Clinical Law Prof Blog

Professor Valena Beety Featured as Eyewitness Identification Expert on the Undisclosed Podcast

Our always amazing West Virginia College of Law colleague, Valena Beety, Professor of Law and Director of the West Virginia Innocence Project, is featured on the March 16, 2018 Undisclosed podcast, State v. Ronnie Long – Addendum 1 – Projecting Innocence.  Professor Beety is interviewed by Colin Miller, Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina College of Law and noted expert in the fields of evidence, criminal law, and criminal procedure.  Professor Beety discusses her evolution from an Assistant United States Attorney to an innocence advocate, then addresses the eyewitness identification that caused Ronnie Long to spend forty years in prison.  She identifies multiple factors that render the eyewitness identification unreliable in Mr. Long's case, while also acknowledging how research has reformed police protocols on interviewing eyewitnesses today.  Professor Beety wraps up the interview by sharing her experience litigating habeas corpus cases in which the admission of faulty bite mark and shaken baby syndrome expert evidence led to wrongful convictions.  

Oh what's in a name - RSS Boaty McBoatface...

If you are anything like me around this time of the year, when the weather slumps and with exams approaching, you look for hilarity where you can find it (when you are avoiding all press about the upcoming political chaos that represents our electoral system).  That's why I was so excited to learn about being able to vote for Boaty McBoatface.  That's right - Boaty McBoatface.  Because, despite best intentions, when you allow the internet to assist with what seems like an innocuous naming endeavor, sometimes funny wins out. 

NERC - the United Kingdom's Natural Environment Research Council, opened up the ability to suggest a name for their newest polar research ship in early March of 2016.  With initial names suggested being what you might expect for this sort of thing - Shackleton, Endeavour and Falcon for example, they might have thought that they were safe.  Not so fast, thanks to James Hand, who submitted the name and who's Twitter feed profile lists him as being a reason we can't have nice things, along with the hashtag #BoatyMcBoatface. 

Should you want to cast your vote - you'd better hurry.  Voting closes April 16, 2016.  You can cast your vote here or by visiting: https://nameourship.nerc.ac.uk/entries.html.  Let this be a lesson to all of us - and may the best name win!

Clinical Law Prof Meet-Up in the Desert: May 6 at 8:30 p.m.

UPDATE:  We're meeting on the patio outside the Fireside Lounge at the Westin.  See you soon.

 

Friends, Writers, Readers,

The Clinical Law Prof Blog community will gather for an informal, not-hosted, meet up at the AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education at 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday night, May 6, somewhere in the Westin.   (Watch this space, the Facebook page and @ClinicalLawProf for the location TBD).

It is impossible to plan a gathering that does not conflict with other worthy gatherings at this mighty conference, but if you can, please save the time and join us for conversation, refreshments and pleasantries.  

Let’s Dance

“It is music and dancing that make me at peace with the world.” ― Nelson Mandela

My father was hiking in Mammoth Lakes with his wife, their 5-year-old daughter, and one of his cross-country runners last month when he unexpectedly had a heart attack and died.  He was 75 years old and still went to work six days a week, eleven months a year.  He had just arrived for a high altitude training camp for his runners.  It was his favorite week of the year in a job he loved.

The only thing he loved more than coaching was his family.  Thus, at the age of twenty, when he had his first of seven children, he began a lifetime tradition of packing up our entire family (and often a couple of neighborhood friends), driving us to the 405, and asking, “North or South, East or West?”  We never knew at the beginning of these month-long vacations whether we would wind up in the Canadian Rockies, a Kansas farm belonging to a third cousin, or the White House.  These summer journeys became our sacred time--a time to rejuvenate, reflect, and cocoon as a family, away from work and school.

When I learned of my father’s death, I was in the midst of one of these sojourns with my older sister and our two families.  We had just arrived in Ireland for a work-free week of family vacation. Somehow I had managed to complicate my first two weeks away from campus with two law conferences, a grant application, the presentation of two papers, and several professional meetings with potential collaborators.  Needless to say, I am no John Binford. 

