Law Commons^™

Grandma Got Arrested: Police, Excessive Force, And People With Dementia, Rashmi Goel

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Recent events have shone a light on the particular vulnerability of people with dementia to police violence. Police are arresting people with dementia and using excessive force to do it—drawing their firearms, deploying tasers, and breaking bones.

To date, little attention has been paid to the burgeoning number of people with dementia, one of society’s most vulnerable populations, and their experiences with the criminal justice system. This Article examines how dementia leads people to engage in activity that appears criminal (shoplifting (forgetting to pay), and trespass (wandering), for instance) and the disproportionate response of police. In several cases where people …

The Broken Fourth Amendment Oath, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Fourth Amendment requires that warrants be supported by “Oath or affirmation.” Under current doctrine, a police officer may swear the oath to obtain a warrant merely by repeating the account of an informant. This Article shows, however, that the Fourth Amendment, as originally understood, required that the real accuser with personal knowledge swear the oath.

That real-accuser requirement persisted for nearly two centuries. Almost all federal courts and most state courts from 1850 to 1960 held that the oath, by its very nature, required a witness with personal knowledge. Only in 1960 did the Supreme Court hold in Jones …

Pardoning Dogs, Sarah Schindler

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In 1994, the Governor of New Jersey pardoned a dog. In 2017, the Governor of Maine did the same. Each of these dogs had been ordered to be euthanized after killing another dog. While the Governor of New Jersey relied on the property status of the dog in issuing her order, the Governor of Maine relied on his standard pardon power, despite the fact that the being to be pardoned was a dog rather than a human. Both of these cases generated a great deal of popular press and attention, and a few months ago, a New York state senator …

Not All Violence In Relationships Is “Domestic Violence", Tamara L. Kuennen

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The article proceeds in four parts. Part I describes in more detail the work of Donileen Loseke, and Part II applies her methodology by taking stock of the constructs as they currently exist. Part III examines social science data available since Loseke published her study, demonstrating that the current construct reflects, in reality, only a subset of relationship violence and a subset of the people who experience it. Part IV examines whether the main service designed to help people experiencing relationship violence today—law—perpetuates, rather than challenges norms. I argue that it does the former, because legal decision makers, like the …

Criminal Trespass And Computer Crime, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) criminalizes the simple act of trespass upon a computer—intentional access without authorization. The law sweeps too broadly, but the courts and scholars seeking to fix it look in the wrong place. They uniformly focus on the term “without authorization” when instead they should focus on the statute’s mens rea. On a conceptual level, courts and scholars understand that the CFAA is a criminal law, of course, but fail to interpret it comprehensively as one.

This Article begins the first sustained treatment of the CFAA as a criminal law, with a full elaboration of …

The Fourth Amendment Inventory As A Check On Digital Searches, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Police and federal agents generally must obtain a warrant to search the tens of thousands of devices they seize each year. But once they have a warrant, courts afford these officers broad leeway to search the entire device, every file and folder, all metadata and deleted data, even if in search of only one incriminating file. Courts avow great reverence for the privacy of personal information under the Fourth Amendment but then claim there is no way to limit where an officer might find the target files, or know where the suspect may have hidden them.

These courts have a …

What Am I Really Saying When I Open My Smartphone: A Response To Prof. Kerr, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In his forthcoming article in the Texas Law Review, Compelled Decryption and the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Orin S. Kerr addresses a common question confronting courts. If a court orders a suspect or defendant to enter her password to open a smartphone or other device as part of a law enforcement investigation, does that order violate the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination?

