99 Fun Facts About Criminal Justice

The 1966 Supreme Court case requiring police to inform suspects of their rights is named after which defendant?

Ernesto Miranda won his case, but prosecutors retried him without the confession and he was convicted again in 1967.

Gideon v Wainwright (1963) required state courts to provide defendants with what?

A lawyer made the difference: retried with counsel, Clarence Earl Gideon was acquitted of the Florida break-in that had sent him to prison.

Mapp v Ohio (1961) applied which doctrine to state prosecutions?

The exclusionary rule overturned Dollree Mapp's conviction for obscene books that police found during an illegal search of her home for a fugitive.

Terry v Ohio (1968) held that police may 'stop and frisk' someone on what standard?

Reasonable suspicion was enough for a plainclothes officer who watched men repeatedly pace past a store window, then frisked them and found pistols.

Batson v Kentucky (1986) barred prosecutors from using peremptory challenges to exclude jurors based on what?

Race was the issue: a prosecutor struck all four Black potential jurors, and an all-white jury convicted James Batson of burglary.

Brady v Maryland (1963) requires prosecutors to hand the defence what?

Exculpatory evidence was at stake: prosecutors hid a companion's confession to the killing, so John Brady won a new sentencing hearing.

Furman v Georgia (1972) led to what across the United States?

A de facto moratorium on executions held until states rewrote their laws, and Gregg v. Georgia approved Georgia's new separate sentencing hearings in 1976.

Which amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures?

The Fourth Amendment answered British writs of assistance, which had let colonial officers rummage through homes in unrestrained searches.

The right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury comes from which amendment?

The Sixth Amendment's jury right reached state courts in 1968 after Louisiana refused a jury to Gary Duncan, a Black teenager accused of slapping a white youth.

Which amendment forbids excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment?

The Eighth Amendment nearly copies a clause of England's 1689 Bill of Rights, a clause aimed at excessive and arbitrary punishments.

What does the Latin legal maxim 'non bis in idem' mean?

Not twice against the same, roughly, is the rule behind double jeopardy, yet a US state and the federal government may each prosecute one act as separate sovereigns.

Judge Sol Wachtler was quoted saying prosecutors could get a grand jury to indict what?

A ham sandwich, he said, yet Sol Wachtler was later charged himself over threats to a former lover, and he pleaded guilty.

Which US vice president resigned in 1973 in a tax evasion plea deal?

Spiro Agnew's deal dropped the corruption charges against him, leaving a $10,000 fine and three years of probation instead of prison.

The Latin phrase habeas corpus, the writ challenging unlawful detention, literally refers to what?

Having the body brought to court is the writ's demand, yet in 1861 Abraham Lincoln ignored Chief Justice Taney's ruling that only Congress could suspend it.

In medieval English common law, what penalty originally set a felony apart from lesser crimes?

Confiscation of land and goods marked a felony, so even a person who died by suicide, legally a felon against himself, had his property forfeited to the Crown.

Who became director of the Bureau of Investigation, the FBI's forerunner, in 1924?

J. Edgar Hoover rebuilt the scandal-hit bureau into a professional force, and he stayed in charge until his death in 1972.

London's Metropolitan Police was founded in 1829 by which Home Secretary?

Robert Peel had already built a paid police force in Ireland, whose constables were called 'peelers' before London's 'bobbies' took his name too.

The Judiciary Act of 1789 created which US federal law enforcement officers?

US Marshals also took the first national census in 1790, and they kept taking the count every decade through 1870.

Which US agency was created in 1865 to fight counterfeit money?

The Secret Service's counterfeiting mission kept it in the Treasury Department until 2003, when it moved into the new Department of Homeland Security.

The Drug Enforcement Administration was created in 1973 under which president?

Richard Nixon had declared drug abuse 'public enemy number one' in 1971, two years before he created the DEA to lead that fight.

Which future New York mayor prosecuted Mafia bosses under RICO?

Rudy Giuliani's case leaned on a bug hidden in a mobster's Jaguar, which recorded bosses talking as he drove them around.

Interpol was founded in 1923 in which city?

