Digital Commons Network^™

Why Judges Should Use 18 U.S.C. § 3553 To Assess Prison Sentences Qualitatively In The Context Of Collateral Relief, Luke Doughty

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Criminogenic Risks Of Interrogation, Margareth Etienne, Richard Mcadams

Indiana Law Journal

In the United States, moral minimization is a pervasive police interrogation tactic in which the detective minimizes the moral seriousness and harm of the offense, suggesting that anyone would have done the same thing under the circumstances, and casting blame away from the offender and onto the victim or society. The goal of these minimizations is to reinforce the guilty suspect’s own rationalizations or “neutralizations” of the crime. The official theory—posited in the police training manuals that recommend the tactic—is that minimizations encourage confessions by lowering the guilt or shame of associated with confessing to the crime. Yet the same …

Second Chances In Criminal And Immigration Law, Ingrid V. Eagly

Indiana Law Journal

This Essay publishes the remarks given by Professor Ingrid Eagly at the 2022 Fuchs Lecture at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. The Fuchs Lecture was established in honor of Ralph Follen Fuchs in 2001. Professor Fuchs, who served on the Indiana University law faculty from 1946 until his retirement in 1970, was awarded the title of university professor in recognition of his scholarship, teaching, and public service. In her Fuchs lecture, Professor Eagly explores the growing bipartisan consensus behind “second chance” reforms in the state and federal criminal legal systems. These incremental reforms acknowledge racial bias, correct for past …

Guilty Of Probable Cause: Public Arrest Records And Dignity In The Information Age, Nicholas Thompson

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The United States is exceptional among Western nations in its treatment of criminal records. Today, an estimated one-third of Americans1 bear the “modern equivalent of branding”: the publicly-accessible criminal record.2 Far from remaining locked in digital limbo, these records serve a variety of purposes, from legitimate law enforcement use to extortion against arrestees seeking to scrub their mugshots from a Google search.3 It would be natural to assume that such records result from an individual’s commission of a crime, for which the individual is duly convicted and then marked with the brand of the state for the transgression. But the …

Enhanced Public Defense Improves Pretrial Outcomes And Reduces Racial Disparities, Paul Heaton

Indiana Law Journal

Numerous jurisdictions are working to reform pretrial processes to reduce or eliminate money bail and decrease pretrial detention. Although reforms such as the abandonment of bail schedules or adoption of actuarial risk assessment tools have been widely enacted, the role of defense counsel in the pretrial process has received less attention.

This Article considers an approach to pretrial reform focused on improving the quality of defense counsel. In Philadelphia, a substantial fraction of people facing criminal charges are detained following rapid preliminary hearings where initial release conditions are set by bail magistrates operating with limited information. Beginning in 2017, the …

Rehabilitating Charge Bargaining, Nancy Combs

Indiana Law Journal

Nobody likes plea bargaining. Scholars worldwide have excoriated the practice, calling it coercive and unjust, among other pejorative adjectives. Despite its unpopularity, plea bargaining constitutes a central component of the American criminal justice system, and the United States has exported the practice to a host of countries worldwide. Indeed, plea bargaining has even appeared at international criminal tribunals, created to prosecute genocide and crimes against humanity—the gravest crimes known to humankind. Although all forms of plea bargaining are unpopular, commentators reserve their harshest criticism for charge bargaining because charge bargaining is said to distort the factual basis of the defendant’s …

The Economic Case For Rewards Over Imprisonment, Brian D. Galle

Indiana Law Journal

There seems to be a growing social consensus that the United States imprisons far too many people for far too long. But reform efforts have slowed in the face of a challenging question: How can we reduce reliance on prisons while still discouraging crime, particularly violent crime? Through the 1970s, social scientists believed the answer was an array of what I will call preventive benefits: drug and mental health treatment, housing, and even unconditional cash payments. But early evaluations of these programs failed to find much evidence that they were successful, confirming a then-developing economic theory that predicted the programs …

Authority And The Globalisation Of Inclusion And Exclusion: Author Meets Readers, Hand Lindahl, Christine Bell Prof, Friedrich Kratochwil, Hans-W. Micklitz, Carlos Thiebaut, Bert Van Roermund

