. Specific information gathered included child and suspect demographic data, law enforcement and CPS involvement, child disclosure patterns and caretaker responses, offender con...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2015