In “Fighting an Oncoming Train,” in the September 29th issue of “Slate,” Susannah Sheffer, a clinical mental health counselor and researcher, reveals what she learned after interviewing 20 death penalty attorneys who had each lost at least one client, about the emotional toll the work exacts on them. “The task is at once urgent and protracted—months or even years of low-grade anxiety punctuated by sudden crises and intense deadlines—so that death penalty lawyers are like some kind of a cross between emergency responders and end-stage oncologists,” Sheffer writes.
In her article, “What Netflix’s ‘The Confession Tapes’ Teach Us about the Psychology of Interrogations” in the September 8 issue of “Scientific American,” Julia Shaw writes about false confessions, how they’re obtained, and why innocent people so often confess to crimes they didn’t commit. “Researchers have repeatedly shown that innocence can put innocents at risk,” Shaw writes.
Myeonki Kim also examines police interrogations in an article, “When and Why Suspects Fail to Recognize the Adversary Role of an Interrogator in America: The Problem and Solution” in the September 9 issue of the Gonzaga Law Review. “American police interrogators are clearly adversarial and should be prohibited from confusing or concealing their adversarial role during interrogation,” Kim writes, and suggests that the “Rule 4.3 in Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which regulates the lawyer’s contact with an unrepresented person, will serve as a good example.”
In “Forensic Science: Daubert’s Failure” in the September 2 Case Western Reserve Law Review, Paul C. Giannelli asks why Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993, “didn’t prevent or restrict the admissibility of testimony based on flawed forensic techniques.” Giannelli examines the status of six forensic techniques, including bite mark analysis, microscopic hair comparisons, and arson investigations, and how the justice system has failed “to demand and properly evaluate foundational research.”