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Authority is written against the background of intense resistance to globalization processes by a range of political movements and grassroots organizations. These processes are complex and have a variety of dimensions. One of these is the emergence of global legal orders, which I define, in a rough and ready manner, as relatively autonomous legal orders that claim or aspire to claim global validity for themselves. They too-most obviously the World Trade Organization (WTO)-are the butt of resistance. Whatever its forms and aspirations, resistance to globalization is fueled by their peculiar dynamic. Indeed, emergent global legal orders spawn massive exclusion when …

When Freedom Of Speech Comes At A Cost: A Case Study Of E.S. V. Austria, Rachael Taylor

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In the fall of 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued a decision upholding the criminal conviction of an Austrian national (E.S.) in violation of Austria's Criminal Code against the disparagement of religious doctrines. Her initial conviction in the Austrian court was based on statements she made about the Prophet Muhammad while teaching a series of seminars entitled "Basic Information on Islam." In upholding her conviction, the ECtHR found that there had been no violation of the Austrian's right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (Convention), and …

Flipping The Script On Brady, Ion Meyn

Indiana Law Journal

Brady v. Maryland imposes a disclosure obligation on the prosecutor and, for this

reason, is understood to burden the prosecutor. This Article asks whether Brady also

benefits the prosecutor, and if so, how and to what extent does it accomplish this?

This Article first considers Brady’s structural impact—how the case influenced

broader dynamics of litigation. Before Brady, legislative reform transformed civil

and criminal litigation by providing pretrial information to civil defendants but not

to criminal defendants. Did this disparate treatment comport with due process?

Brady arguably answered this question by brokering a compromise: in exchange for

imposing minor obligations on …

Recidivist Sentencing And The Sixth Amendment, Benjamin E. Adams

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

First Amendment “Harms”, Stephanie H. Barclay

Indiana Law Journal

What role should harm to third parties play in the government’s ability to protect religious rights? The intuitively appealing “harm” principle has animated new theories advanced by scholars who argue that religious exemptions are indefensible whenever they result in cognizable harm to third parties. This third-party harm theory is gaining traction in some circles, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s pending cases in Little Sisters of the Poor and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. While focusing on harm appears at first to provide an appealing, simple, and neutral principle for avoiding other difficult moral questions, the definition of harm …

A Case For Reforming The Anti-Money Laundering Regulatory Regime: How Financial Institutions’ Criminal Reporting Duties Have Created An Unfunded Private Police Force, Christopher Wilkes

Indiana Law Journal

Part I of this Note provides background information outlining the relevant BSA/AML laws that establish financial institutions’ affirmative duties to report financial crimes. Part II analyzes the contours of other laws that create mandatory criminal reporting obligations, including their extent, their underlying justifications, and how stringently government agencies enforce them. Part III demonstrates how financial institutions’ reporting duties are uniquely stringent and punitive compared to those imposed elsewhere in the law, and it questions the justifications of this policy. Lastly, Part IV of this Note argues that the BSA/AML regulatory regime could be reformed to reduce the costs and duties …

The Legal Fiction Of The Right To Defense In The Colombian Criminal Justice System, Manuel Iturralde

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In the first section of the article, I will discuss Omar's case to show why he did not have a fair trial, and particularly how his rights to access to justice and to defense were infringed, both by the public defense he was provided and by the judges that decided his case.

In the second section, I will show that Omar's case is a tellingillustration of the features of the Colombian criminal justice system, which systematically and disproportionately sentences and imprisons marginalized and poor people-in great measure because they lack the financial resources to pay for better and more motivated …

Revenge Porn And The Aclu’S Inconsistent Approach, Elena Lentz

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

The Noisy "Silent Witness": The Misperception And Misuse Of Criminal Video Evidence, Aaron M. Williams

Indiana Law Journal

This Note examines recent developments in the research of situational video evidence biases. Part I examines the current and growing body of psychological research into the various situational biases that can affect the reliability of video evidence and the gaps in this research that require further attention from researchers and legal academics. Because these biases do not “operate in a vacuum,” Part I also examines some of the recent and exciting research into the interaction between situational and dispositional biases. Part II examines the development of camera and video processing technology and its limitations as a means of mitigating such …