Vienna's police chief convened the founding congress, but in 1938 Nazi Germany seized control of the commission and later moved its headquarters to Berlin.

Interpol moved its headquarters in 1989 to which French city?

Lyon's headquarters sends out red notices, but Interpol agents do not make arrests; that is left to each member country's own police.

Colin Pitchfork, sentenced in 1988, was the first person convicted of murder using what?

DNA profiling caught Colin Pitchfork even though he had persuaded another man to give a sample in his place during the mass screening.

Fingerprint examiners sort prints into three basic patterns: arches, whorls and what?

Loops, arches and whorls became the basis of Edward Henry's classification system, which police forces across the English-speaking world adopted.

In 1921 John Larson, a Berkeley physiologist with a doctorate, built the polygraph while working as what?

A city police officer in Berkeley, John Larson later regretted the lie detector, calling it a Frankenstein's monster he had spent over 40 years combating.

Innocence Project founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld served on which celebrity's murder trial defense team?

O. J. Simpson's defense had them attack how police collected the blood evidence, the kind of forensic proof their project uses to free the wrongly convicted.

Which cobbler began US probation in 1841 by persuading a judge to release a 'drunkard' into his custody?

John Augustus brought the man back to court sober, then kept bailing out and supervising offenders as an unpaid volunteer for 18 years.

What did the 1962 Alcatraz escapees leave in their beds to fool guards?

Dummy heads with real hair fooled the night guards, and in 1979 the FBI closed its case with no credible sign that the three men had survived.

Which gangster did Eastern State Penitentiary hold in 1929?

Al Capone had been arrested in Philadelphia for carrying a concealed gun, and he was sentenced to a year in prison.

The Auburn system of the 19th century had prisoners work together by day under what rule?

Enforced silence was part of the American prison experiments that Alexis de Tocqueville crossed from France to study in 1831, a trip that also gave rise to Democracy in America.

Sing Sing prison, said to have inspired the slang 'up the river', is in which New York village?

Ossining was itself called Sing Sing until 1901, when the village changed its name so it would stop being confused with the prison.

Which celebrity served five months at Alderson federal prison camp from 2004?

Martha Stewart was convicted not of insider trading but of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about her sale of ImClone shares.

What was Cesare Beccaria's 1764 treatise condemning torture and the death penalty titled?

On Crimes and Punishments came out when Cesare Beccaria was only 26, and a French translation soon carried his case against torture across Europe.

Which philosopher conceived the Panopticon prison design?

Jeremy Bentham's plan was not fully adopted in his day, but later prisons borrowed it, among them Stateville near Joliet, Illinois.

The 'broken windows' theory of policing was introduced in a 1982 article in which magazine?

James Q. Wilson and George Kelling argued that visible disorder invites more serious crime; the idea shaped 1990s New York policing.

Where did the landmark 1972-73 experiment on whether patrol levels affect crime take place?

Kansas City police dropped routine patrols in some beats and doubled or tripled them in others, yet crime and fear of crime did not differ significantly.

The first true 'three-strikes' sentencing law was passed by voters in which state in 1993?

Washington's law targeted repeat violent and serious felons, yet in its first three years fewer offenders struck out than state planners had projected.

Which country's mass gang crackdown gave it the world's highest incarceration rate by 2023?

El Salvador declared a state of emergency in March 2022 after a weekend of gang killings, suspending some rights so police could arrest suspected gang members en masse.

Which English king's Assize of Clarendon had sworn local juries report suspected robbers and murderers?

Henry II's juries only accused suspects, who then had to face the ordeal of water, and anyone convicted forfeited his goods and chattels to the king.

Evidence derived from an illegal search is known by what botanical phrase?

Fruit of the poisonous tree can still be used at trial if police would inevitably have found the evidence anyway, or also found it by independent, lawful means.

The warnings police must read to suspects in custody rest chiefly on which amendment to the US Constitution?

Fifth Amendment roots made the warnings a constitutional rule, so in 2000 the Supreme Court held that a 1968 law Congress passed to override them could not.

Which president's 1901 assassination led to full-time protection for US presidents?