To answer this question, Kerr appropriately looks by analogy to existing Fifth Amendment case law as applied to document subpoenas, the “act of production” doctrine, and its mysterious cousin, the “foregone conclusion” doctrine. From these materials, he gleans a …

Why Courts Fail To Protect Privacy: Race, Age, Bias, And Technology, Bernard Chao, Catherine Durso, Ian Farrell, Christopher Robertson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable “searches and seizures,” but in the digital age of stingray devices and IP tracking, what constitutes a search or seizure? The Supreme Court has held that the threshold question depends on and reflects the “reasonable expectations” of ordinary members of the public concerning their own privacy. For example, the police now exploit the “third party” doctrine to access data held by email and cell phone providers, without securing a warrant, on the Supreme Court’s intuition that the public has no expectation of privacy in that information. Is that assumption correct? If judges’ intuitions about …

Intimate Partner Violence & Men’S Professional Sports: Advancing The Ball, Chelsea Augelli, Tamara L. Kuennen

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article examines how men'sprofessional sports leagues treat domestic violence committed by players. Over the past twenty years, but particularly over the last five, the public has criticized, and the media has shone a spotlight on, the big leagues' ignoring of the issue. Many call for parity between how the criminal justice system treats the issue of domestic violence and how the leagues should treat it, arguing for a zero-tolerance approach. This article applies lessons learned by feminist law and policy makers and legal scholars in the development of the larger justice system response to domestic violence to the nascent …

Unlocking The Fifth Amendment: Passwords And Encrypted Devices, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Each year, law enforcement seizes thousands of electronic devices — smartphones, laptops, and notebooks — that it cannot open without the suspect’s password. Without this password, the information on the device sits completely scrambled behind a wall of encryption. Sometimes agents will be able to obtain the information by hacking, discovering copies of data on the cloud, or obtaining the password voluntarily from the suspects themselves. But when they cannot, may the government compel suspects to disclose or enter their password?

This Article considers the Fifth Amendment protection against compelled disclosures of passwords — a question that has split and …

Who Should Own Police Body Camera Videos?, Laurent Sacharoff, Sarah Lustbader

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Numerous cities, states, and localities have adopted police body camera programs to enhance police accountability in the wake of repeated instances of police misconduct, as well as recent reports of more deep-seated police problems. These body camera programs hold great promise to achieve accountability, often backed by millions of dollars of federal grants.

But so far, this promise of accountability has gone largely unrealized, in part because police departments exercise near-total control over body camera programs and the videos themselves. In fact, the police view these programs chiefly as a tool of ordinary law enforcement rather than accountability — as …

Conspiracy As Contract, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article considers the central concept of criminal conspiracy — the agreement. It shows how both courts and scholars have almost entirely failed to define it. Even more surprisingly, neither discusses how “agreement” in criminal conspiracy compares with the agreement in contract law. Instead, courts have diluted the agreement requirement by substituting “mutual understanding” or “slight connection,” leading to uncertainty, unfairness, and a profusion of conspiracy convictions for mere presence or association.

This article argues courts should define agreement, and do so as an exchange of promises between the conspirators to commit a crime. An exchange of promises meets the …

Panel On Problematizing Assumptions About Gender Violence (Transcript), Rashmi Goel, Tamara Love, Elizabeth Macdowell, Adele Morrison

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Transcript of a Panel session at the CONVERGE! Conference on problematizing assumptions about gender violence.

Domestic Violence And The Confrontation Clause: The Case For A Prompt Post-Arrest Confrontation Hearing, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Part I and Part II of this article discuss the consequences of Crawford v. Washington for domestic violence victims and detail the problem of domestic violence in America, including the current prosecution strategies and challenges in domestic violence cases. Part III reviews the evolution of confrontation law jurisprudence. Part IV sets forth a proposed Crawford-compliant procedure that also protects domestic violence victims. Part V addresses anticipated objections to the prompt-post arrest confrontation hearing.

