Criminal Law: Cases and Materials

Joshua Dressler, Ohio State University College of Law

Stephen P. Garvey, Cornell University Law School

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Teacher's Manual

Author’s Notes Regarding the Changes in New Edition:

We are thankful that our casebook has been popular with many users. As such, we avoid making wholesale changes. Our philosophy is: “If it ain’t broke (too much), don’t fix it (too much). On the other hand, we listen well to adopters of our casebook for suggestions for improvement (and have done so in this edition, as well.)

Obviously we have included new Notes dealing with relevant recent newsworthy events, (e.g., the January 6 insurrection, the attempt to kill Justice Kavanaugh, etc.).

Also, we have made some cuts here and there that will render the casebook a tad shorter.

The most significant changes:

In Chapter 2:

• We deleted People v. Du and replaced it with United States v. Smith. We concluded that the value of Du has eroded over the years. The Smith case we believe does a better job of demonstrating how a judge can make thoughtful sentencing decisions.
• We deleted the Gementera (“shaming-as-punishment”) case and deal with the issue as a Note. “Shaming” punishment is less debated than it was when we first included the case.
• We have replaced Coker v. Georgia with the Supreme Court’s Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), which deal with the proportionality issues relating to the death penalty for rape of a child.

In Chapter 3:

• We have removed two Supreme Court cases that were included in Chapter 9 (Defenses), Robinson v. California and Powell v. Texas, and converted them into a significant Note in this chapter. Most users do not cover Robinson and Powell, so the lessons of those cases are lost to users. We believe they take up too much class time in Chapter 9 anyway and are difficult sledding for 1L students. So, we have covered the gist of these two cases in Chapter 3, where it analytically works best.
• Along with Robinson and Powell, we have included a Note on the Supreme Court’s recent decision, Grants Pass v. Johnson, which deals with the question of punishing persons for a status (here, being homeless).

Chapter 5: We have deleted State v. Miles, a statutory interpretation case, replacing it with Flores v. Figueroa, the case we used in earlier editions. We received a number of messages from long-time users who implored us to being back Flores as a better teaching too.

In Chapter 8:

• This chapter, covering Sexual Assault, has undergone significant changes in the Notes, including new article excerpts, raising new issues, and bringing in the new and finalized Sexual Offense provisions of the Model Penal Code.
• On the subject of rape by fraud, we have dropped our prior case, Boro v. Superior Court (1985) and replaced it with State v. Kelso-Christie (2015), which deal with a more modern issue of fraud, here involving use of Facebook, which also sheds some light on how the law in this area may slowly be changing.

Chapter 9: Besides removing Robinson and Powell (discussed above), we created a separate subsection dealing with Law Enforcement Defenses (Crime Prevention Defense and Arrest Defense). Although this subsection is entirely textual, we believe it brings more attention to the issues of police use of excessive force in law enforcement than in the previous editions.

Learn more about this series.