To Agree or Not to Agree, That is the Question: The New York Court of Appeals On Remand

--Following Supreme Court Reversal in Cases Involving Search and Seizure and Self Incrimination from 1980 to the Present


By Madeline M. Moore
Madeline Moore, a third year student at Albany Law School, is an Associate Director for the Center. Raised in Maybrook, New York, she is a philosophy graduate of the University of Michigan. In law school, she has worked as a law intern at the Albany County Office of the Public Defender and the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Northern District of New York.

She prepared this paper for the State Constitutional Adjudication seminar, Spring 2011.

This paper examines cases decided by the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, following reversal and remand by the United States Supreme Court. The paper focuses on criminal cases. Specifically, it examines those five cases since 1980 that dealt with search and seizure or self incrimination issues.

In these cases, the New York Court of Appeals did one of three things. It came to the same conclusion as the United States Supreme Court, but on different grounds; it came to the same conclusion and followed the Supreme Court's reasoning; or it refused to follow the Supreme Court and came to a different conclusion based on independent state grounds.*

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* Citations to references in this introduction are available in the paper.
To read the entire paper, open HERE.