The Journalist's Guide to American Law

John Nockleby, John T. Nockleby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136895333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This easy-to-use guidebook offers an overview of American law that should find a place on the desk of any journalism student or professional journalist. The Journalist's Guide to American Law provides an overview of major legal principles and issues in practical terms for journalists covering any aspect of the legal system. The book's organization captures both the bird's-eye view of the subject and offers an easy reference guide when the professional needs to understand a distinct legal concept. The areas covered range from professional concerns such as the First Amendment, cameras in the courtroom, Sunshine laws, and access to government documents to general legal matters such as the institutions of law and the lawmaking function of the judiciary, core constitutional principles such as separation of powers and judicial review, and the day-to-day functioning of courts. Equally at home on the desk of the general assignment reporter or the legal correspondent, as well as their producers and editors, the book equips the journalist with the knowledge required to translate complex legal notions into plain English.

1Introduction

John T. Nockleby

Professor of Law and Director, Civil Justice Program, Loyola Law School

On the night of March 3, 1991, the Los Angeles police and California highway patrol officers stopped a speeding automobile driven by an African American, Rodney King. When King, who had been drinking but was unarmed, failed to comply with the officers’ commands to lay prone the officers beat him more than 50 times with their metal batons and kicked him several times while several other officers watched and a police helicopter spotlighted the scene from overhead. Eighty-one seconds of the beating was captured on videotape by an amateur photographer, George Holliday.

The Holliday videotape was played and replayed thousands of times on local and national television. Most people who saw the tape thought the police used excessive force when subduing King. Later, as the officers returned to their stations, they sent text-messages from their in-car computers. The officer in charge at the scene, Sergeant Stacey Koon, typed messages that read: “U[nit] just had a big time use of force. Tased and beat the suspect of CHP pursuit big time.” Another officer, Laurence Powell, reported the incident on his computer: “Ooops” and “I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time.”

The beating led to separate state and federal criminal prosecutions of four police officers, and, much later, a civil trial in which the jury awarded King $3.8 million for his injuries. More importantly, the acquittal of the officers in the 1992 state trial set off one of the most serious riots in American history, resulting in 54 deaths, over 2,000 injured, and nearly a billion dollars of property damage. The 1992 Los Angeles riots and the various trials that bracketed them rank as some of the most newsworthy events of the late 20th century.

If a reporter is assigned to cover such events, is there useful background information in law that would assist her? For example, how much force may an officer use when subduing a suspect? If a person is found “not guilty” of a crime in state court, may he be prosecuted a second time in federal court? Isn’t the same evidence presented at both trials? And, what is the relationship between criminal trial and civil lawsuits involving the same events? Could a person be found “not guilty” of a crime, yet later found “liable” for the same behavior in a civil case? What must a person like Rodney King prove in order to win his civil case? These are some of the questions this book is designed to answer.

The American legal system is complex. Part of the complexity stems from the fact we have parallel court systems, federal and state. So, there are federal crimes and state crimes; federal statutes and state statutes; federal rules and state rules of procedure; a Constitution for the United States that establishes the governing structure of the national government and guarantees a number of individual rights; but also separate state-by-state constitutions that establish the governing structures within each state and that often guarantee individual rights in addition to those established by the U.S. Constitution.

In fact, most of “our law” continues to be developed at the state level, and not the national level. This causes enormous confusion for the citizenry, and even for beginning lawyers. When someone asks a lawyer “what is the law” on a particular question, the answer often hinges on whether the question is one of criminal law or civil law, or invokes federal or state law; but also in which state the questioner resides.

Moreover, the United States has many law-making bodies. Every county, every municipality, every burg exercises jurisdiction over some bailiwick; federal and state agencies step in to regulate matters in ways that may conflict with state and local laws; and often it’s challenging to figure out which of several overlapping governing authorities control the outcome of a particular legal question. Zoning is often decided at the local level, but many state constitutions authorize state officials to override powers exercised at the local level. Oftentimes “what is the law” depends on which of potentially conflicting rules controls in a given situation. Sorting out those conflicts is an important part of the lawyer’s job.

Because the interplay among different institutional actors, jurisdictions, and sources of law is often brought into discussions about the justice system, the rest of this introduction addresses the following structural tensions within the system:

1. State law vs. federal law
2. State courts vs. federal courts
3. Criminal law vs. civil law
4. Common law (judge-made law) vs. statutory law
5. Judicial independence and judicial accountability
6. Judicial role vs. jury role

State Law vs. Federal Law

The Rodney King beating led the local district attorney to seek indictments against officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, and Sergeant Stacey Koon, the supervising officer. All four were charged under state law with “assault by force likely to produce great bodily injury and a deadly weapon” and with assault “under color of authority.” Two officers were also charged with filing false reports, and Koon was charged with being an accessory.

At one level, prosecuting the police officers in state court was routine: most violent assaults are state crimes, not federal. The notoriety of the case arose from the videotape that documented what many people already believed—that the Los Angeles Police Department routinely used excessive force, particularly on black men. Yet, most crimes do not arise to the level of federal offenses.

Indeed, most rules of law defining crimes, or governing enforcement of contracts, protection of property, and remedies for personal injury derive from state law. This is a central feature of our constitutional structure: many functions of government are decentralized and the powers of the federal government are limited. If Congress enacts legislation that defines certain behavior as a federal offense, or makes certain contractual provisions uniform across state lines, or changes the tort law of states, ordinarily it must justify the enactment on grounds that the problem being regulated affects interstate commerce or is authorized by another provision of the Constitution.

