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Tolling Justice, Anjelica Hendricks

Articles

Police officers commit crimes. All too often, however, they are not prosecuted. For decades, the conventional explanation has been that unprosecuted police crimes are the product of human choices: prosecutors who shield the police, unions that immunize their members from accountability, and police themselves for refusing to condemn their colleagues. Though these explanations play a role in the phenomenon, they are incomplete.

This Article shows that there is another reason why police officers frequently escape criminal accountability: statutes of limitations. Using a hand-built, original dataset of 838 likely police crimes, I find that statutes of limitations prevented prosecutors from bringing …

"No One Else Was In The Room Where It Happened": Ensuring The Careful Use Of Accomplice-Witness Testimony Without Resorting To Corroboration Requirements, Ethan Cohen

University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Policing The Police: An Analysis Of The Citizens Police Oversight Commission, Devontae W. Torriente

University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Rethinking The Balance Of Interests In Non-Exculpatory Defenses, Paul Robinson, Jeffrey Seaman, Muhammad Sarahne

Articles

"Most criminal law defenses serve the criminal law’s goal of shielding blameless defendants from liability. Justification defenses, such as self-defense and law enforcement authority, exculpate on the ground that the defendant’s conduct, on balance, does not violate a societal norm. Excuse defenses, such as insanity and duress, exculpate on the ground that, while the defendant may well have violated a societal norm, it was done blamelessly. That is, it is the excusing conditions, not the defendant, that is to blame. In contrast, a third group of general defenses, what has been called “non-exculpatory defenses,” bar liability in instances where the …

Bail At The Founding, Sandra G. Mayson, Kellen R. Funk

Articles

How did criminal bail work in the founding era? This question has become pressing as bail, and bail reform, have attracted increasing attention, in part because history is thought to bear on the meaning of bail-related provisions in state and federal constitutions. To date, however, there has been no thorough account of bail at the Founding. This Article begins to correct the deficit in our collective memory by describing bail law and practice in the founding era, from approximately 1790 to 1810. In order to give a full account, we surveyed a wide range of materials, including founding-era statutes, case …

Child Sacrifices: The Precarity Of Minors' Autonomy And Bodily Integrity After Dobbs, Teri D. Baxter

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law

No abstract provided.

Original Understanding, Punishment, And Collateral Consequences, Brian M. Murray

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law

Can Founding-era understandings of punishment limit the reach of punitive state activity, specifically with respect to automatic collateral consequences? This Article begins to tackle that question. For over a century, the Supreme Court has struggled to define the boundaries of crime and punishment. Under current doctrine, a deprivation constitutes punishment when it furthers a legislatively assigned penal purpose. A retributive purpose is sufficient, whereas traditionally instrumentalist purposes, such as deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation, are not. Scholars have criticized this framework for several reasons, highlighting its jurisprudential assumptions, philosophical confusion, historical inconsistency, unworkability, complexity, and failure to reflect the essentially punitive …

An Absent "No" Is Not A "Yes": A Legal Analysis Of Consent In Japan's Amended Penal Code And International Rape Legislation Standards, Larissa Truchan

University of Pennsylvania Asian Law Review

On June 16, 2023, the Japanese government passed a law to partially amend the Penal Code that explicitly outlines eight scenarios prosecutable as the crime of rape that make “it difficult for the victim to form, express, or fulfill the intention not to consent.” This article will reveal that the June 2023 amendment does not criminalize all “non-consensual sexual intercourse,” as its text suggests, but is premised on defining coercive circumstances that may interfere with a victim’s presumed duty to demonstrate their “intention not to consent.” As a result, Japanese courts will continue to possess the subjective power to determine …

"The Key-Stone To The Arch": Unlocking Section 13'S Original Meaning, Kevin Bendesky

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania holds that Section 13 of the State’s constitution, which prohibits all “cruel punishments,” is coextensive with the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits only punishments that are both “cruel and unusual.” Rather than analyze the state provision independently, the court defers to the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Eighth Amendment. This, says the court, is because Pennsylvania history does not provide evidence that the Commonwealth’s prohibition differs from the federal one. And without that historical basis, the court believes it is bound by federal precedent. This is mistaken.

History reveals that Pennsylvanians had a distinct, original …

The Federal War On Guns: A Story In Four-And-A-Half Acts, Brandon E. Beck

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law

“History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.”