William McKinley was shot while shaking hands with the public in Buffalo, and doctors predicted he would recover before gangrene killed him eight days later.

Which factor does the Innocence Project say played a role in the most wrongful convictions later overturned?

Eyewitness mistakes sent Kirk Bloodsworth to death row on the word of five witnesses, and he spent more than nine years in prison before he was cleared.

Which Berkeley police chief set up a criminal justice programme at UC Berkeley in 1916?

August Vollmer put Berkeley officers on bicycles, then motorcycles and patrol cars, and was the first police chief to require college degrees.

In 1838, which US city gained the legal power to appoint officers for a day police force?

Boston's day police ran apart from its old night watch until 1854, when the city replaced both with a single police department.

Which 1968 law created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration?

The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act set up an agency that sent block grants to the states to fight crime, yet it was abolished in 1982.

Which verdict can a US jury never actually return, whatever the evidence?

Innocent is never the finding, because a verdict of not guilty only means the proof failed to overcome all reasonable doubt of guilt.

Members of which religious group were prominent among the founders of Philadelphia's 1787 prison reform society?

Quakers helped found the society, yet it was nondenominational from the start, and an Episcopal bishop, William White, led it for 49 years.

Until 2026, which country's juries could acquit the accused with a third verdict, 'not proven'?

Scotland kept the oddity for almost three centuries; novelist Walter Scott, himself a sheriff, called it 'that bastard verdict' after watching a jury use it in 1827.

Which Paris fortress-prison held just seven inmates when revolutionaries stormed it on 14 July 1789?

The Bastille was nearly empty and already marked for demolition: its inmates were four forgers, two mentally ill men and a count locked up at his family's request.

The syndrome in which hostages bond with captors is named after a 1973 bank siege in which capital?

Stockholm gave the syndrome its name after four bank workers were held in a vault for six days; the psychiatrist who coined the term never met or spoke to them.

America's first 911 call was placed in 1968 in the small town of Haleyville in which state?

Alabama got there first because a small independent phone company raced to beat the giant AT&T; the state's House speaker dialled, and a US congressman picked up.

William Kemmler was the first person put to death by which method, at Auburn Prison in 1890?

Electric chair deaths began with Kemmler, using a device dreamed up by a Buffalo dentist; George Westinghouse hated seeing his new electrical technology used this way.

Which aviator's baby son was kidnapped in 1932, leading Congress to pass a federal kidnapping law?

Charles Lindbergh's 20-month-old son was taken from his crib, a case that also inspired the kidnapping plot in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.

Whose brother recognized the prose style of a 1995 manifesto and tipped off the FBI?

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote a 35,000-word essay attacking technology; his brother David spotted the familiar phrasing, and the tip led to an arrest in 1996.

Which Babylonian king's law code, carved on a basalt stele, is famed for 'eye for an eye' penalties?

Hammurabi's stele was carried off as plunder to Susa, in present-day Iran, some 600 years after it was carved, and lay there until its rediscovery in 1901.

Which courtroom object, a fixture of American legal dramas, have British judges never used?

The gavel belongs to American courtrooms and to auctioneers; the judiciary of England and Wales says its criminal courts have never used one, whatever imported TV shows suggest.

Giles Corey died in the 1692 Salem witch trials when officials used which method to force him to enter a plea?

Pressing under stones meant rocks piled on boards laid across his body; he held out for two days without entering a plea, and his estate went to two sons-in-law under his will.

Which Athenian lawgiver, said to punish most offences with death, gave English a word for harsh laws?

Draco replaced blood feuds with a written code that only a court could enforce, and tradition holds that Solon later repealed all of it except the laws on homicide.

Which English monarch sealed Magna Carta in 1215, promising protection from illegal imprisonment?

King John met the rebel barons at Runnymede, a Thames water-meadow chosen as neutral ground between his fortress at Windsor and their base at Staines.

The First Fleet of eleven British ships sailed in 1787 to found a convict colony in which present-day country?

Australia received more than 1,400 people on that voyage; the governor rejected the planned landing site at Botany Bay and chose Port Jackson, a little to the north.

