Best criminal evidence books according to redditors

Here are some books I'd recommend:

Changing Laws, Saving Lives: https://www.trialguides.com/collections/books/products/changing-laws-saving-lives

The Plaintiff Lawyer's Playbook: https://www.trialguides.com/collections/books/products/the-plaintiff-lawyers-playbook

Twelve Heroes, One Voice: https://www.trialguides.com/collections/books/products/twelve-heroes-one-voice

McElhaney's Trial Notebook: https://smile.amazon.com/McElhaneys-Trial-Notebook-James-McElhaney/dp/1590315030?sa-no-redirect=1

Winning at trial: https://smile.amazon.com/Winning-Winner-Highest-Professional-Excellence/dp/160156001X/ref=pd_sbs_14_13?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=160156001X&pd_rd_r=845a375c-7200-49f2-9dae-49f4c77c8820&pd_rd_w=yeBiQ&pd_rd_wg=kow2F&pf_rd_p=52b7592c-2dc9-4ac6-84d4-4bda6360045e&pf_rd_r=DZKRBF0S8HJ20R61HKTP&psc=1&refRID=DZKRBF0S8HJ20R61HKTP

>I am assuming the guilty have been figured out with the use of DNA evidence.

You're assuming that the prosecutor or investigators would never present falsified evidence. That is not the case at all. [Note: Each word is a separate link.] In fact, I would argue that this is already enough reason for capital punishment to be considered morally wrong and shouldn't be allowed.

“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” - William Blackstone

Actually, as goofy as rules of evidence are (such as the hearsay rule), the rule against propensity evidence is one of the few rules that shows an empirical benefit to the truth. This is a phenomenon that has been studied widely, and juries have shown a significant tendency to give propensity evidence unfair weight. There are two problems in particular:

1.) Juries improperly assume the defendant is guilty of the present charge based on his past conduct. "Meh, you trafficked drugs in the past, you probably did it this time too. Time to go home before dinner reaches the table."

2.) Juries stop caring about the defendant's present charge and hold his past conduct against him. "Oh you raped someone in the past? Well I don't really care if you're actually guilty of trafficking heroin, I'm going to find you guilty here because I don't like rapists."

Source: This book and lectures in evidence class by the author.

I highly recommend reading Witness for the Defense by Elizabeth Loftus.

>"The study of memory had become my specialty, my passion. In the next few years I wrote dozens of papers about how memory works and how it fails, but unlike most researchers studying memory, my work kept reaching out into the real world. To what extent, I wondered, could a person's memory be shaped by suggestion? When people witness a serious automobile accident, how accurate is their recollection of the facts? If a witness is questioned by a police officer, will the manner of questioning alter the representation of the memory? Can memories be supplemented with additional, false information?"

>The "passion" Loftus describes in the lines above led her to a teaching career at the University of Washington and, perhaps more importantly, into hundreds of courtrooms as an expert witness on the fallibility of eyewitness accounts. As she has explained in numerous trials, and as she convincingly argues in this absorbing book, eyewitness accounts can be and often are so distorted that they no longer resemble the truth.

It's a very good book and she does address the common sentiment of distrust towards her for being a "expert witness" and being compensated monetarily.

Oh my God what garbage that is. Let' start with "The German army entered Estonia and Latvia in July 1942, a few weeks after it invaded the Soviet Union." The Soviet Union was invaded in 1941.

Or: "Based on the testimony of eyewitnesses during the war crimes trials conducted in Estonia in the 1960s, the Nazy collaborators were brutal." Laughed at this one. At the time, Estonia was an occupied country with extremely powerful secret police. There was no freedom of speech, strong censorship and a ban on everything that did not belong to the "Soviet way of life", and yes, that includes jazz.

To give an example of how those trials in 1960s looked like: Karl Linnas' trial took place in January 1962, and his verdict was accidentally published in the January edition of the journal of Office of Public Procurator of the USSR - before the trial began. The "mistake" was soon noticed. Old copies were rounded up and destroyed, and "correct" issue of the journal was printed. Still, you can see a copy of the "incorrect" journal in the Museum of Occupations in Tallinn. : )

That verdict, however, was good enough for the US to deport Linnas to the Soviet Union. This also illustrates why the Supreme Court decision cannot be used as a moral platform - in their naivety, North American courts relied on Soviet evidence that was often nothing less than forgery. See Soviet Evidence in North American Courts: An Analysis of Problems and Concerns with Reliance on Communist Source Evidence in Alleged War Criminal Trials for many more examples.

In short, the author doesn't have a clue of Estonian historiography, nor of issues related to post-WW2 mock trials in Eastern Europe. As far as war crimes go, here are valid topics, such as the actions of Ain-Ervin Mere (he was one of the accused in the mock trials of 1960s) and of Omakaitse, but these topics are limited to the civil administration and their auxiliary units, and have very little to do with front-line units like the 20th Estonian Waffen-SS Division.

siegels I️ used this for pretty much every class

>I want the courtroom proceedings (in Chicago, IL) to be as realistic as possible.

