Friday, November 6, 2015

Hiatus

Sorry for the lull in the posts.  I've got about ten good topics lined up in the writing queue, but they're all going to have to wait.  Even though Knightly is currently resting up, I've been working on a new project with coauthor Larry White.  More specifically, many Wisconsin criminal defense lawyers have lamented that our state's burden of proof instruction allows conviction with far less than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. (I've always thought that the prosecutor's burden in our state was more like a preponderance of the evidence standard.)  So our new study and soon-to-be law review article tested that hypothesis.  And sure enough, mock jurors that were given the Wisconsin jury instruction convicted at a much higher, statistically significant rate than did mock jurors given a straight reasonable doubt instruction.  We plan to start submitting the article for publication to journals in February, and, historically, I've received offers on my articles by mid-March if not sooner.  Hopefully at that time the publishing journal will let us post a pre-publication version of the article to SSRN.  This should give defense lawyers some ammunition when filing pretrial motions to modify Wisconsin's burden of proof instruction.  Ultimately, the article should convince our jury instruction committee to modify Wisconsin's instruction to the constitutionally guaranteed beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard.  Stay tuned!