Law Commons^™

Nondelegating Death, Alexandra L. Klein

Scholarly Articles

Most states’ method of execution statutes afford broad discretion to executive agencies to create execution protocols. Inmates have challenged this discretion, arguing that these statutes unconstitutionally delegate legislative power to executive agencies, violating the state’s nondelegation and separation of powers doctrines. State courts routinely use the nondelegation doctrine, in contrast to the doctrine’s historic disfavor in federal courts. Despite its uncertain status, the nondelegation doctrine is a useful analytical tool to examine decision-making in capital punishment.

This Article critically evaluates responsibility for administering capital punishment through the lens of nondelegation. It analyzes state court decisions upholding broad legislative delegations to …

Is Supervised Release Tolled Retrospective To The Start Of An Unrelated Detention If The Defendant Is Credited With Time Served Upon Sentencing For The New Offense?, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

The district court sentenced Jason Mont for violating his supervised release conditions after a state conviction and sentence that credited him for time in pretrial detention served while he was on supervised release. Mont challenges the court’s exercise of jurisdiction, arguing that 18 U.S.C. § 3624(e) does not permit the court to reach backward to find that supervised release was tolled once he received credit for his pretrial detention at sentencing. Petitioner and respondent disagree about the interpretation of the language and structure of Section 3624(e). While the government relies heavily on the purpose of supervised release, petitioner notes that …

Privatizing Criminal Procedure, John D. King

Scholarly Articles

As the staggering costs of the criminal justice system continue to rise, states have begun to look for nontraditional ways to pay for criminal prosecutions and to shift these costs onto criminal defendants. Many states now impose a surcharge on defendants who exercise their constitutional rights to counsel, confrontation, and trial by jury. As these “user fees” proliferate, they have the potential to fundamentally change the nature of criminal prosecutions and the way we think of constitutional rights. The shift from government funding of criminal litigation to user funding constitutes a privatization of criminal procedure. This intrusion of market ideology …

Felon Disenfranchisement, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

In its broadest forms, felon disenfranchisement excludes even individuals who have long been rehabilitated. Yet they are still treated only as partial citizens. Automatic, long-term restrictions on the franchise are unnecessarily exclusionary. More importantly, they hinder reentry and rehabilitation. Citizens returning from imprisonment, who can vote, have lower rates of recidivism than those who are barred from voting. Re-enfranchisement signals a return to citizenship. It advances and confirms a returning citizen’s full participatory rights. Ultimately, that means we recognize these individuals as having lived up to the expectation of rehabilitation rather than leaving them feeling defeated.

From Timbuktu To The Hague And Beyond: The War Crime Of Intentionally Attacking Cultural Property, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This essay refracts the criminal conviction and reparations order of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Al Mahdi case into the much broader frame of increasingly heated public debates over the protection, removal, defacement, relocation, display and destruction of cultural heritage in all forms: monuments, artefacts, language instruction, art and literature. What might the work product of the ICC in the Al Mahdi proceedings -- and international criminal law more generally -- add, contribute or excise from these debates? This essay speculatively explores connections between the turn to penal law to protect cultural property and the transformative impulses that …

Will The Supreme Court Rein In “Excessive Fines” And Forfeitures? Don’T Rely On Timbs V. Indiana, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Timbs v. Indiana buoyed the hopes of those who saw it as a powerful signal to states and municipalities to rein in excessive fines and forfeitures. One commentator deemed it “a blow to state and local governments, for whom fines and forfeitures have become an important source of funds.” That may have been an overstatement. The Court seems disinclined to fill the term proportionality with robust meaning or wrestle with Eighth Amendment challenges to fines and fees. Those steps would be required for the Excessive Fines Clause to function as an effective backstop against …

Saving Justice: Why Sentencing Errors Fall Within The Savings Clause, 28 U.S.C. § 2255(E), Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

