Criminal Law and Procedure: A Courtroom Approach
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 2 familiarizes students with the criminal justice process from arrest to trial through the “Boston Marathon bomber” trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The chapter explains the constitutional constraints on the adversary process such as the pretrial identification process (pp. 39–42), prosecutorial discretion in a death penalty case (pp. 42–43), discovery obligations (pp. 43–44), the charging process and pretrial matters (pp. 44–48), an excerpt of a motion to suppress evidence from Tsarnaev’s trial (pp. 48–50) with an explanation and illustration of how a motion travels through the court system (pp. 51–52), the plea bargain process with an emphasis on how the government uses plea bargains to possibly generate testimony at trial (pp. 52–55), the burden of proof and presentation of evidence at trial (pp. 55–56), jury selection and challenges to the venire (pp. 56–57), types of evidence and the standards for expert testimony admissibility (pp. 58–61), closing argument and the process of achieving a verdict, and the basics of how a case gets to the U.S. Supreme Court (pp. 61–63).