Today in Supreme Court History: October 5, 1953

10/5/1953: Chief Justice Earl Warren takes the oath.

Chief Justice Earl Warren

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

Maryland v. Kulbicki,136 S.Ct. 2 (decided October 5, 2015): Court grants cert, and reverses, Maryland high court, and dismisses ineffective assistance of counsel claim; method of comparing lead in bullets in defendant's truck vs. in victim's brain relied on by prosecution was later discredited but was still state of the art at time of conviction

[John F. Carr]

How many similar cases were there after Daubert changed the rules?

There was a move to have fingerprint evidence considered unreliable. The legal system concluded anything so widely used had to work. Wouldn't want to undermine confidence in the system or clog up the works.

[LawTalkingGuy]

An innocence project lawyer, Chris Fabricant, wrote a book called Junk Science, although it is more anecdotal than data heavy. Most of it focuses on the "Bite Mark Wars" and the efforts to discredit it as a "science" despite widespread acceptance.

[defaultdotxbe]

Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System is the title.

There is another book simply called Junk Science but Dan Agin, but it has nothing to do with courts or bite marks lol.

[Krayt]

So what is the larger context of this? He needed the ineffective council to get a new trial? But if the bullet analysis was a chimera, why wasn't that enough?

[Dan Schiavetta]

The claim was that his attorney should have attacked the bullet analysis. But the Court held that this was just hindsight. Defendant had other arguments going and waited 11 years to bring this argument up, during which time the method had been increasingly called into question.

[Syd Henderson]

I can understand the method, which is similar to analyzing ancient jewels to figure out where they came from. Not something you’d want to convict someone on since there must have been many bullets using the same batch of lead. It's also a pretty blunt instrument, not a lead pipe cinch.

[Dan Schiavetta]

I'm sure some prosecutor somewhere, using that method (called Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis, CBLA), made that joke. Hopefully not in front of the jury.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

The Haymarket Massacre trial used some of the first chemical analysis for forensic testing to match bomb fragments with incomplete bombs found a defendant's house or workship. Couldn't tell from the book how reliable that evidence was. But the book convinced me the trial was fairer and better run than I had thought, and there was other evidence.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Warren used his intuition to get to results he considered fair - I actually think he got some things right and some things wrong.

Oops, I forgot where I was posting - I meant to say that he was either all good or all bad, and that anyone who disagrees is a bad person.

There, that's better.

[Sarcastr0]

If Warren and his Court were as you say, they wouldn't have bothered with all those legal doctrines citing the Constitution we still use today.

Of course the Warren Court didn't have a 100% perfect jurisprudence. But that doesn't mean he was some Constitution-discarding legal realist. And it certainly doesn't justify the campaign on the right to dismantle every Warren Court decision regardless of what they say.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

There’s the kind of nuanced discussion I was expecting!

Other Warren Court justices, and their clerks, formulated the details of legal doctrine.

I don’t think the righties have consistently tried to overrule everything. Rehnquist upheld Miranda. The court not only stayed with Warren’s incorporation precedents but added new ones (excessive fines, 2nd Amendment).

[Ridgeway]

Personally, I have always been impressed that a man that worked as a male stripper during law school could rise to become Chief Justice of the USA.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I see you watched The Simpsons when it was still good. This is one of the clinical signs of aging.

[Ridgeway]

I was waiting for one of the more naive and humorless commentors here to claim that the late Earl Warren was never a male stripper.