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Full-Text Articles in Law
Forced To Play And Forced To Pay: The Indigent Counsel Fee In Massachusetts As A Cost Of Being Charged With A Crime, Stanislaw Krawiecki
Forced To Play And Forced To Pay: The Indigent Counsel Fee In Massachusetts As A Cost Of Being Charged With A Crime, Stanislaw Krawiecki
University of Massachusetts Law Review
When indigent defendants in Massachusetts are charged with a crime and receive a court-appointed lawyer, they are also charged something else: a fee. This $150 fee is imposed on criminal defendants by the state as soon as they receive a constitutionally guaranteed "free" legal defense. The Article focuses on this inherent contradiction and identifies its far-reaching effects in undermining individuals’ constitutional protections. Massachusetts’s indigent counsel fee "chills" the right to counsel, creating a straightforward result for indigent individuals who are faced with a choice between paying for a "free" lawyer and not disclaiming their constitutional right to one. The deeper …
How To Expand Rape By Deception And Protect Consent, Ricardo Licea
How To Expand Rape By Deception And Protect Consent, Ricardo Licea
University of Massachusetts Law Review
The trend towards accepting the violation of consent as the underlying wrong addressed by rape law conflicts with the almost universal rejection of rape by deception. Rape by deception is limited to fraud in the factum, however the exclusion of fraud in the inducement finds no support under a consent framework. The principal objections to the expansion of rape by deception are that it will criminalize common behavior, that rape by deception produces only minor harm, and that self-protection is a viable alternative. Analogizing from the criminalization of deception to obtain money shows that the criminal deception statutes need not …
The Law Of The Groves: Whittling Away At The Legal Mysteries In The Prosecution Of The Groveland Boys, William R. Ezzell
The Law Of The Groves: Whittling Away At The Legal Mysteries In The Prosecution Of The Groveland Boys, William R. Ezzell
University of Massachusetts Law Review
This Article tells the legal story of one of the South’s most infamous trials – the Groveland Boys prosecution in central Florida. Called “Florida’s Little Scottsboro,” the Groveland case garnered international attention in 1949 when four young black men were accused of the gang rape of a white woman in the orange groves north of Orlando. Several days of rioting, Ku Klux Klan activity, three murders, two trials, and three death penalty verdicts followed, in what became the most infamous trial in Florida history. The appeals of the trial reached the United States Supreme Court, with the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall …
Watching The Watchers: The Growing Privatization Of Criminal Law Enforcement And The Need For Limits On Neighborhood Watch Associations, Sharon Finegan
Watching The Watchers: The Growing Privatization Of Criminal Law Enforcement And The Need For Limits On Neighborhood Watch Associations, Sharon Finegan
University of Massachusetts Law Review
On the night of February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman, a member of a neighborhood watch program, was patrolling his community in Sanford, Florida, when he spotted Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old Africa-American high school student, walking through the neighborhood. Zimmerman dialed 911 and indicated that he was following "a real suspicious guy". The police dispatcher requested that Zimmerman discontinue following Martin, but he ignored the request and approached the teenager. In the resulting confrontation, Zimmerman used his legally owned semi-automatic handgun to shoot and kill Trayvon Martin. Martin, who was unarmed, had been returning from a local convenience store. George Zimmerman …
Un-Torturing The Definition Of Torture And Employing The Rule Of Immigration Lenity, Irene Scharf
Un-Torturing The Definition Of Torture And Employing The Rule Of Immigration Lenity, Irene Scharf
Faculty Publications
In the first three sections, I examine the background of the Convention in the context of international human rights instruments (Section I); the context for a critique of the CAT’s definition of torture, given the legislative history of the Convention and an existing statute that could aid in correcting the misinterpretation adversely affecting CAT enforcement (Section II); and the adverse international implication of the United States’ restrictive meaning of torture (Section III). In a concluding section (IV), I offer possible solutions to the problem, invoking a robust principle of Immigration Lenity to prevent the return of potential torture victims to …
Nevada Case Threatens To Expand Terry Stops, Shaun B. Spencer
Nevada Case Threatens To Expand Terry Stops, Shaun B. Spencer
Faculty Publications
This term, the U.S. Supreme Court will review a Nevada decision authorizing police to arrest people for refusing to identify themselves. If affirmed, the decision could reshape how privacy is viewed in the criminal context throughout the United States, and could prompt the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to depart from the Supreme Court’s approach to stop-and-frisk cases. The case is Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, 59 P.3d 1201 (Nev. 2002), cert. granted, 124 S. Ct. 430 (2003).