May States Protect Individual Rights Beyond Those Under U.S. Constitution?

Many state supreme courts have interpreted their constitutions to protect individual rights more extensively than the U.S. Supreme Court has found under the U.S. Constitution. For example, the Montana legislature enacted a statute that permitted only physicians (and not physician assistants, for example) to provide abortions. The U.S. Supreme Court held the statute did not substantially impede a woman’s opportunity to obtain an abortion, a fundamental right of decisional privacy protected by its 1972 decision Roe v. Wade. However, the Montana Supreme Court later ruled the same statute was unconstitutional under the state constitution. See Mazurek v. Armstrong, 520 U.S. 968 (1997); Armstrong v. Montana, 989 P.2d 364 (Mont. 2000).

For example, stalking is usually a state offense, but if the behavior crosses state lines, the federal government has the power to criminalize it. Medical malpractice liability is ordinarily a state problem, but Congress may step in if the issue affects interstate provision of medical care. The limited powers of the federal government will be developed further in the constitutional law chapter (see chapter 2).

As these examples suggest, both the federal government and the states create criminal and civil wrongs. Stalking is a criminal offense in many states, but in 2006 the federal government enacted a comprehensive statute that criminalized interstate stalking. Similarly, the rules governing medical malpractice liability have customarily been a state law issue, but Congress may enact legislation restricting medical malpractice tort suits if the provisions are consistent with its power under the Commerce Clause.

Since our federal system created overlapping governments with shared responsibilities, the same behavior might violate both federal and state law. For example, the state prosecution of the officers involved in the King beating resulted in an acquittal of the four police defendants, and the federal government subsequently brought federal charges against the same defendants based on the same behavior, but requiring proof of different elements. The federal charges were based on a federal civil rights statute that prohibit officials acting “under color of law” from depriving persons of constitutional rights, rather than felony assault and related charges. In the federal case, Powell, Briseno, and Wind were charged with willful use of unreasonable force in arresting King, and the supervising officer, Stacey Koon, was charged with willfully permitting the other officers to use unreasonable force during the arrest. After a trial in federal court, the jury convicted Koon and Powell but acquitted Wind and Briseno.

In the United States, the dual sovereignty doctrine holds that, within certain limits, either a state or the federal government can prosecute a person subsequent to an acquittal by the other sovereign, even though the state or federal violation arises out of the same act and even though the state and federal offences are substantially the same (see Table 1.1). We explore many of these issues in the chapters on criminal law and criminal procedure (chapters 3 and 4).

Table 1.1 Comparing State and Federal Laws

Usually State	Usually Federal	Often Both
Criminal Law • Murder • Rape • Crimes against property • Deliberate violations of state safety laws	Criminal Law • Kidnapping • Bank robbery • Federal income tax evasion • Willful antitrust violations	Criminal Law • Serious deprivation of civil rights • Fraud (including securities violations) • Stalking • Failure to pay taxes
Civil Law • Contract law • Real property law • Tort law (injuries to person or property) • Family law • Violations of state constitution	Civil Law • Securities violations • Consumer • Enforcing administrative agency orders	Civil Law • Antitrust • Consumer fraud • Violations of safety regulations • Violations of U.S. Constitution

State Courts vs. Federal Courts

The U.S. Constitution establishes the third branch of the federal government— the federal judiciary—and authorizes Congress to establish the jurisdiction of these federal courts. Similarly, the jurisdiction of state courts is established by state constitutions and state legislatures. Each state’s constitution follows the tripartite structure embodied in the federal Constitution.

Generally speaking, the jurisdiction of federal and state courts follows from whether the matter is one of federal or state law. Thus, most cases (whether civil or criminal) arising under state law are heard in state court, while most cases arising under federal law are heard in federal court. For example, the prosecution of the officers involved in the King beating for state crimes occurred in state court, while the federal crimes were prosecuted in federal court. In criminal cases, the jurisdiction of a federal or state court extends only to federal or state crimes, respectively. When both jurisdictions provide criminal penalties for the same offense, federal prosecutors will often defer to state officials.

In contrast, these limitations don’t apply in the same way for civil cases. Most civil cases, including tort, contract, property, and family cases, arise under state law, and thus are tried in state courts. As a result, state courts handle more than 98 percent of all civil litigation, and federal courts less than 2 percent. Thus, although federal courts capture significant media attention, the workload of state courts is far more substantial.

In any event, on the civil side federal courts are empowered to hear many types of state law claims. For example, for cases in which parties hail from different states and the damages are large, federal courts may hear the state law claims under what is known as diversity jurisdiction. When federal courts hear civil state law cases, they are required to apply the law of the state with the most substantial connection to the dispute. Even though the dispute is heard in federal court, the substantive rules that are applied derive from state law. Thus, a breach...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Constitutional Law
• 3. Criminal Law
• 4. Criminal Procedure
• 5. Torts
• 6. Contract Law
• 7. Intellectual Property
• 8. Civil Procedure
• 9. Evidence
• 10. Ethical Obligations of Lawyers and Judges
• Appendix: Legal Research for Journalists
• Index