Love Matters, Tamara L. Kuennen

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Love matters to women in abusive relationships. Consequently, matters of love should mean something to both the legal regime redressing intimate partner violence (“IPV”) and to feminist legal scholars seeking to reform the same. Currently the law ignores matters of love by conditioning legal remedies on the immediate termination of the intimate relationship by the victim. Feminist legal scholars unwittingly ignore love by failing to be sufficiently specific about the type of abuse we most wish to eradicate: coercive control. This is a pattern of acts—both violent and nonviolent—in which one partner seeks to control and dominate the personhood and …

Recognizing The Right To Petition For Victims Of Domestic Violence, Tamara L. Kuennen

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Like any citizen, a victim of domestic violence (DV) may call the police for help when she needs it. And yet, when a victim calls the police, she not only seeks law enforcement assistance but also invokes her constitutional right to seek one of the most fundamental services the government can provide—protection from harm. That right, recently described by the Supreme Court as “essential to freedom,” is the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” guaranteed by the First Amendment. This Article argues that a combination of law and policy initiatives produces negative collateral consequences for DV …

Miranda’S Hidden Right, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

When the Court in Miranda v. Arizona applied the Fifth Amendment “right to remain silent” to the stationhouse, it also created an inherent contradiction that has bedeviled Miranda cases since. That is, the Court in Miranda said that a suspect can waive her right to remain silent but also that she must invoke it. Numerous courts have repeated this incantation, including most recently last summer in Berghuis v. Thompkins. But how can both be true about the same right? Either the suspect has the right and can waive it or does not yet enjoy it and must therefore invoke it. …

Honest Services After Skilling: Judicial, Prosecutorial And Legislative Responses, Iris E. Bennett, Jessie K. Liu, Cynthia J. Robertson, Govind C. Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In Skilling v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court substantially narrowed the reach of the “honest services fraud” statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1346, by holding that it applies only to “bribery and kickback schemes,” not to “undisclosed self-dealing by a public official or private employee.” Skilling v. United States, 130 S. Ct. 2896 (2010). Two companion cases also were decided the same day. See Black v. United States, 130 S. Ct. 2963 (2010); Weyhrauch v. United States, 130 S. Ct. 2971 (2010). These decisions have major significance for federal fraud prosecutions.

Private Relationships And Public Problems: Applying Principles Of Relational Contract Theory To Domestic Violence, Tamara L. Kuennen

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This Article maps out a new theoretical critique of no-drop prosecution policies, the criminal justice system’s predominant approach to domestic violence. No-drop rules compel prosecutors to make decisions about whether to pursue charges against a batterer without regard to the victim’s wishes. When the law mandates this approach, it not only enforces the criminal law, but also effectively terminates the relationship between the victim and her partner. This blunt response to what is often a complex situation indiscriminately dispenses with the many reasons a victim may want or need to preserve her intimate relationship. While numerous scholars have grappled with …

Delinquent Or Distracted?: Attention Deficit Disorder And The Construction Of The Juvenile Offender, Rashmi Goel

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

William and Billy, 1 two boys, each 13 years old, appear in juvenile court. Neither has any criminal history. Both are doing poorly in school. Both have been cited for truancy in the past. Both are appearing on assault charges arising out of schoolyard fights. If we could peer into their brains, we would find that both have the same brain chemistry, characteristic of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). 2 In the end, the court finds one delinquent, and the other merely distracted. The court finds one in need of confinement, and the other in need of care. Two different …

Beyond A Conceivable Doubt: The Quest For A Fair And Constitutional Standard Of Proof In Death Penalty Cases, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The death penalty remains the most contentious issue in criminal law jurisprudence, and continues to be challenged on both constitutional and moral grounds. What is most remarkable about American death penalty jurisprudence is that it has traditionally focused on purely technical and procedural aspects of the imposition of the death penalty, despite the fact that the most vulnerable plank in the arsenal of death penalty defenders is evidence that innocent people have been, and will continue to be, executed. Perhaps no legal principle is more difficult to explain to the layman or first-year law student than that of all the …

No-Drop Civil Protection Orders: Exploring The Bounds Of Judicial Intervention In The Lives Of Domestic Violence Victims, Tamara L. Kuennen