Beginning in the early 1990s, the Executive Branch took a novel approach to the enforcement of federal firearms offenses. It replaced traditional notions of restraint with a newfound willingness to exercise its power broadly, leading to a sharp increase in the number of federal firearms offenders that continues today. A recent development, however, threatens to dismantle the core of the federal firearms scheme. Decided in 2022, the …

Reassessing The Rule Of Law Legacy Of The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Randle C. Defalco

University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law

The focal point of transitional justice efforts in Cambodia have been recently-completed criminal prosecutions at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (“ECCC”). Like other international criminal justice institutions, the ECCC has been framed as not only a criminal court, but also as an institution capable of helping achieve various transitional justice goals such as improving the rule of law and respect for human rights domestically in Cambodia. This Article identifies troubling connections between the ECCC experience and the Cambodian government’s increasing use of rule by law tactics in recent years. The Article identifies two related ways in which …

Local In A Peculiar Way: The Police Force In American Law, Nadav Shoked

University of Pennsylvania Law Review

This Article sets out to pinpoint the locus of control over the police. Running the police force is one of the most important tasks assigned to local governments in America. Yet heretofore policing has not been analyzed through the lens of local government law. Through a review of state statutes, this Article reveals that the reigning notion that the police are local oversimplifies a complex legal reality. Local governments are mostly empowered to choose to establish (or not establish) a police force and to define the force’s size and role. However, they are mostly not afforded concomitant full powers over …

Outcome Reasons And Process Reasons In Normative Constitutional Theory, Larry Solum

University of Pennsylvania Law Review

Constitutional theory is a mess. Disagreements about originalism and living constitutionalism have become intractable. Constitutional theorists make some arguments that seem clearly fallacious and advance proposals that are pie in the sky. One of the reasons for the mess is an overreliance by constitutional theorists on “outcome reasons,” justifications that rely on the theorist’s beliefs about what outcomes are good and what outcomes are bad. This outcome-drive approach is exemplified by the so-called “canonical cases” argument, which evaluates positions in normative constitutional theory on the basis of their counterfactual implications for a handful of prior decisions of the Supreme Court. …

Losing The Right To Counsel: Exploring And Reforming Waiver By Conduct And Forfeiture In State Courts, Carolyn T.A. Hartwick

University of Pennsylvania Law Review

Under the Sixth Amendment, a criminal defendant has both the right to counsel and the right to represent himself. These rights are mutually exclusive, and the default right is the right to counsel; to exercise the right to self-represent, a defendant must “knowingly and intelligently” waive the right to counsel and its attendant benefits. Typically, a defendant who self-represents does so after expressly invoking that right and affirmatively rejecting the right to counsel.

But trial courts frequently confront defendants whose conduct seems to abuse the right to counsel and confuses the exercise of their Sixth Amendment rights. This conduct ranges …

Implicit Bias, Structural Bias, And Implications For Law And Policy, Goodwin Liu

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law

No abstract provided.

The Failed Promise Of Installment Fines, Beth Colgan, Jean Galbraith

University of Pennsylvania Law Review

n the 1970s, the Supreme Court prohibited the then-common practice of incarcerating criminal defendants because they lacked the money to immediately pay off their fines and fees. The Court suggested that states could instead put defendants on installment payment plans. As this Article shows, this suggestion came against a backdrop of impressive success stories about installment fines—including earlier experiments in which selected defendants had reliably paid off modest fines through carefully calibrated payment plans. Yet as this Article also shows, installment fines practices of today differ significantly from those early experiments, as lawmakers have increased fine amounts, added on fees, …

Systemic Failure To Appear In Court, Lindsay Graef, Sandra G. Mayson, Aurelie Ouss, Megan Stevenson

University of Pennsylvania Law Review

This Article aims to reorient the conversation around “failure-to-appear” (FTA) in criminal court. Recent policy and scholarship have addressed FTA mostly as a problem of criminal defendants in connection with questions about how bail systems should operate. But ten years of data from Philadelphia reveal a striking fact: it is not defendants who most frequently fail to appear but rather the other parties necessary for a criminal proceeding—witnesses and lawyers. Between 2010 and 2020, an essential witness or private attorney failed to appear for at least one hearing in 53% of all cases, compared to a 19% FTA rate for …

Equal Protection Against Policing, Evan Bernick

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law

No abstract provided.

Caged Birds And Those That Hear Their Songs: Effects Of Race And Sex In South Carolina Parole Hearings, David M. N. Garavito, Amelia Courtney Hritz, John H. Blume

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change

When most incarcerated persons go before the parole board, they hope that the decision whether to release them will be based on their institutional record; put differently, that the board will consider the use of opportunities available in prison, rehabilitation, and likelihood of success outside the carceral environment. However, numerous persons with excellent records and reentry plans are denied parole every year. Why? The actual variables that influence parole board decision making are often a mystery; parole rejections are left unexplained or opaque. Empirical research examining what drives parole outcomes is scarce, yet this research is necessary given the power …

Chaotic Childhoods, Stephanos Bibas

Articles

Rob Henderson’s breakout memoir, Troubled, gives us a window on troubled youth. Henderson, a brilliant young psychologist, illumines how harmful childhood instability is by reflecting on his own experience. He never knew his father, was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, and bounced around foster care. After squandering much of his early education and drowning his rage in alcohol, drugs, fights, and vandalism, he made his way through the Air Force to Yale and now Cambridge. But few of his friends escaped the wounds from their childhoods; many wound up unemployed, in prison, or dead. As an outsider to the elites …