Bringing famous defendants into the Criminal Procedure classroom

Last year, I drafted a series of posts for this blog wherein I suggested the many benefits of bringing Brendan Dassey’s prosecution into the law school curriculum (the intro post from that series is here). In that series, I mentioned that I twice taught a course called (Un)Making a Murderer and assembled course materials to accompany the class. Those materials relied, in part, on filings from Dassey’s case. Doing so intimately acquainted me with his case and its many associated legal issues.

To bring the Dassey prosecution to life for students, I expose them to numerous filings from the case alongside several law enforcement investigatory materials (including, for example, search warrants and interrogation videos). Teaching that class taught me this:  in-class conversations that focus on actual case filings has significant advantages compared with the more typical classroom conversation that revolves around discussing one case at a time in a vacuum—disconnected from how that case applies to a real person.

Since teaching the UnMaking a Murderer class, I wondered whether relying on case filings from real defendants might have broader classroom applicability. I learned that it does, and especially so in the investigative criminal procedure course. There’s certainly no reason that a casefile approach could not work in other classes, but I focused on the investigative criminal procedure course because the subject matter—what police can and cannot do—touches all of us as citizens.

Moreover, most law students take the investigative criminal procedure course in law school. Rarely is it a tough sell though. After all, more than 68 million people have downloaded the hit podcast Serial and 19.3 million people have watched season one of Netflix’s documentary series, Making a Murderer. Both Serial and Making a Murderer tell the true stories of criminal defendants’ experiences with our justice system through footage or audio recordings of the actual trial—essentially opening the courtroom doors to the public at large. To my mind, the investigative criminal procedure course should do the same for law students; doing so helps students learn substantive law in a manner that captures their attention while honing their practical skills.

Over the course of a series of posts, I’ll share precise suggestions on how you might rely on what I call the “casefile method” in the investigative criminal procedure course. You can look forward to my thoughts on teaching criminal procedure topics through the following well-known names:

1. Exigent circumstances as taught through O.J. Simpson—the former NFL running back;
2. Probable cause through the lens of John Wayne Gacy (one of this country’s most prolific serial killers);
3. The exclusionary rule through Alex Levin and Operation “Pacifier” (the largest hacking operation in U.S. history);
4. The plain view doctrine explained through the investigation into Aaron Hernandez (the former New England Patriots tight end);
5. Search warrant basics though the lens of searching Steven Avery’s property;
6. The automobile exception through a pair of traffic stops that brought down TF Mafia;
7. The voluntariness doctrine and the West Memphis Three; and
8. Miranda basics via the interrogation of James Holmes.

We’ll begin in my first substantive post with how the performance of Adnan Syed’s attorney, M. Cristina Gutierrez, at his trial for the murder of Hae Min Lee makes for a compelling way to teach Strickland v. Washington—one of the Supreme Court’s historically more disappointing but critically important cases. 

Comments

[Tung Yin]

Looking forward to this series!