Law Commons^™

The Culpability Of Felony Murder, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

Legal scholars are almost unanimous in condemning felony murder as a morally indefensible form of strict liability. This Article provides the long-missing principled defense of the felony murder doctrine. It argues that felony murder liability is deserved for killing negligently by means of a violent or apparently dangerous felony involving an additional malign purpose independent of physical injury to the victim killed. This claim follows from the simple idea that the guilt incurred in attacking or endangering others depends on one’s reasons for doing so. The article develops this idea into an expressive theory of culpability that assesses blame for …

Battered By Men, Bruised By Injustice: The Plight Of Women Who Fight Back And The Need For The Battered Women Defense In West Virginia, Jeffrey M. Shawver

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reforming Homicide Law To Separate Guilt From Sentence: An International Gloss, Steve Coughlan

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article argues that Canadian homicide law is handicapped by trying to combine two contradictory approaches. In general, Canadian criminal law adopts the approach of setting out relatively rigid rules for determining guilt or innocence. That is, the Criminal Code sets out particular offences, and if the elements of an offence can be proven, then failing the presence of any defence (also relatively rigidly defined), any accused will be found guilty. The question of guilt or innocence is not individualized to the circumstances of the offender. On the other hand, sentencing decisions adopt exactly the opposite approach, and are made …

Thoughts On Professor Crump's Comparison Of Traditional American Homicide Law And The Model Penal Code, Neil P. Cohen

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Murder, Pennsylvania Style": Comparing Traditional American Homicide Law To The Statutes Of Model Penal Code Jurisdictions, David Crump

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Critiquing Crump: The Strengths And Weaknesses Of Professor Crump's Model Laws Of Homicide, Arnold H. Loewy

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Attempt, Reckless Homicide, And The Design Of Criminal Law, Michael T. Cahill

University of Colorado Law Review

Most American criminal codes create an offense for recklessly killing another person, and nearly all contain a general provision covering any attempt to commit an offense. This article explores the relation between reckless homicide and attempt, which proves more complex than it appears and also turns out to provide a useful starting point for examination of several broader issues in attempt law and criminal law generally. The idea of "attempted reckless homicide" ("ARH") is largely disfavored by legal scholars and almost, but not quite, universally rejected in American law. Part I of the article questions that hostility. The theoretical arguments …

Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder And Suicide? A Review Of International Evidence, Don B. Kates, Gary A. Mauser

ExpressO

The world abounds in instruments with which people can kill each other. Is the widespread availability of one of these instruments, firearms, a crucial determinant of the incidence of murder? Or do patterns of murder and/or violent crime reflect basic socio-economic and/or cultural factors to which the mere availability of one particular form of weaponry is irrelevant?

This article examines a broad range of international data that bear on two distinct but interrelated questions: first, whether widespread firearm access is an important contributing factor in murder and/or suicide, and second, whether the introduction of laws that restrict general access to …

The Origins Of American Felony Murder Rules, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

Contemporary commentators continue to instruct lawyers and law students that England bequeathed America a sweeping default principle of strict liability for all deaths caused in all felonies. This Article exposes the harsh "common law" felony murder rule as a myth. It retraces the origins of American felony murder rules to reveal their modern, American, and legislative sources, the rationality of their original scope, and the fairness of their original application. It demonstrates that the draconian doctrine of strict liability for all deaths resulting from all felonies was never enacted into English law or received into American law. This Article reviews …

"Which One Of You Did It? Criminal Liability For "Causing Or Allowing" The Death Of A Child, Lissa Griffin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article analyzes how current U.S. criminal law addresses the problem of securing a homicide conviction where multiple defendants are accused in a child's non-accidental death. Part III sets forth the English response: a statute that includes (1) a new substantive crime; (2) a permissible negative inference against a defendant who fails to account for the non-accidental death of a child for whom he or she is responsible; and (3) delay of a motion to dismiss for failure to establish a prima facie case until after the defense has been presented or the jury has been allowed to draw the …

Homicide On Holiday: Prosecutorial Discretion, Popular Culture, And The Boundaries Of The Criminal Law, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This article discusses prosecutors' discretion to press criminal charges against individuals who cause death during recreational activities. Based on newspaper sources, published opinions, and unpublished materials from cases that resulted in plea bargains, Homicide on Holiday continues the author's exploration of the relationship between the American public, criminal prosecutors, and the nature of the prosecutors' public role. It shows that, despite popular culture's glorification of risk and a nationwide trend in tort law toward sheltering sports co-participants from civil negligence liability, an exhilarating trip down a ski slope is increasingly likely to land a skier in jail if he collides …

Prom Mom Killers: The Impact Of Blame Shift And Distorted Statistics On Punishment For Neonaticide, Lynne Marie Kohm, Thomas Scott Liverman