Which German city hosted the 1945–46 trial of leading Nazis, in a Palace of Justice with a prison attached?

Nuremberg staged the trial although Berlin was named the tribunal's permanent seat: its courthouse was relatively intact, with cells for the defendants next door.

The International Criminal Court, founded under the 1998 Rome Statute, sits in which Dutch city?

The Hague is home to a court of last resort, which may step in only when a nation's own courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute.

Which amendment ended slavery in 1865 but left an exception for people duly convicted of a crime?

The Thirteenth Amendment's exception opened the door to convict leasing, under which Southern plantations rented cheap prisoner labour after the Civil War.

Which woman was acquitted in 1893 of the hatchet murders of her father and stepmother in Massachusetts?

Lizzie Borden never left Fall River: after the trial she and her sister Emma bought a house in a wealthier part of town, where she lived out her life.

Which bank robber was shot by federal agents in 1934 on leaving a Clark Gable film at the Biograph Theater?

John Dillinger was given away by a companion who agreed to wear orange, so the agents waiting outside could pick her out of the crowd.

Which Prohibition agent led a handpicked team nicknamed 'The Untouchables' for refusing to take bribes?

Eliot Ness went through the records of every Prohibition agent to build a reliable team, at first only six strong, and began raiding stills and breweries in 1931.

The Taser stun gun takes its name from a 1911 novel about which fictional boy inventor?

Tom Swift was the childhood hero of NASA researcher Jack Cover, who finished the device in 1974 and named it with a loose acronym of the book's title.

Which medieval method of proof, such as holding red-hot iron, declined after the Church barred priests from it in 1215?

Trial by ordeal rested on the belief that God would work a miracle to save the blameless; once clergy withdrew it lost its authority, and England's courts had abandoned it within four years.

Small neighbourhood police posts called koban are the bases for community policing in which country?

Japan has around 6,000 of the posts; often translated as 'police box', each is really a small building of a room or two staffed by a few officers.

The Carabinieri, a police corps that also forms a branch of the armed forces, serve which country?

Italy's Carabinieri were created by a King of Sardinia on the model of the French gendarmerie, and in 2000 they split from the Army to become a military branch of their own.

Halden Prison, opened in 2010 and designed to resemble a village, is in which country?

Norway built Halden around rehabilitation, so its layout simulates life outside; it won an award for interior design and drew criticism for being too liberal.

Which 1919 law, named for the congressman who steered it through the House, put national Prohibition into effect?

The Volstead Act took its name from Andrew Volstead, who chaired the House Judiciary Committee and sponsored it; Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League is widely credited with drafting it.

Under 'benefit of clergy', medieval English defendants could escape the gallows by showing they could do what?

Read from the Bible in Latin and a court treated a man as clergy; a 1351 statute opened the loophole to all who could read, and playwright Ben Jonson used it in 1598.

Which Stanford psychologist halted his 1971 mock-prison experiment on day six as student guards grew brutal?

Philip Zimbardo stopped the study after psychologist Christina Maslach saw the conditions and confronted him; he had cast himself as the prison superintendent.

Whose 1991 beating by police, filmed from a nearby balcony, led to riots when the officers were acquitted?

Rodney King's beating was filmed by George Holliday, who sent the tape to a local TV station; a federal court later convicted two of the four officers.

AMBER Alerts for missing children are named after a nine-year-old girl abducted in 1996 in which state?

Texas is where Amber Hagerman was taken while riding her bike in Arlington; the name was later made to stand for America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response.

Who became the first woman to serve as US Attorney General, holding the post from 1993 to 2001?

Janet Reno had already been Florida's first female state attorney, and only one man, William Wirt, ever held the national post for longer.

Which detective won fame by claiming to have foiled an 1861 plot to kill President-elect Abraham Lincoln?

Allan Pinkerton's agent Kate Warne reserved sleeping-car berths for a 'sick brother', and a disguised Lincoln slipped through Baltimore by night to reach the capital.

Which London force, at first just six men, was founded in 1749 by a magistrate also famous as a novelist?

Bow Street Runners was the public's nickname, which the men themselves thought derogatory; the force lasted until 1839, when it merged into the Metropolitan Police.

