Um, I already know how a bill becomes a law. Why am I taking this exam again?
Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments: Rights of the Accused
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- Rights of the Accused
- Study Break
- Equal Protection
- Tiers of Equal Protection
- Equal Protection: Race and Education
- Equal Protection: Gender
- Equal Protection: Sexual Orientation
Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments: Rights of the AccusedHave You Read This?If yes, click here. Let's say that the policy legally searched your home and did in fact find an enormous pile of dead bodies, illegal narcotics, counterfeit money, and endangered species. Sorry, bud, you're probably going to jail. But hey—at least you're innocent until proven guilty! You're heard the phrase—but have you ever considered all that it means? It means, most basically, that until a court determines otherwise, you are innocent (even though there were, like, a dozen dead bodies in your house). You may have been arrested and indicted by a grand jury, but you are still presumed innocent (even though you were clearly sitting on an enormous stash of counterfeit Benjamins). You may have been denied bail because of the nature of your alleged crimes, but you are still presumed innocent (even though those snow leopard pelts are going to be really hard to explain in court). And because you have not yet been proven guilty, you are entitled to the full protections of the Constitution. The framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights developed their views on government as members of a revolutionary movement. They were suspicious of power and anxious to protect individual liberties against overreaching political authorities. Therefore, they drew up a fairly extensive list of protections. Today, most Americans are less nervous about governmental power, but even so, the courts have extended even greater protection to those accused of a crime. Rights of the AccusedSo now that you've been accused of serial killing/drug dealing/counterfeiting/poaching, what exactly are the rights you still have? In fact, you still have quite a few, explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution: Writs of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus means a court order requiring that the government provide good reasons for the detention of a person (usually better reasons than, "c'mon, he just looks like a criminal, amirite?"). President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus as a war measure during the Civil War. The Supreme Court has upheld the president's limited right to suspend habeas during wartime, but only in areas where there is actual fighting. No double jeopardy. A person may not be tried for the same crime twice. But a crime may be broken into several different violations of law, each warranting a separate trial. And a person may be tried in both federal and state courts if both federal and state laws apply to the crime. This right has been incorporated. A speedy and public trial. The Speedy Trial Act of 1974 defined speedy as within 100 days for a criminal trial. Okay, we guess it's speedy by government standards. Yet quite often, the attorneys agree to extensions beyond this deadline. The original concern was that trials would not be public enough; now the more common concern is that a trial is too public—compromised by excessive press coverage. Federal trials may not be televised, but the Court has ruled that state courts may televise trials if they wish. Trial by jury. Persons charged with a federal crime are entitled to a jury trial in the area in which the crime was committed (sparing us, for now, from the dystopian world of Judge Dredd). Jurors must be drawn from a pool representing a "cross section" of the community (Strauder v. West Virginia). This right was incorporated but only for "serious offenses." Adequate defense. A person accused of a federal crime is entitled to a lawyer and if unable to afford one, the government must provide one (but since you get what you pay for, you shouldn't exactly expect the top of the Harvard Law class). This right was initially incorporated only for capital crimes, but in Gideon v. Wainwright the guarantee was extended to all crimes. No self-incrimination. An individual cannot be compelled to testify against himself in any government hearing—i.e., a criminal trial or legislative hearing. (Which rules out the previously effective tactic of "Guiltymansayswhat? Gotcha!") A coerced confession, or a confession secured by interrogation, after a suspect requests a lawyer, is inadmissible in court (Escobedo v. Illinois.) If the police fail to inform an arrested person that he has the right to remain silent, any statements made are inadmissible in court (Miranda v. Arizona). This right has been incorporated. No bills of attainder or ex post facto laws. A bill of attainder is a law that imposes a penalty on "named individuals" or "easily ascertainable members of a group" without a trial. An ex post facto law is a law criminalizing an act that has already occurred. Reasonable bail. Based on the premise that a person can better prepare his defense when not incarcerated, bail must be in proportion to the crime alleged and the accused's ability to pay. The favorite right of skeezy bail-bondsmen everywhere. No cruel or unusual punishment. This guarantee is most commonly applied to questions surrounding the death penalty. The Court has ruled that the death penalty is not inherently cruel or unusual. In Louisiana v. Resweber, the Court went so far as to hold that a person could be subjected to electrocution a second time when the electric chair malfunctioned during the first electrocution. But the Court has also held that there are inequities in the awarding of the death penalty. In Furman v. Georgia, the Court found that African-Americans and the poor were more likely to receive the death penalty than white, wealthier persons convicted of murder. Consequently, the Court suspended all existing state death penalties until fairer sentencing methods could be developed. The Court rejected mandatory death sentences attached to certain crimes in Woodson v. North Carolina. But in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court upheld the two-stage process established by several states in which one trial establishes guilt and a second jury trial determines if the particulars of the crime warrant the death penalty. All in all, pretty, generous, huh? (Especially since you were caught with all those giraffe carcasses.) But wait, there's more! In addition to the specific guarantees provided in the Bill of Rights, the Fifth Amendment offers a more sweeping guarantee of fairness. The well-known mandate that the government may not deprive you of "life, liberty or property without due process of law," is at bottom a promise that the government will treat you fairly. The courts have broken this requirement into two categories.