Returning to campus three days after my father’s burial, I immediately threw myself headlong into work—focusing on meeting the end of summer writing deadlines, and preparing to survive the late August tsunami of students and clients and committees.  I became friends with midnight and a stranger to my children. 

Transitioning from work to sleep one early morning, I read the following article in Times Higher Education (“THE”) on the link between relaxation and work, which reminded me that working longer hours can often compromise productivity, not increase it.  It brought to mind a New York Times essay I read last year that cited similar research.  Somehow between infancy and high school, I became caught up in America's "Busy Trap," and here in mid-life, I have still not learned to break free.  Was this busy-ness compromising my productivity as a professor?  Did it make me a poor role model for my students?  Was I missing out on motherhood because I mistakenly thought that working 14 hours a day would make me more successful or helpful to those in need or a better provider or whatever it is that is driving me?

What would happen if we stepped back and experimented with some new approaches to productivity, such as those suggested in this Forbes article?  What if we set aside three hours a day, away from our students and family and clients and colleagues just to write, and broke those hours into 90-minute blocks?  What if we made it a priority to sleep at least eight hours a night?  Should we turn off email for hours at a time as suggested in this New York Times op-ed?  What if we silenced all notifications when we wanted to think or needed to meet with people?  Could we stop sleeping with our iPhones next to us?  Better yet, what if we declared our time away from work a digital-free zone?  Would that make us smarter, more present, productive, efficient, relaxed?  Is it possible to be at peace with not at least trying to answer every email every day?  Would it possibly make us more professional to manage our time and communications more proactively, rather than go through life with an “Always Open” neon sign across our chests?  Maybe my dad was right about the sanctity of summer vacations.  Should we, could we stop trying to work on vacation?  According to NPR, adults need recess, too.  What about dancing and singing and loving?  Will these make us better teachers, scholars, attorneys, people?  Maybe we should find out.

Care to dance with me this semester? 

 

 

Please Forget Me in the Morning

A high-impact decision was issued by the European Court of Justice today when it held that Google must adhere to the requests of individuals to erase links to information that is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27388289).  The case was brought by a Spanish man who did not want an auction notice for a repossessed home he had owned to be retrieved in response to searches of his name.  The emerging legal concept, the “right to be forgotten,” is largely European and grows from the region’s well-established and widely-recognized body of privacy rights.  

George Washington University Law Professor Jeffrey Rosen, who is also the Legal Affairs Editor of The New Republic, calls the “right to be forgotten” the “biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade” (http://goo.gl/pq4UHC).  A more comprehensive treatment of this right was published by Steven Bennett and can be found here:  http://goo.gl/0nY227.  Professor Rosen’s response to the emergence of the right to be forgotten is hardly surprising in a society like ours whose passion for free speech is only matched by our love of guns and money.  But at what price? 

Viviane  Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship praised the ruling as a step out of the “digital stone age.”  That stone age is one in which our children are often among the most vulnerable.  Over ten years ago, Michigan State University Law Professor Kevin Saunders published a book examining the effects of the First Amendment on our nation’s children, Saving Our Children from the First Amendment  (http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookid=9489#.U3Jqumjn-1s).  Since then, we have witnessed an exploding occurrence of cyberbullying, sextortion, sexting, and exchange of sex abuse images involving our children and youth.  While there are clearly exceptions to First Amendment freedoms for some of the challenges our children and youth face in the Digital Age, the fact remains that many of our children will carry a burden that we have never experienced as their youthful impulses, indiscretions, and, in some cases, victimizations, will be forever published and available on the Internet for others to witness again and again, unless the United States begins to more widely recognize a right to privacy.

Who among us isn’t thankful that those cellulose acetate images of a certain Spring Break in the Bahamas or that post-college graduation train ride across Europe or the election night victory party are degrading in someone’s attic right now?  After all, as Scientific American reminded us yesterday, even the brains of mice, Chilean rodents, and guinea pigs know that some things are better forgotten (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-brain-cells-erase-old-memories/?&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20140512).