This issue of the Stetson Law Review is co-sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Advocacy at Stetson University College of Law.’ Stetson takes great pride in training students not only to think like lawyers, but also to advocate like lawyers. Additionally, Stetson takes seriously its responsibility to help promote the high standards of the legal profession through continuing legal education. With this symposium issue, Stetson continues its commitment to train and assist students and lawyers to professionally and effectively litigate for their clients.
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When John Spinkelink was executed on May 25, 1979, death-penalty advocates were satisfied that Florida’s statutory death-penalty scheme was constitutionally bulletproof. After all, the proponents of the new scheme had read the tea leaves provided in the Furman v. Georgia decision, and the protections against arbitrary application of the death penalty contained in the scheme addressed all of the conflicting concerns that the majority Justices expressed in their individual opinions. The new scheme was lauded by the Florida Legislature and the bench. With obvious self-satisfaction, the Florida Supreme Court approved the scheme and stated, “Thus the inflamed emotions of jurors can no longer sentence a man to die; the sentence is viewed in the light of judicial experience.”
We live in an amazing time. Advances in medicine and technology have given doctors the power to save lives that would almost certainly have been lost in the past. But such advances in life-saving techniques have their downsides as well. As numerous courts have recognized, doctors now have the power to preserve life—or at least the physiological attributes of life—past the point at which many of us would care to live. As medical professionals’ ability to preserve life increases, so do conflicts concerning whether such treatment should be rendered. The litigants in such contests include family members, medical institutions, the person whose possible death is at issue, the state, and occasionally, even total strangers. The task of making decisions in these contests often falls to judges. These contests at the twilight of life and death, and the roles that various actors in the legal system take in resolving them, are the subject of this Article.
Over the course of nearly three decades, the Florida Evidence Code has stood as a success story in the sometimes uneasy relationship
between the courts and the legislature. The Florida Legislature enacted the code in 1976, and since then has passed changes that, until recently, were adopted by the Florida Supreme Court without controversy as rules of procedure. Thus, there was never any need for a court to consider the question of whether a given change was substantive or procedural: so long as the Florida Supreme Court adopted the change, it simply did not matter.
I’m sorry I’m not going to talk exactly on the topic. It’s not litigation ethics that I want to address tonight, but it is ethics, and it is ethics that applies to litigators. It’s also ethics that applies to all lawyers, and I submit it applies to all clients. So, if there are any nonlawyers in this room, I hope you’ll pay attention because there’s a lot more at stake for you in what I’m about to discuss than there is even for the lawyers.
DNA evidence has exonerated over 140 wrongly convicted capital defendants in the United States. Just as DNA is often effective in providing a remedy to the wrongly accused, it is also an extremely powerful resource for law enforcement. At first blush, this may appear to be a “win-win” scenario for all concerned (except, of course, for defendants who are actually guilty), but the expanding use of DNA evidence, particularly in cases involving DNA databanking, has met substantial resistance on the civil-liberties front. When examining the privacy implications involved with DNA sampling, it is enlightening to compare constitutional analyses of two DNA databanks—one from convicted criminals and a similar sampling required of members of the United States Armed Forces.
J.D.S. is a twenty-three-year-old woman with the mental capacity of a young child, living in Orlando, Florida. She suffers from “severe mental retardation, cerebral palsy, autism, and [a] seizure disorder.” She cannot communicate and requires complete assistance in all her daily activities. When J.D.S. was a child, her family abandoned her, and she has lived most of her life since that time in a state-licensed group home in southwest Orlando.
On the occasion of its Golden Anniversary, Brown v. Board of Education has been described by lawyers, historians, educators, and journalists as perhaps the most important civil-rights decision of the twentieth century. Without dispute, the decision holds a prominent place in American education law. The open question, however, is whether American education and American courts will ever fully embrace the vision of those, like Thurgood Marshall, who saw Brown‘s true promise.
One of the most intriguing questions in the study of American law during the period of Jim Crow is how American society could see itself as the city on a hill for constitutional equality while also creating and enforcing a formidable structure of legally mandated white supremacy. The peculiarly American contradiction between long-professed and deeply held equality and liberty principles and a devastating history of racism has often been noted, and as one scholar has observed, the maintenance of both aspects in law required significant cultural and legal self-deception. This Article argues that the answer can be found, in part, by studying how the law operates to manage societal cognitive dissonance. It is not enough simply to identify the contradiction; we also should look at the mechanisms by which law manages the contradiction to see how equal citizenship principles were so grossly violated, yet so willingly accepted, by the white legal elite. This analysis may also help us see how the doctrines and rhetoric of equal citizenship can both facilitate and hinder real progress.
When Irene Morgan boarded a Greyhound bus in Hayes Store, Virginia, on July 16, 1944, she had no inkling of what was about to happen—no idea that her trip to Baltimore would alter the course of American history. The twenty-seven-year-old defense worker and mother of two had more mundane things on her mind. It was a sweltering morning in the Virginia Tidewater, and she was anxious to get home to her husband, a stevedore who worked on the docks of Baltimore’s bustling inner harbor. Earlier in the summer, after suffering a miscarriage, she had taken her two young children for an extended visit to her mother’s house in the remote countryside near Hayes Store, a crossroads hamlet in the Tidewater lowlands of Gloucester County. Now she was going back to Baltimore for a doctor’s appointment and perhaps a clean bill of health that would allow her to resume work at the Martin bomber plant where she helped build B-26 Marauders. The restful stay in Gloucester—where her mother’s family had lived and worked since the early nineteenth century, and where she had visited many times since childhood—had restored some of her physical strength and renewed a cherished family bond. But it had also confirmed the stark realities of a rural folk culture shouldering the burdens of three centuries of plantation life. Despite Gloucester’s proximity to Hampton Roads and Norfolk, the war had brought surprisingly few changes to the area, most of which remained mired in suffocating poverty and a rigid caste system.