A few months ago, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain had this to say about the Constitution: "We don't need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America, we need to reread the Constitution and enforce the Constitution…And I know that there are some people that are not going to do that, so for the benefit of those who are not going to read it because they don't want us to go by the Constitution, there's a little section in there that talks about 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'" Um, we hate to break it to you, Herman—but that's actually not in the Constitution. It's in the Declaration of Independence. You probably should have checked with Shmoop first. Another big buzzword missing from the Constitution—at least for its first century or so—was "equality." We all know that the Declaration insists that "all men are created equal"—but not until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, did the Constitution give that pledge equal force. In fact the 14th Amendment was aimed primarily at guaranteeing the recently freed slaves the "equal protection of the laws." In addition, the amendment only authorized the federal government to make sure thatstate governments treated these freedmen equally. How this fairly narrow requirement that the states provide the freedmen with equal treatment under law grew into a more ambitious attempt to ensure educational, occupational, and even marital equality for African Americans, women, and homosexuals is bit of a complicated story—but it's a story worth knowing. Tiers of Equal ProtectionWe're betting you often roll your eyes when someone tells you to proofread your work before turning it in. So what if your paper had a few "hte"'s and they're/their mistakes and left an R or two out of "Huckleberry Finn"? You got your point across, right? Actually, the Fourteenth Amendment is an excellent example of why every word matters. It doesn't say a thing about preventing discrimination based on gender, age, sexual orientation, or disability—it was only written to protect the recently freed slaves. But the amendment doesn't say that it protects "freedmen"—it says that it protects "any person." Boom! That key term was enough to open the amendment to the interpretation that it protected all Americans, not only some. But at the same time, the Supreme Court has argued that it may employ a "tiered" approach to its application. To respect the amendment's historical intention, racial discrimination receives the highest level of scrutiny. But to honor the broader spirit of the amendment, other forms of discrimination also receive scrutiny, albeit to a lesser degree. A bit ironically, though, the Court bases its understanding of equal protection on dividing us into different categories. After all, if everyone had to be treated exactly the same, a three-year-old could walk into a bar and buy a drink, middle-schoolers could carry firearms, and creepy 40-year-olds across America could sign up to retake 9th grade. Age is simply one example of a case where the law is allowed to treat us differently. The basic question the courts ask is this: is the different treatment reasonable? (Remember the hypothetical Redhead Internment Act from Unit 2? Probably wouldn't fly.) To figure out whether different treatment actually is reasonable, courts look at the sort of classification the law in question uses—race, gender, age, etc.? Racial classifications receive the highest level of scrutiny. Race is considered a "suspect class" and any law using racial classifications is subject to "strict scrutiny" by the courts (in other words, the law better have a darn good reason). Other sorts of classifications receive somewhat less scrutiny. State laws that employ gender classifications now receive an intermediate standard of review. This intermediate standard asks not only if a law treating people differently is reasonable, it asks whether the classification employed serves "important governmental objectives" and whether the classifications are "substantially related to achievement of those objectives."