Gender Disparities In Plea Bargaining, Carlos Berdejo

Indiana Law Journal

Across wide-ranging contexts, academic literature and the popular press have identified pervasive gender disparities favoring men over women in society. One area in which gender disparities have conversely favored women is the criminal justice system. Most of the empirical research examining gender disparities in criminal case outcomes has focused on judges’ sentencing decisions. Few studies have assessed disparities in the steps leading up to a defendant’s conviction, where various actors make choices that constrain judges’ ultimate sentencing discretion. This Article addresses this gap by examining gender disparities in the plea-bargaining process. The results presented in this Article reveal significant gender …

Fictional Pleas, Thea Johnson

Indiana Law Journal

A fictional plea is one in which a defendant pleads guilty to a crime he has not committed, with the knowledge of the defense attorney, prosecutor, and judge. With fictional pleas, the plea of conviction is detached from the original factual allegations against the defendant. As criminal justice actors become increasingly troubled by the impact of collateral consequences on defendants, the fictional plea serves as an appealing response to this concern. It allows the parties to achieve parallel aims: the prosecutor holds the defendant accountable in the criminal system, while the defendant avoids devastating noncriminal consequences. In this context, the …

Opioid Policing, Barbara Fedders

Indiana Law Journal

This Article identifies and explores a new, local law enforcement approach to alleged drug offenders. Initially limited to a few police departments, but now expanding rapidly across the country, this innovation takes one of two primary forms. The first is a diversion program through which officers refer alleged offenders to community-based social services rather than initiate criminal proceedings. The second form offers legal amnesty as well as priority access to drug detoxification programs to users who voluntarily relinquish illicit drugs. Because the upsurge in addiction to —and death from—opioids has spurred this innovation, I refer to it as “opioid policing.” …

Lead Us Not Into Temptation: A Response To Barbara Fedders’S “Opioid Policing”, Anna Roberts

Indiana Law Journal

In “Opioid Policing,”1 Barbara Fedders contributes to the law review literature the first joint scholarly analysis of two drug policing innovations: Seattle’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program and the Angel Initiative, which originated in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Even while welcoming the innovation and inspiration of these programs, she remains clear-eyed about the need to scrutinize their potential downsides. Her work is crucially timed. While still just a few years old, LEAD has been replicated many times2 and appears likely to be replicated still further—and to be written about much more. Inspired by Fedders’s call for a balanced take, this Response …

We Are All Farkhunda: An Examination Of The Treatment Of Women Within Afghanistan's Formal Legal System, Ashley Lenderman

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

In this paper, I will examine three cases of violence against women that went through the Afghan formal legal system: the case of Farkhunda, the Paghman district gang rape case, and the case of Sahar Gul. In the first Part, I will discuss the formal legal system framework on which the cases are based. In the second Part, I will discuss the cases in detail. In the third Part, I will describe neo-liberal, reformist, and neo-fundamentalist approaches to interpretation of Islamic law, and I will then draw out pieces of the decisions from the three cases that closely match these …

Unusual: The Death Penalty For Inadvertent Killing, Guyora Binder, Brenner M. Fissell, Robert Weisberg

Indiana Law Journal

Can a burglar who frightens the occupant of a house, causing a fatal heart attack, be executed? More generally, does the Eighth Amendment permit capital punishment of one who causes death inadvertently? This scenario is possible in the significant minority of American jurisdictions that permit capital punishment for felony murder without requiring a mental state of intent to kill or reckless indifference to human life. Thus far, Eighth Amendment death penalty jurisprudence has required a culpable mental state of recklessness for execution of accomplices in a fatal felony, but has not yet addressed the culpability required for execution of the …

The Rome Statute: Global Justice And The Asymmetries Of Recognition, Hans Lindahl

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Given the emergence of challenges that are increasingly global in nature, and given the irreducible contingency of state borders, it would seem that justice must become global justice: justice that takes shape through a legal order that holds for all of humanity and everywhere. But is justice for all and everywhere possible? At issue, in this question, is not a rearguard defense of the state and state law. Instead, the question concerns the globality of global law and global justice. Is any legal order possible, global or otherwise, that organizes itself as an inside without an outside, that is, which …

The Prison To Homelessness Pipeline: Criminal Record Checks, Race, And Disparate Impact, Valerie Schneider

