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Full-Text Articles in Law
Quit Using Acquittals: The Unconstitutionality And Immorality Of Acquitted-Conduct Sentencing, Brenna Nouray
Quit Using Acquittals: The Unconstitutionality And Immorality Of Acquitted-Conduct Sentencing, Brenna Nouray
Pepperdine Law Review
This Comment examines the phenomenon of acquitted-conduct sentencing—a practice that allows a sentencing judge to enhance a criminal defendant’s sentence due to conduct for which he has already been acquitted. Seventeen-year-old Dayonta McClinton is one of many criminal defendants who have unjustly suffered at the hands of this practice when he received a thirteen-year enhancement because of conduct for which he already received a verdict of not guilty from a jury. This Comment argues that acquitted-conduct sentencing is unconstitutional, as it violates both the reasonable doubt standard required under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the jury …
The Nonexistent Speedy Trial Right, Colleen Cullen
The Nonexistent Speedy Trial Right, Colleen Cullen
Pepperdine Law Review
The United States Constitution and all fifty states guarantee a speedy trial right for individuals accused of crimes. The controlling United States Supreme Court case, decided over fifty years ago, described the Sixth Amendment as a fundamental right with Fourteenth Amendment Due Process implications. Although the right to a speedy trial is a universally recognized right, this Article compellingly demonstrates the right is actually nonexistent throughout the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and exacerbated this previously unrecognized problem in courthouses across the country, which has led to news outlets finally covering the issue of the nonexistent speedy trial. This …
Washington’S Young Offenders: O’Dell Demands A Change To Sentencing Guidelines, Erika Vranizan
Washington’S Young Offenders: O’Dell Demands A Change To Sentencing Guidelines, Erika Vranizan
Seattle University Law Review
This Note argues that the O’Dell decision was a watershed moment for criminal justice reform. It argues that the reasoning in O’Dell should be seized upon by the legislature to take action to remediate instances in which defendants are legal adults but do not possess the cognitive characteristics of an adult sufficient to justify adult punishment. Given both the scientific impossibility of identifying a precise age at which characteristics of youthfulness end and adulthood begins and the Court’s repeated recognition that these very factors impact culpability, the current approach to sentencing young offenders aged eighteen to twenty-five as adults simply …
Cashing In On Convicts: Privatization, Punishment, And The People, Laura I. Appleman
Cashing In On Convicts: Privatization, Punishment, And The People, Laura I. Appleman
Utah Law Review
For-profit prisons, jails, and alternative corrections present a disturbing commodification of the criminal justice system. Though part of a modern trend, privatized corrections has well-established roots traceable to slavery, Jim Crow, and current racially-based inequities. This monetizing of the physical incarceration and regulation of human bodies has had deleterious effects on offenders, communities, and the proper functioning of punishment in our society. Criminal justice privatization severs an essential link between the people and criminal punishment. When we remove the imposition of punishment from the people and delegate it to private actors, we sacrifice the core criminal justice values of expressive, …
Beyond The Money: Expected (And Unexpected) Consequences Of America's War On Drugs, Cynthia Brown
Beyond The Money: Expected (And Unexpected) Consequences Of America's War On Drugs, Cynthia Brown
Lincoln Memorial University Law Review Archive
The purpose of this paper is to provide a high-level survey of our nation’s prohibition policies within the context of the costs of the law enforcement efforts upholding those policies. The discussion will offer a cursory review of the economic expense of the war on drugs with tangential coverage of the constitutional, institutional and intangible expenses that are inseparable from an assessment of the costs of America’s drug control efforts. Part I provides a historical review of illicit drug use in the United States, while Part II supplies the evolution of the country’s efforts to codify its drug control policies. …
Exonerating The Innocent: Pretrial Innocence Procedures, Tim Bakken, Lewis M. Steel
Exonerating The Innocent: Pretrial Innocence Procedures, Tim Bakken, Lewis M. Steel
NYLS Law Review
No abstract provided.
O.P.P.: How "Occupy's" Race-Based Privilege May Improve Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence For All, Lenese C. Herbert
O.P.P.: How "Occupy's" Race-Based Privilege May Improve Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence For All, Lenese C. Herbert
Seattle University Law Review
This Article submits that Occupy’s race problem could, ironically, prove to be a solution if protesters grow more serious about exposing the injury of political subordination and systems of privilege that adhere to the criminal justice system. Privilege is a “systemic conferral of benefit and advantage [as a result of] affiliation, conscious or not and chosen or not, to the dominant side of a power system.” Accordingly, now that police mistreatment affects them personally, Occupy may finally help kill a fictitious Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that ignores oppression through improper policing based on racial stigma. Occupy may also help usher in …
A Mandatory Right To Counsel For The Material Witness, Susan Kling
A Mandatory Right To Counsel For The Material Witness, Susan Kling
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This Note argues that a uniform statute establishing a mandatory right to counsel should be adopted, at both the state and federal levels, to afford to the material witness protection that the Constitution fails to provide. Part I describes the general scope of the problem and concludes that neither the federal government, the individual states, nor the United States Constitution provides the material witness with a mandatory right to counsel. Part II argues that the material witness should have a statutorily mandated right to counsel. A mandatory right to counsel should be extended to the material witness both for the …