You do know that one, right? Please? Bueller?
Just in case you missed that one, Brown v. Board, in 1954, struck down racial segregation and the "separate but equal" doctrine in schools, and ordered America's schools to be desegregated "with all deliberate speed." But the battle to enforce this decision would drag on for more than a decade, until roughly 1970, when the Court held that school officials had an "affirmative obligation" to integrate and that "all deliberate speed" meant now (a decision known as Swift Kick in the Pants v. Racists). As part of the desegregation effort, some colleges developed affirmative action programs (after an approach introduced by Richard Nixon for promoting minority hiring by federal contractors). As African-American enrollment in colleges had changed little between 1955 and 1965 (roughly 5% of all students), these colleges argued that more "affirmative" steps should be taken to increase black enrollment, including the use of enrollment targets and annual admissions quotas. These affirmative action programs were challenged inRegents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). The Court held that while admissions quotas could notbe used by colleges to increase minority enrollment, race could be used as one factor among many in evaluating student applications. In 2003, the Court returned to the issue of affirmative action programs in higher education in two cases involving the University of Michigan (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger). The result was another split decision. Programs employing racial classifications were still acceptable, but would be subject to very close scrutiny by the Court. If racial classifications were applied too heavily, they would be struck down. If race were used more carefully along with many other factors in order to achieve diversity, the Court would accept it. But, warned Justice Sandra O'Connor, within a generation, the use of these sorts of racial classifications would not be acceptable to the Court.
(If you asked, "What kind of cookies?" you're a terrible person.) We're not quite making up that law. As late as 1961, a state could let women opt out of serving on a jury because women were "the center of home and family life." But in 1972, the Court started holding sex discrimination to a higher standard ("those better be really, really good cookies—like with chocolate chunks and macadamia nuts and everything"). To change our food metaphor a bit, the Court actually changed its gender discrimination standards because of beer. In 1972, Oklahoma actually had two drinking ages for beer—men could drink at 21, but women only had to wait until they were 18. Feminists across America were outraged at the implication that they just weren't as irresponsible as men when it came to alcohol—and in Craig v. Boren, the Court agreed and struck down the law. The real importance of the case wasn't about the drinking age—it was about the Court's decision that gender classifications were entitled to an intermediate standard of review. They would not be scrutinized as closely as racial classifications, but the state must prove that they served "important governmental objectives" and must be substantially related to achievement of those objectives. Applying this new intermediate standard, the Court held in 1981 that federal laws excluding women from the military draft were not unconstitutional since the use of a gender classification was "substantially related" to the achievement of an "important governmental objective." But in United States v. Virginia (1996) the Court ruled that the Virginia Military Institute's exclusion of women was unconstitutional, because it served no important governmental objective and "generalizations about 'the way women are'" could not be allowed to restrict opportunities for women "whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description" (a principle known as the G.I. Jane rule). Equal Protection: Sexual OrientationHey, we're making progress! African-Americans, women…who's next? Gay people? Actually, the Court hasn't quite gotten there yet. The Supreme Court does not consider gays and lesbians a suspect class (and remember, that's a good thing to be when it comes to equal protection law). As a result, laws that draw distinctions on the basis of sexual orientation don't receive the strict scrutiny applied to racial distinctions nor the intermediate scrutiny applied to gender distinctions. That's one reason why the Supreme Court has not ruled that gay people share with straight people an equal right to marry. Still, the Court has staked out a more tolerant position in the last fifteen years (a sure sign that it's gotten a sassy gay friend, à la Will and Grace). In 1996, the Court struck down a Colorado anti-gay ordinance because it had no rational basis (Romer v. Evans). And in 2003, the Court overturned Texas's anti-sodomy law because it could find no rational state interest in singling out a group of people for criminal punishment over their private sexual activities (Lawrence v. Texas). Study BreakArea Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution to Be. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 0.75 Mb. Share with your friends:
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