Outlines for Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, which are separate classes in law school.

http://www.lexisnexis.com/documents/pdf/20150722022446_large.pdf

http://www.lexisnexis.com/supp/lawschool/resources/barbri/criminal-procedure-2l.pdf

Super condensed outlines:

https://www.amazon.com/Criminal-Law-Quickstudy-Barcharts-Inc/dp/1423233085/

https://www.amazon.com/Criminal-Procedure-Quickstudy-Law-Barcharts/dp/1423233093

https://www.amazon.com/Evidence-Barcharts-Quickstudy-Law-Inc-ebook/dp/B07GBNF3N6/

Things to understand. Grand juries. Voir dire. Mens rea. "Elements" of a crime. Evidence...how police gather it can have a huge impact on whether it makes it into the trial and the result...Google "Fruit of the poisoned tree." Jury instructions. Reasonable doubt. Whether the jury has the option for a lesser charge. Role of the jury ("fact finders") vs. role or the judge (interpreter of the law).

Real criminal trials might takes years if you include all the pre-trial motions. The actual trial itself is likely rather boring. Few actual attorneys have ever taken part in a murder trial, although criminal law and criminal procedure are required classes in law school. Anyway, there's a lot of room for sensationalism in anything legal-related. Audiences are used to it.

My evidence exam was party multiple choice too, so I used Questions & Answers: Evidence by Paul Giannelli. My library had a copy at the circulation desk, but Amazon also sells it for like $25. Good luck!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1531009913/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_i_qjYTDbJ4Y7H95

I think you ask an important question. Full disclosure: I am an applied mathematician, and so hope to eventually provide some arguments in favor of the clarity of logic that the appropriate application of mathematics can provide.

But first, I must agree with you in part: I think there are very real problems with the practical misuse of statistics in particular, or of mathematics in general. You mention that you studied law; hopefully logic enters into the consideration of validity of legal arguments... but as soon as numbers start to creep into those arguments, trouble often ensues. You may be interested in the book "Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom" by Schneps and Colmez.

At a high level, I think this impression of being able to "argue any desired view" with a cherry-picked statistical approach boils down to one or both of two basic problems:

First: misuse of a mathematical model of a situation. Here the problem is that mathematics is clean, while the real world is typically messy. That is, it is useful to be able to quantify the existence, nature, or extent of relationships between things that we observe. We can try to model those relationships mathematically... but the more realistic the model, the more complex it is to analyze. We sometimes have to trade fidelity for simplicity, and sometimes scientists make the wrong choices in that tradeoff.

(A natural example of this is hurricane forecasting: in principle, the "best" mathematical model of the weather is to model the "microscopic" interactions between every individual particle in the atmosphere, so that "macroscopic" phenomena like the creation and motion of a hurricane are the result of the model. But such a model would be prohibitively large and time-consuming; instead, another approach is to treat a "hurricane" as an actual element of the model, with its macroscopic behavior (rotational motion, etc.) "hard-wired," and thus implicitly assumed, into the model. This is a trade-off, since we may "miss" some important real-world behavior that isn't accounted for in the model.)

The second problem: misinterpretation of the results of a statistical analysis. As a mathematician, this is the one that frustrates me the most about statistics. Here the problem is that the mathematical analysis really tells us one thing, while it is often interpreted as saying something different/more than that.

Examples of this that fit the ELI5 criteria are difficult to come up with. An easy target is the use of p-values; let me know if an actual detailed example would be useful.

Not free, but this hornbook is concise and not impossible to read. http://www.amazon.com/Saltzburgs-Principles-Evidence-Concise-Hornbook/dp/0314279954

Get the Simmons/Merritt textbook, no cases just explanations and examples for every rule: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0314275401?pc_redir=1409999044&robot_redir=1

This is spot-on. OP, if you're interested in learning the policy behind the various exceptions to the general prohibition on hearsay evidence, grab a hornbook. I liked Roger Park's.

There is only one, I think. No, you don't need to match your case book authors for these types of classes as the law is fairly well established. In fact, if you are having trouble, I would suggest not doing that so that you can get another perspective.

http://www.amazon.com/Evidence-Examples-Explanations-Eighth-Edition/dp/1454802480

Law in a Flash flashcards are clutch!! https://www.amazon.com/Law-Flash-Evidence-Emanuel/dp/1454894881?ref_=ast_sto_dp

http://www.amazon.com/Questions-Answers-Evidence-David-Leonard/dp/142247352X

This contains 450 multiple choice questions. Helped my friend get an A. I just finished going through it now, and honestly I feel like I understand all of Evidence.

I never could get it nailed down in my brain. See if your library has The Hearsay Rule ISBN 1594606978. This book helped me get somewhat close to "getting" it, though not quite. I ended up passing Evidence, at least, so that was nice.

This textbook can be bought used for under $25. Textbooks for college are ridiculously expensive when added up, even if you buy the wrong editions used. (bc we always need the latest edition of every book) I've just taken to not buying the majority of my books and hoping I'll still be able to do okay. As this is my last year and I'm hoping to graduate with a 3.5, I need to do a little better these final two semesters, and I've been trying to save all money not going to rent to be used on books. I could use all the help I can get lol

back to cool

Try an audiotape. A really good one is Professor Goode's Evidence from Sum & Substance.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Goodes-Substance-Evidence-English-Edition/dp/031418953X