Which defense attorney's marathon plea in 1924 spared the young killers Leopold and Loeb a death sentence?

Clarence Darrow turned the sentencing hearing into an attack on the death penalty as mere retribution, and the judge gave both men life plus 99 years.

Whose insanity acquittal for shooting President Ronald Reagan in 1981 led Congress to narrow that defense?

John Hinckley Jr. believed the attack would impress the actress Jodie Foster, and he spent more than three decades in psychiatric care rather than prison.

Which term did sociologist Edwin Sutherland introduce in 1939 for offences by high-status people at work?

White-collar crime, as Sutherland defined it, is committed by 'a person of respectability' in the course of an occupation; fraud, bribery, insider trading and embezzlement are typical.

What do the letters W and T stand for in the police acronym SWAT?

Weapons and Tactics beat a more aggressive rival: Los Angeles inspector Daryl Gates wanted the acronym to mean 'Special Weapons Attack Team', but his deputy chief turned that down.

The FBI and the Bureau of Prisons both sit within which arm of the US cabinet, created in 1870?

The Department of Justice arrived 81 years after the attorney general's office itself, and its first leaders used it to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members in the early 1870s.

Devil's Island, the penal colony where Captain Alfred Dreyfus was exiled, lay off which part of South America?

French Guiana held the colony in its Salvation Islands for a full century, from 1852 to 1952, and Dreyfus, wrongly accused of spying, was its most famous inmate.

Which New York detective testified to the Knapp Commission about police graft and was played by Al Pacino in 1973?

Frank Serpico was the first officer in the history of the NYPD to come forward and testify openly about widespread payoffs to corrupt colleagues.

Louisiana State Penitentiary, built on a former slave plantation, is better known by which name?

Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, and so much of its 18,000 acres is given over to crops that officers patrol on horseback.

Which mobster became, in 1963 Senate testimony, the first Mafia member to admit publicly that it existed?

Joseph Valachi, a Genovese family mobster already serving life for killing a fellow inmate, broke the organization's code of secrecy and popularized the term Cosa Nostra.

In re Gault (1967), which won juveniles constitutional safeguards, began when a 15-year-old was confined for what?

Making a lewd phone call would have cost an adult two months at most, yet Gerald Gault was sent to a state school until he turned 21, a possible six years.

Besides the United States, which is the only country with a similar commercial system of bail bondsmen?

The Philippines is the lone match; in India and South Africa, courts have disciplined attorneys for professional misconduct over commercial bail arrangements.

Zebulon Brockway ran which New York reformatory, founded in 1876, with military drill and open-ended sentences?

Elmira dressed its inmates in military-style uniforms and marched them to a band; Brockway led his field, though he was accused of brutality in 1893.

In 1846, which US state became the first English-speaking jurisdiction to end the death penalty for ordinary crimes?

Michigan kept the gallows on the books only for treason, a charge nobody ever faced under its law, and removed that last exception in 1963.

Legal scholar Herbert Packer's 1968 book set the 'crime control' model of criminal justice against which rival model?

Due process was the second of Packer's two models, a pairing that shaped decades of debate over criminal policy; he devised them as a Stanford law professor.

Alice Stebbins Wells petitioned her way onto which city's police force in 1910, gaining its first policewoman's badge?

Los Angeles issued Wells a call box key, a rulebook and a first aid book with her badge, and she went on to found the International Policewomen's Association.

Which Tennessee senator chaired the televised 1950–51 hearings on organized crime and later ran for vice president?

Estes Kefauver became a household name as an estimated 30 million Americans tuned in, and his hearings introduced the public to the Mafia title capo di tutti capi.

Charles Ponzi's 1920 scheme promised investors a 50% profit in 45 days from trading in what?

Postal coupons, which prepaid a reply's postage between countries, could in principle be bought cheaply abroad and redeemed at face value in the United States.

Johnny Cash recorded a famous live album in January 1968 for inmates of which California prison?

Folsom hosted two shows that day, with June Carter and Carl Perkins on the bill, and the album that came out of them climbed to number one on the country chart.