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Whatever approach a judge takes to a victim's motion to vacate, there will be a risk. Women who are victims of domestic violence will be threatened or hurt or even killed, and the danger of this happening may increase or decrease based in part on the judge's decision. In the face of such risk, this article argues that on balance, the cost of sacrificing victim autonomy in these cases is too great, and that courts should defer to the victim's decision to vacate, except in the limited circumstance in which doing so is detrimental to an identifiable third party - …

Analyzing The Impact Of Coercion On Domestic Violence Victims: How Much Is Too Much?, Tamara L. Kuennen

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Part I of the essay reviews the work of activists and scholars who make the case that coercion is central to domestic violence, but notes that these scholars' conceptions of coercion are diverse. Part II describes the justice system's current responses to the impact of coercion on a victim's decision to drop a criminal or civil case. Part III exposes a number of challenges inherent in measuring the impact of a batterer's influence on a domestic violence victim's decision. Part IV describes the conceptual limitations of current judicial guidelines, and argues for a more nuanced conceptualization of coercion that accounts …

No Price Too High : Victimless Crimes And The Ninth Amendment, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Hardaway argues the criminalization of victimless crimes violates the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and creates enormous public policy problems in the society. He contends that the Ninth Amendment adjudication model and the concepts of self-determination and the harm principle are the standards to which privacy issues should be litigated. Hardaway contends that privacy issues should be litigated under the standards of the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution adjudication model, concepts of self-determination, and the harm principle. The Ninth Amendment follows the true beliefs of the founding fathers and their adherence to Natural Law, autonomy, liberty, and the …

No Women At The Center: The Use Of The Canadian Sentencing Circle In Domestic Violence Cases, Rashmi Goel

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

For Canadian Aboriginal women, domestic violence is pervasive. A report by the Ontario Native Women’s Association indicates that eighty percent of Aboriginal women surveyed had personally experienced family violence. In this context, Rashmi Goel looks at the use of sentencing circles to respond to wrongdoing by Aboriginal people. Current Aboriginal justice initiatives emphasize a return to traditional values and processes, manifested in one way in the sentencing circle. Yet, states Goel, such initiatives fail to restore Aboriginal women to their honored place. Contemporary Canadian sentencing circles exemplify this problem; they further injure victims in several respects. Hence, Goel argues that …

Pretrial Publicity In Criminal Cases Of National Notoriety: Constructing A Remedy For The Remediless Wrong, Robert M. Hardaway, Douglas B. Tumminello

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this Article examines the history of pretrial publicity in American courts and explores the values that the Sixth Amendment seeks to protect. Part II criticizes the Supreme Court's current approach to the pretrial publicity problem. Part III analyzes case studies of nationally notorious trials. Part IV explores remedial measures reasonably calculated to nullify the effects of prejudicial publicity and cases in which a trial judge's omission of those measures constitutes reversible error. Finally, this Article concludes by setting forth a proposed standard that should be applied in order to ensure the defendant's right to a fair trial …

Book Review: Allen Steinberg, The Transformation Of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800-1880, Thomas D. Russell

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Equivalent Deterrence: A Proposed Alternative To The Exclusionary Rule In Criminal Proceedings, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps no other area of American jurisprudence is as controversial as the exclusionary rule. Rejected by all other civilized countries2 and held in contempt by much of the American public, the rule reached its zenith during the Warren Court, only to be chipped away a little at a time by the Burger Court. Indeed, if the rule is ever to die, it seems destined to go out with a whimper rather than a bang. . .

Student Representation Of Indigent Defendants And The Sixth Amendment: On A Collision Course, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article will review the parallel patterns of development of clinical education and the sixth amendment, highlighting areas in which the practices of the former either conflict, or contain the potential for conflict with the latter. An analysis will be made of the present legal status of law student representation of indigent criminal defendants, with reference primarily to constitutional and sixth amendment considerations, but also to such related matters as the confidentiality of student-client communications, law student professional responsibility, and the applicability to students of state bar disciplinary rules. Finally, guidelines will be proposed regarding the proper scope of student …