Notwithstanding the extent to which scholars, lawyers, and community organizers are broadening their contestations of the criminal justice system, they have paid insufficient attention to federal sentencing regimes. Part of the reason for this is that sentencing is a “back-end” criminal justice problem and much of our nation’s focus on criminal justice issues privileges “front-end” problems like policing. Another explanation might be that the rules governing sentencing are complex and cannot be easily rearticulated in the form of political soundbites. Yet sentencing regimes are a criminal justice domain in which inequalities abound—and in ways that raise profound questions about fairness, …

Myth Of The Attorney Whistleblower, Carliss N. Chatman

Scholarly Articles

Notwithstanding the political grandstanding and legal regimes put in place to prevent the next Enron, this article explores whether attorney whistleblower provisions provided in the Standards of Professional Conduct for Attorneys Appearing and Practicing Before the Commission in the Representation of an Issuer and in the Model Rules of Professional Conduct are effective. When faced with attorney involvement in Enron, Congress passed § 307 of the Sarbanes Oxley Act (Sarbanes), which required the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to amend its standards governing the conduct of attorneys practicing before the SEC. In response, the SEC and the American Bar Association …

Revisiting The Role Of Federal Prosecutors In Times Of Mass Imprisonment, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

None available.

Fear-Based Provocation, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Scholarly Articles

This Article offers three major contributions to challenge existing view of provocation: first, it considers psychological research that found that fear, similarly to anger, may also significantly interfere with individuals’ decision making processes by disturbing rational judgment, therefore sometimes leading to lethal aggression. Second, drawing on this research, this Article argues that provocation doctrine should be reconstructed to also include a fear-based prong. Third, recognizing fear-based provocation calls for rejecting the loss of control paradigm that currently dominates judges’ and jurors’ perception of the defense. In its place, this Article advocates focusing on the fearful defendant’s fear of violence threatened …

Cybersurveillance Intrusions And An Evolving Katz Privacy Test, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

To contextualize why a new approach to the Fourth Amendment is essential, this Article describes two emerging cybersurveillance tools. The first Cybersurveillance tool, Geofeedia, has been deployed by state and local law enforcement. Geofeedia uses a process known as "geofencing" to draw a virtual barrier around a particular geographic region, and then identifies and tracks public social media posts within that region for predictive policing purposes. The second tool, Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), is under development by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS). FAST is another predictive policing tool that analyzes physiological and behavioral signals with the …

Structuring Relief For Sex Offenders From Registration And Notification Requirements: Learning From Foreign Jurisdictions And From The Model Penal Code: Sentencing, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

This paper first discusses the scope of sex offender registration and notification under federal and state laws, and contrasts U.S. laws with those in other countries. Part III turns to the prevailing rationales for these laws and tests their empirical validity. It highlights the negative effect of registries and notification on criminal investigations, and the cost they impose on public coffers, public safety, and those labeled sex offenders. Part IV discusses a set of proposals to turn registries, which may serve a limited legitimate function, into more effective law enforcement tools while restricting public notification. This section outlines ex ante …

Epilogue: Homecoming Kings, Queens, Jesters, And Nobodies, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This epilogue unpacks the return of convicted war criminals as homecomings, with all the attendant rites, rituals, and expectations. Knotting together the various papers in this edited collection, this paper examines how the international community constructs an ideal homecoming and, in turn, how such a construction may simply be fanciful.

Book Review, Jamie Rowen, Searching For Truth In The Transitional Justice Movement (2017) & Leonie Steinl, Child Soldiers As Agents Of War And Peace: A Restorative Transitional Justice Approach To Accountability For Crimes Under International Law (2017), Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Why do truth commissions emerge following some conflicts but not others? Jamie Rowen tackles this question in Searching for Truth in the Transitional Justice Movement. Rowen approaches this topic through a detailed study of three jurisdictions: the former Yugoslavia, Colombia, and the United States. Although truth commissions did progress in Colombia, they stalled in both the former Yugoslavia in the wake of the Balkan Wars as well as in the United States in regard to the conduct of US officials after the events on 11 September 2001. Rowen unpacks what happened and what failed to happen — and why …

