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Law in Contemporary Society
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The Quarles Public Safety Exception, its Impact, and-- By AlexHeycke - 23 Apr 2024New York v. Quarles and the Public Safety ExceptionIn New York v. Quarles, the Supreme Court held that our 5th Amendment Miranda right is subject to a public safety exception: when there is a need to protect the public or police from any immediate danger, pre-_Miranda_ statements–and evidence gathered on their basis–are admissible evidence against the accused. In my first draft, I argued that Quarles reflects an extremely worrisome trend of excessive deference to police discretion in our constitutional law; and that one major cause of such a trend is the overrepresentation of prosecutors relative to public defenders in the federal judiciary. I heavily walk back both of these assertions in this second draft.Troubling Implications of Quarles[ADD SECTION FROM DOC HERE] My second point of critique was that the decision serves an expressive function, legitimizing the use of police discretion in the eyes of the public: by placing faith in the police’s (questionable) ability to correctly identify threatening scenarios, the court effectively downplays the deep issues with policing in America, causing the public to be less likely to recognize such issues. This is because people outsource their judgments to some extent: if a credible appearing actor makes a certain assessment, we may accept the truth of this assessment. While clear evidence to the contrary might prevent us from following its lead, many people are not presented with such clear evidence of the fact that excessive police discretion is an issue. The decision of an institution that they believe to be a bastion of detached, objective decisionmaking could therefore be enough to sway the opinions of the ambivalent. It is unlikely, however, that the Quarles decision would have such an impact. First, it is limited to the context of police discretion in terms of whether there is a threat once the suspect has been apprehended; this is different from endorsing police’s ability to perceive whether a suspect is threatening before an arrest has even taken place. Second, it is unlikely that dictum, buried in page 11 of a 42 page opinion, would make a significant impact on the general public’s perception of policing.Will A More Balanced Judiciary Undermine Quarles?One often advanced remedy to this perceived overly pro-police case law is the massive imbalance in the federal judiciary between former prosecutors and public defenders. Until Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the Supreme Court, there had not been a justice with experience as a public defender on the Court since Thurgood Marshall. By comparison, four justices currently on the Supreme court have served as prosecutors at some point in their career. The imbalance is equally egregious in lower federal courts, where former prosecutors outnumber former public defenders 5 to 1. Among Trump appointees, this ratio was over 10 to 1. The fact that judges are more likely to come from prosecutorial backgrounds, however, does not automatically lead to the conclusion that they are more likely to be deferential to police in criminal cases. For example, Justice Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Quarles, was never a prosecutor. Meanwhile, Justice Sotomayor, who was described as a zealous prosecutor, has a record of opposing the court’s conservative majority in many criminal cases. One might argue that, while there may be outliers like Sotomayor and Blackmun, it seems inconceivable, that, in the aggregate, those who have spent a large part of their careers advocating for deference to the police, operating on the assumption that police’s instincts can be trusted, can evaluate such topics with detached impartiality. But while some studies suggest that former prosecutors do indeed tend to side with the government more often than judges without prosecutorial experience, they fail to adequately account for an important confounding variable that actually can predict judicial behavior in some circumstances: political ideology. After controlling for judges’ ideologies and a host of other potentially relevant variables, there ceases to be a statistically significant relationship between a federal judge’s prosecutorial background and whether they are more likely to side with the government in criminal cases. One could argue that this more recent literature, which generally fails to show such a relation, is faulty because it fails to distinguish between different types of criminal cases. For example, if there was a strong prosecutorial bias in 5th Amendment cases, but not in other sorts of criminal cases, lumping the former sort of case together with the latter might drown out the. But in the absence of evidence of this, the conclusion I drew in my first draft was a hasty one. Because judges who served as prosecutors are only more likely to side with the government in criminal cases to the extent that they are more conservative, advocating for a better balance between prosecutors and public defenders in the federal judiciary seems to be an ineffective strategy for undermining Quarles and its legacy--if that should even be the goal in the first place.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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