Exam 2: Overview of the Criminal Justice Process

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The two facts that must be shown to prove a claim of denial of equal protection of the laws are first, that some official act had a discriminatory effect. This usually means proving race or some other illegal group characteristic is the reason for the official decision. The second fact to be proven is that officials intended to discriminate against a specific claimant because of race or some other illegal criteria.

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From the passage of the Constitution to the Civil War, criminal justice was considered a local affair. The Bill of Rights extended protection against only the federal, not state, government. The Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause changed that.
Courts, however, defined due process differently. Some decisions emphasized procedural due process, contending that due process guarantees fair procedures for deciding cases. The question then became which fair procedures are guaranteed. The Bill of Rights lists several. Were they due process guarantees?
Experts differed. Some claimed the Bill of Rights codified a specific list of procedures to protect people against governmental excesses and the Fourteenth Amendment requires all these procedures apply to the states.
Others claimed that if due process was shorthand for the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause is wasted language, because the Fifth Amendment already includes a due process clause. They the meaning of due process should evolve to meet the needs of an ever-changing society.
Until the 1930s, the Supreme Court refused to apply the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause to state criminal proceedings. After World War I came the rise of totalitarian governments in the late 1920s and 1930s which gave rise to American suspicions of arbitrary government. In 1932, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in Powell v. Alabama that the state of Alabama had denied the defendants due process during their trial. In Brown v. Mississippi (1936), the Court ruled the defendants were denied due process when confessions obtained by brutality and torture were used against them.
These two cases established the fundamental fairness doctrine. According to this doctrine, due process commands states to provide the basics of a fair trial. These include (1) giving defendants notice of the charges against them and (2) assuring a full hearing before conviction. However, even after these two cases, the Supreme Court refused to hold that the Bill of Rights now automatically applies to state criminal justice.
During the 1940s and 1950s, all the Justices agreed the Bill of Rights imposes limits on state criminal procedures, but they disagreed about what those limits are. This view was opposed by Justices who believed in the total incorporation doctrine. They believed that all the provisions of the Bill of Rights should be incorporated through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and applied to state criminal justice proceedings. A third approach, selective incorporation, took a middle ground. Under this doctrine, some rights in the Bill of Rights should be incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment and others should not. This doctrine was adopted by the Court in the 1960s. Gradually, on a case-by-case basis, most of the protections of the Bill of Rights were selectively incorporated and applied to the states.