Commodifying Policing: A Recipe For Community-Police Tensions, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

This Article, in Part II, begins with a description of how municipalities, at least since the recession of 2008, have fallen short of fully funding their departments. Part III focuses on four distinct outside funding components and their impact on policing. The first subsection discusses asset forfeitures, under both state and federal law. Subsection two highlights revenue derived from citations, often in the form of traffic tickets. A discussion of fees that are being added to fines, often to fund courts, probation agencies, and police departments, follows. The increasing amounts and types of fees imposed have substantially increased the burden …

Crimmigration-Counterterrorism, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

The discriminatory effects that may stem from biometric ID cybersurveillance and other algorithmically driven screening technologies can be better understood through the analytical prism of “crimmigration-counterterrorism”: the conflation of crime, immigration, and counterterrorism policy. The historical genesis for this phenomenon can be traced back to multiple migration law developments, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. To implement stricter immigration controls at the border and interior, both the federal and state governments developed immigration enforcement schemes that depended upon both biometric identification documents and immigration screening protocols. This Article uses contemporary attempts to implement an expanded regime of “extreme vetting” …

No Smoke And No Fire: The Rise Of Internal Controls Absent Anti-Bribery Violations In Fcpa Enforcement, Karen E. Woody

Scholarly Articles

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits bribery of foreign public officials in order to obtain or retain business. It is, for all intents and purposes, an anti-bribery statute. To detect bribery, the FCPA contains accounting provisions related to bookkeeping and internal controls. The books and records provision requires issuers to make and maintain accurate books, records, and accounts; likewise, the internal controls provision requires that issuers devise and maintain reasonable internal accounting controls aimed at preventing and detecting FCPA violations. If one considers the analogy that bribery is the “fire” in FCPA enforcement actions, and books and records violations …

The United States And The International Criminal Court: A Complicated, Uneasy, Yet At Times Engaging Relationship, Leila Nadya Sadat, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

The United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court and this Article demonstrates that it has a complicated relationship to questions of complementarity in the Rome Statute. Federal and (to a small degree) state criminal law in the United States codifies some of the crimes that, conceptually, relate to conduct proscribed in the Rome Statute, but coverage is incomplete and jurisdiction may often be lacking. Thus, the United States is able to prosecute a limited number of ICC crimes in federal courts as such, particularly genocide, torture, and some war crimes including the recruitment or use of …

Implementing Change In Sentencing And Corrections: The Need For Broad-Based Research, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

None available

How To Change The Philosophy And Practice Of Probation And Supervised Release: Data Analytics, Cost Control, Focus On Reentry, And A Clear Mission, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

None available.

Voluntary Disclosure Fostering Overenforcement And Overcriminalization Of The Fcpa, Karen E. Woody

Scholarly Articles

Professor Peter Reilly’s article, Incentivizing Corporate America to Eradicate Transnational Bribery Worldwide: Federal Transparency and Voluntary Disclosure Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 67 Fla. L. Rev. 1683 (2015), challenges the notion that voluntary disclosure of potential Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations to the government is always the best course of action for a company. In a world where whistleblowers can receive a bounty for information provided to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC),2 self-reporting is a critical, high-pressure decision that each company must undertake when faced with potential FCPA liability.

This Article takes a broader look at …

Judicial Challenges To The Collateral Impact Of Criminal Convictions: Is True Change In The Offing?, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

Judicial opposition to disproportionate sentences and the long-term impact of criminal records is growing, at least in the Eastern District of New York. With the proliferation and harshness of collateral consequences and the hurdles in overcoming a criminal record, judges have asked for greater proportionality and improved chances for past offenders to get a fresh start. The combined impact of punitiveness and a criminal record is not only debilitating to the individual but also to their families and communities. A criminal case against a non-citizen who will be subject to deportation and a decade-long ban on reentry and three different …

Victims Who Victimise, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

How to speak of the agency of the oppressed to harm others in times of atrocity? This article juxtaposes Holocaust literature (Levi, Frankl, Kertesz, Ka-Tzetnik) with Holocaust judging (the Kapo collaborator trials in Israel). It does so didactically to interrogate international criminal law’s interaction with former child soldier Dominic Ongwen, currently awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court.