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Discretionary Power Of "Public" Prosecutors In Historical Perspective, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

Norms urging prosecutors to seek justice by playing a quasi-judicial role and striving for fairness to defendants are often assumed to have deep historical roots. Yet, in fact, such a conception of the prosecutor's role is relatively new. Based on archival research on the papers of the New York County District Attorney's Office, "The Discretionary Power of 'Public' Prosecutors in Historical Perspective" explores the meaning of the word "public" as it applied to prosecutors in the nineteenth century. This article shows that, in the early days of public prosecution, district attorneys were expected to maximize convictions and leave defendants' rights …

Fetal Homicide: Woman Or Fetus As Victim? A Survey Of Current State Approaches And Recommendations For Future State Application, Sandra L. Smith

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Felony Murder And Mens Rea Default Rules: A Study In Statutory Interpretation, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

The Model Penal Code's influential approach to culpability included default rules assigning a culpable mental state to every conduct, circumstance and result element of each offense. Such rules have been enacted in half of the American states. The Code's drafters also rejected what they understood to be the felony murder rule's imposition of "a form of strict liability for... homicide." Yet almost every state has retained some form of the felony murder rule and so repudiated the Model Penal Code's proposed reform. Because the Model Penal Code's disapproval of felony murder flows from its general disapproval of strict liability, the …

Meaning And Motive In The Law Of Homicide (Reviewing Samuel H. Pillsbury, Judging Evil: Rethinking The Law Of Murder And Manslaughter), Guyora Binder

Book Reviews

Many criminal law scholars have criticized the Model Penal Code’s restrictive conception of culpability as awareness of risk, and have sought to incorporate motives and desires into culpoability analysis. In his excellent book Judging Evil, Samuel Pillsbury has applied this richer conception of culpability to homicide law. The result is a comprehensive theory of homicide liability, unified by an effort to predicate liability on deficient moral reasoning rather than merely awareness of risk. This review essay explicates and commends Pillsbury’s theory but also criticizes one crucial deficiency. Pillsbury shrinks from one of the most obvious but potentially most controversial implications …

Manslaughter And Other Homicides, Paul C. Giannelli

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Violence-Related Injuries Treated In Hospital Emergency Departments, Us Department Of Justice

National Institute of Justice Office of Justice Programs

No abstract provided.

Dangerous Games And The Criminal Law, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

This essay means to correct the ways in which the law of homicide deals with lucky winners or survivors of dangerous games that end in the deaths of unlucky (dead) "losers" or even unluckier non-participants. Drag racing and Russian roulette are my focus, not only because they are so frequently litigated, but also because most other (unlawful) excessive risk-taking ventures are not, grammatically, what we mean when we say "game." It is not so much my intention to evaluate the role that "moral luck" plays generally in the world or specifically in the criminal law. It is my position that …

A Confluence Of Authority And Critique, H Archibald Kaiser

Dalhousie Law Journal

Reading about murder in the news, seeing it portrayed on the longrunning British television series Inspector Morse, or pondering it as one digests Crime and Punishment are in many ways far preferable to studying, teaching or practising the law of homicide. After a few chapters, and particularly following my re-immersion into the cold substantive law of homicide which commences in chapter 3, one is certainly reminded that this is not a work to read as a pastime in "blissful circumstances". It is, nonetheless, a remarkably good book in terms of its breadth, authority and originality in approach and substance. It …

Introduction: O.J. Simpson And The Criminal Justice System On Trial, Christopher B. Mueller

Publications

No abstract provided.

Reducing Violent Crimes And Intentional Injuries, Us Department Of Justice

National Institute of Justice Office of Justice Programs

No abstract provided.

Double Jeopardy

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Self-Defense In Colorado, H. Patrick Furman

Publications

No abstract provided.

The New Law Of Murder, Daniel Givelber

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Character Evidence, James L. Kainen

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Improving The Investigation Of Violent Crime: The Homicide Investigation And Tracking System, Us Department Of Justice

National Institute of Justice Research in Brief

No abstract provided.

Defending Women, Susan Estrich

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Justifiable Homicide: Battered Women, Self-Defense and The Law by Cynthia Gillespie

Is "Psychological Self-Defense" A Solution To The Problem Of Defending Battered Women W Ho Kill?

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Self-Defense In Kentucky: A Need For Clarification Or Revision, Robert G. Lawson, William S. Cooper

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Recent prosecutions have pushed Kentucky’s concept of self-defense beyond the limits of tolerance for complexity and confusion. There is little doubt that there exists a critical need to clarify or to revise the Kentucky law of self-defense. A demonstration of this need and a description of its nature are the principal objectives of this article. To accomplish these objectives, it is necessary to provide some information about the recent history of homicide and self-defense in Kentucky and to describe some important recent interpretations of this law by the Supreme Court of Kentucky.