Indiana Law Journal

Study after study has shown that securing housing upon release from prison is critical to reducing the likelihood of recidivism,1 yet those with criminal records— a population that disproportionately consists of racial minorities—are routinely denied access to housing, even if their offense was minor and was shown to have no bearing on whether the applicant would be likely to be a successful renter. In April of 2016, the Office of General Counsel for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued much anticipated guidance dealing directly with the racially disparate impact of barring those with criminal records …

Conflicting Approaches To Addressing Ex-Offender Unemployment: The Work Opportunity Tax Credit And Ban The Box, Katherine English

Indiana Law Journal

Each year, roughly 700,000 prisoners are released from their six-by-eight-foot cells and back into society. Sadly, though, many of these ex-prisoners are not truly free. Upon returning to society, they often encounter several challenges that prevent them from resuming a normal, reintegrated lifestyle. For many, the difficulties associated with reentry prove to be too much, and within a short three years of their release, two-thirds of ex-offenders are rearrested, reconvicted, and thrown back into the familiar six-by-eight-foot cell. Recidivism might appear to be entirely the exoffenders’ fault, but ex-offenders are not solely responsible for these recidivism rates or the solution …

Collateral Visibility: A Socio-Legal Study Of Police Body Camera Adoption, Privacy, And Public Disclosure In Washington State, Bryce Clayton Newell

Indiana Law Journal

Law enforcement use of body-worn cameras has become a subject of significant public and scholarly debate in recent years. This Article presents findings from a study of the legal and social implications of body-worn camera adoption by two police departments in Washington State. In particular, this study focuses on the public disclosure of body-worn camera footage under Washington State’s public records act, state privacy law, and original empirical findings related to officer attitudes about—and perceptions of—the impact of these laws on their work, their own personal privacy, and the privacy of the citizens they serve. The law in Washington State …

Measuring The Creative Plea Bargin, Thea Johnson

Indiana Law Journal

A great deal of criminal law scholarship and practice turns on whether a defendant gets a good deal through plea bargaining. But what is a good deal? And how do defense attorneys secure such deals? Much scholarship measures plea bargains by one metric: how many years the defendant receives at sentencing. In the era of collateral consequences, however, this is no longer an adequate metric as it misses a world of bargaining that happens outside of the sentence. Through empirical re-search, this Article examines the measure of a good plea and the work that goes into negotiating such a plea. …

"A Choice Of Weapons": The X-Men And The Metaphor For Approaches To Racial Equality, Gregory S. Parks, Matthew W. Hughey

Indiana Law Journal

The authors explore The X-Men comic as a metaphor for both racial discrimination in the United States and strategies for addressing such discrimination. In consideration of the recent rise in the shooting of people of color, particular African American men and women, at the hands of law enforcement officers, an increasingly vocal and aggrieved segment of the white populace in the form of the “alt right,” and a presidential candidate that both implicitly and explicitly deploys “law and order” and racist appeals for particular social and political changes, we appear to once again stand at an important crossroads in American …

Indiana’S Texting-While-Driving Ban: Why Is It Not Working And How Could It Be Better?, Emma Gormley

Indiana Law Journal

This Note will identify and examine obstacles standing in the way of more effective enforcement of Indiana’s texting while driving ban and make recommendations on how to achieve greater success. Part I will take a closer look at what makes texting while driving so dangerous, situating it within the larger context of distracted driving. Part II will then focus on Indiana’s legislative response in particular, breaking down the texting-while-driving laws and discussing impediments to widespread and consistent enforcement. Part III explores alternative strategies for combating those impediments to enforcement, drawing from the approaches of other areas of law and extralegal …

Method Of Attack: A Supplemental Model For Hate Crime Analysis, Angela D. Moore

Indiana Law Journal

On October 28, 2009, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA) was signed into law by President Barack Obama. Two years later, between September and November of 2011, members of a Bergholz, Ohio, Amish community allegedly carried out five attacks in which they forcibly restrained, and cut the hair and beards of, members of other Amish communities. In September of 2012, a jury rendered a verdict in United States v. Mullet and found sixteen members of the Bergholz community—including Samuel Mullet, bishop of the community—guilty of HCPA violations. These were the first convictions for religion-based …