Extracurricular International Criminal Law, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This article unpacks the jurisprudential footprints of international criminal courts and tribunals in domestic civil litigation in the United States conducted under the Alien Tort Statute (ats). The ats allows victims of human rights abuses to file tort-based lawsuits for violations of the laws of nations. While diverse, citations to international cases and materials in ats adjudication cluster around three areas: (1) aiding and abetting as a mode of liability; (2) substantive legal elements of genocide and crimes against humanity; and (3) the availability of corporate liability. The limited capacity of international criminal courts and tribunals portends that domestic tort …

Alternative Visions For The Federal Criminal Justice And Corrections System: Is True Change Possible?, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

None available.

Overcriminalizing Speech, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Scholarly Articles

Recent years have seen a significant expansion in the criminal justice system’s use of various preemptive measures, aimed to prevent harm before it occurs. This development consists of adopting a myriad of prophylactic statutes, including endangerment crimes, which target behaviors that merely pose a risk of future harm but are not in themselves harmful at the time they are committed.

This Article demonstrates that a significant portion of these endangerment crimes criminalize various forms of speech and expression. Examples include conspiracies, attempts, verbal harassment, instructional speech on how to commit crimes, and possession crimes. The Article argues that in contrast …

International Criminal Law: Year In Review 2014-2015, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This publication is based on Professor Drumbl's remarks on September 1, 2015, at the Ninth International Humanitarian Law Dialogs held in Chautauqua, New York.

What I do not want to do is review and repeat what has already been said about the international arena. I thought what I would do is boil it down to a couple observations that I have about the activities at the international institutions over the past year, and discuss four elements that have emerged.

One is transition. What I mean by this is that the work of a number of the international institutions is winding …

Stepping Beyond Nuremberg’S Halo: The Legacy Of The Supreme National Tribunal Of Poland, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

The Supreme National Tribunal of Poland (Najwyzszy Trybunal Narodowy (Tribunal)) operated from 1946 to 1948. It implemented the 1943 Moscow Declaration in the case of suspected Nazi war criminals. This article unpacks two of the Tribunal’s trials, that of Rudolph Hoess (Kommandant of Auschwitz (Oswiecim) and Amon Goeth (commander of the Krakow-Plaszow labour camp). Following an introduction, the article proceeds in four sections. Section 2 sets out the Tribunal’s provenance and background, offering a flavour of the politics and pressures that contoured (and co-opted) its activities so as to recover its place within the imagined spaces of international criminal accountability. …

Sentencing Inequality Versus Sentencing Injustice, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

Women lag behind men in pay for equal work and in positions of prestigious employment, such as chief executive officers at Fortune 500 companies and presidents of colleges and universities. Women also suffer conscious and subconscious negative bias from both men and women in positions to evaluate an applicant's capabilities and potential, making it less likely that an employer or mentor will choose a woman instead of a man. In contrast to these and many other contexts, our federal criminal justice system regularly favors women over men. Empirical studies show that this lenient treatment begins with prosecutors and law enforcement …

Anti-Justice, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

This Article contends that, despite their unique, ethical duty to “seek justice,” prosecutors regularly fail to fulfill this ethical norm when removed from the traditional, adversarial courtroom setting. Examples abound. For instance, in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked classified information revealing a government-operated surveillance program known as PRISM. That program allows the federal government to collect metadata from phone companies and email accounts and to monitor phone conversations. Until recently, prosecutors relied on some of this covertly acquired intelligence to build criminal cases against American citizens without informing the accused. In failing to notify defendants, prosecutors violated the explicit statutory directives …