Wikipedia:Peer review/Berghuis v. Thompkins/archive1

Berghuis v. Thompkins

This peer review discussion has been closed.
Berghuis v. Thompkins was promoted to GA in June 2010. The article is stable and the write-up seems comprehensive, sourced to a high standard, and balanced. Other than technical matters related to law articles and any improvement to "brilliant prose" it's not easy to see what might be improved in terms of actual content. In relation to MOS and subtleties of presentation there's probably things to do though.

Some input on ways to improve the article, how ready (or otherwise) it is for FAC, and tips on what more is needed would be appreciated.

Thanks for your help,

FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 05:31, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Comments from Jappalang

• Dablink (tool in the box on the right of this peer review page) shows one disambiguation link; please fix it.

Lede

• "Berghuis v. Thompkins, 560 U.S. ___ (2010) (docket 08-1470) ..."

  Why are there three underscores between U.S. and (2010)?

• "... in which the Court considered the position of a suspect who understands his or her right to remain silent under Miranda v. Arizona and is aware he or she has the right to remain silent, but does not explicitly invoke or waive the right. The Court held that unless and until the suspect actually stated that he was relying on that right, his subsequent voluntary statements could be used in court and police could continue to interact with (or question) him. The mere act of remaining silent was, on its own, insufficient to imply the suspect has invoked his or her rights. Furthermore, a voluntary reply even after lengthy silence could be construed as implying a waiver."

  Suggestion: "... in which the Court held that unless a suspect declares he is exercising his right to remain silent (per Miranda v. Arizona), his subsequent voluntary statements can be used in court and he is subject to further interactions with the police. A suspect's Miranda rights cannot be invoked by remaining silent in the presence of police; a voluntary statement made after a lengthy silence can be construed as a waiver of said rights."

• "The dissent, authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, argued that Miranda and other previous cases had required a claimed waiver of a constitutional right to be shown more strongly, especially in light of a lengthy interrogation with a possible "compelling influence" during which the accused had remained almost entirely silent for almost 3 hours prior to the self-incriminating statement."

  Suggestion: "The dissent, authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, argued that in Miranda and other previous cases, the waiving of a constitional right must be clearly expressed. She and her peers were not convinced that such a right was waived by a suspect who remained mostly silent during 3 hours of interrogation before making a self-incriminating statement under a possible "compelling influence"."

Media response

• Why is it in point form? The quotes used also seem to be overly long. The whole subsection could perhaps be written with paragraphs based on the themes/points in those articles quoted.

Images

• File:Anthony Kennedy Official.jpg is a copyright violation; Reid, the photographer, is not a government employee.

General

• (De-)capitalization of quoted text do not need to be encased with square braces.

• Several sections/paragraphs of text are not cited to a source. For example, last part of Legal background, State court appeal and federal court habeas corpus proceedings, etc.

• Is the article using spaced hyphens or spaced endashes when separating clauses? I believe the Manual of Style calls for either spaced or unspaced emdashes.

• Why are some quotes in italics?

• I find there is much lawyerly text (redundant or hard-to-understand wordings) in this article. It might make sense to practitioners of the law—exact and precise details and exclusions to preclude any wrangling of intent of the wording; however, I believe it overloads the comprehension of the layman.

• There are a lot of quotes in this article. I hazard that it was borne to a desire not to misinterprete the sources but it turns the article in my view into more a collection of opinion pieces than an overview of the subject. Can these quotes not be broken down, analyzed and rewritten (i.e. regrouped and reorganised based on the sources)?

-- Jappalang (talk) 09:01, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for these. I'll work on them shortly. I've fixed the dab link, and the copyvio image. Some of the others need research or checking first. FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 11:05, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

FT2, are you also a Commons administrator? The copyrighted revisions of the image should be deleted, not just overloaded with a valid "free" image. Jappalang (talk) 14:58, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

No, I'm not a commons admin. I'm not much involved in image work per se beyond an understanding of the key aspects of copyright, licensing, etc, and creating/sourcing/uploading images which I am reasonably sure are free or (for Wikipedia) valid fair use. I left a note at Commons help desk asking for someone to do whatever cleanup is needed. I've explained the action taken so far; whoever handles it will surely spot the deletion needed and clean up the pages concerned properly. FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 15:16, 8 November 2010 (UTC)