Criminal Law & Procedure –Lecture 2 (of 4) (Part 2): Substantive Criminal Law—Defenses and Introduction to Procedure

The lecture covers defenses to crimes and an introduction to criminal procedure, focusing on the Fourth Amendment.

Defenses to Crimes:

Capacity Defenses include insanity, infancy, and intoxication.

Insanity involves not understanding actions or right from wrong, using tests like the M'Naghten Rule, Irresistible Impulse Test, Durham Rule, and Model Penal Code Test.

Infancy recognizes that minors lack criminal intent, with different age classifications.

Intoxication is generally not a defense, except for involuntary intoxication or for negating specific intent crimes.

Justification/Excuse Defenses include self-defense, defense of others, duress, necessity, and entrapment.

Self-defense involves using proportional force against imminent harm, sometimes with a duty to retreat.

Defense of others is similar to self-defense, sometimes using the "alter ego rule" or "reasonable belief" standard.

Duress involves committing a crime under immediate threat of harm, but is not a defense to murder.

Necessity involves committing a crime to prevent greater harm when there is no other reasonable alternative. * Entrapment is when law enforcement induces a crime that a person would not otherwise commit.

Criminal Procedure:

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Most searches require a warrant based on probable cause.

Exceptions to the warrant requirement include search incident to arrest, exigent circumstances, consent searches, the automobile exception, plain view doctrine, and border & administrative searches.

The Exclusionary Rule makes illegally obtained evidence inadmissible in court.

The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree doctrine extends this to evidence derived from an illegal search, with some exceptions.

The lecture serves as an introduction to defenses and the Fourth Amendment. The following lecture will discuss the Fifth and Sixth Amendment protections.