Law Commons^™

Facing Injustice: How Face Recognition Technology May Increase The Incidence Of Misidentifications And Wrongful Convictions, Laura M. Moy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does law enforcement use of face recognition technology paired with eyewitness identifications increase the incidence of wrongful convictions in U.S. criminal law? This Article explores this critical question and posits that the answer may be yes. Facial recognition is frequently used by law enforcement agencies to help generate investigative leads that are then presented to eyewitnesses for positive identification. But erroneous eyewitness accounts are the number one cause of wrongful convictions, and the use of face recognition to generate investigative leads may create the conditions for erroneous eyewitness identifications to take place. This is because face recognition technology is designed …

The Ostensible (And, At Times, Actual) Virtue Of Deference, Anthony O'Rourke

Journal Articles

In Rethinking Police Expertise, Anna Lvovsky exposes how litigators leverage judicial understandings of police expertise against the government. The article is rich not only with descriptive insights, but also with normative potential. By rigorously analyzing the relationship between expertise and authority in specific cases, Professor Lvovsky offers guidance as to how judges and lawyers should factor a police officer’s expertise into an assessment of whether the officer’s conduct is lawful. This Response argues, however, that Rethinking Police Expertise’s normative potential is weakened by the sharp conceptual distinction it draws between judicial understandings of expertise as a “professional virtue” (which it …

Sb320: A Call To Arms For Victims Of Domestic Violence, Golden Gate University School Of Law

GGU Law Review Blog

Under California law, a person restrained by any domestic violence protection order is prohibited from owning, possessing, purchasing, receiving, or attempting to purchase or receive a firearm while the order is in effect. According to the Armed Prohibited Persons System (APPS), over 23,000 restricted people are armed in California. This number reflects only the number of known registered firearms in the state. Of these 23,000 restricted people, special agents recovered 1,243 prohibited firearms last year — 778 of those firearms were identified in APPS; however, 465 were previously unknown.

Senate Bill 320 purports to redress the inadequacy of current practice …

Trauma, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Faculty Scholarship

Meek Mill’s life and career have been punctuated by trauma. From childhood through his current adulthood, Mill has experienced excruciating trauma even as a well-known hip hop artist. In 2018’s track of that name Trauma, Mill describes in illuminating prose just how these traumatic experiences harmed and impacted him personally describing the very same harms that impact so many similarly situated young black people in the United States. Meek Mill, as a child, witnessed violent death and experienced poverty while as a young man he was arrested and incarcerated (wrongly). Despite his star turn as a true hip hop icon, …

Habeas Corpus Unbound, Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Sites of incarceration present stress tests to our theories and practices of administrative law. They yield insights, too, into how law distributes power across the administrative state. While studying administrative law as prison law reveals certain distinctions between the law that rules in prisons and everyday administrative state operations, it also reveals continuities—for instance, between the surveillance and control characterizing prisons and the routine surveillance and control that police, child welfare, social assistance, mental health, and public health authorities concentrate upon Indigenous, Black, disabled, and poor people in ways that produce and reproduce subordination and disproportionate incarceration. We begin to …

#Blacklivesmatter: From Protest To Policy, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey, Lisa O. Singh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In summer 2020, mass protests spread across the globe challenging police brutality and racial injustice and demanding change. Fueled by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, these protests drew 15 million to 26 million participants in the United States alone to participate in late May and June of 2020. The sheer scale of these protests made them the largest movement in U.S. history. While there has been some consensus that this unprecedented protest movement pushed social awareness and changed the national conversation around race, existing research has yet to clearly …

"Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! These Mass Arrests Have Got To Go!": The Expressive Fourth Amendment Argument, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

The racial justice protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 constitute the largest protest movement in the United States. Estimates suggest that between fifteen and twenty-six million people protested across the country during the summer of 2020 alone. Not only were the number of protestors staggering, but so were the number of arrests. Within one week of when the video of George Floyd’s murder went viral, police arrested ten thousand people demanding justice on American streets, with police often arresting activists en masse. This Essay explores mass arrests and how they square with Fourth Amendment …

Proportionality, Constraint, And Culpability, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

Philosophers of criminal punishment widely agree that criminal punishment should be “proportional” to the “seriousness” of the offense. But this apparent consensus is only superficial, masking significant dissensus below the surface. Proposed proportionality principles differ on several distinct dimensions, including: (1) regarding which offense or offender properties determine offense “seriousness” and thus constitute a proportionality relatum; (2) regarding whether punishment is objectionably disproportionate only when excessively severe, or also when excessively lenient; and (3) regarding whether the principle can deliver absolute (“cardinal”) judgments, or only comparative (“ordinal”) ones. This essay proposes that these differences cannot be successfully adjudicated, and one …

The Constitutionalization Of Parole: Fulfilling The Promise Of Meaningful Review, Alexandra Harrington

Journal Articles

Almost 12,000 people in the United States are serving life sentences for crimes that occurred when they were children. For most of these people, a parole board will determine how long they will actually spend in prison. Recent Supreme Court decisions have endorsed parole as a mechanism to ensure that people who committed crimes as children are serving constitutionally proportionate sentences with a meaningful opportunity for release. Yet, in many states across the country, parole is an opaque process with few guarantees. Parole decisions are considered “acts of grace” often left to the unreviewable discretion of the parole board.

This …

2021 Annual Campus Security And Fire Safety Report, Otterbein Police Department

Otterbein Police Department

2021 Annual Campus Security and Fire Safety Report from the Otterbein Police Department. The crime and arrest statistics compiled by OPD are from calendar years 2018, 2019, and 2020.

A Decarceral Cadence: Neurologic Music Therapy As An Abolitionist Project, Mallori D. Thompson, Richard A. Kirby

Connecticut Law Review

Because police and prison abolition must be approached while simultaneously improving quality of life, and thus reducing harm, abolitionist discourse should include health policies that regard the (de)regulation, use, and culture of addictive substances. This Essay calls for research into neurologic music therapy as a response to addiction, improving quality of life and paving the way for police and prison abolition.

The Supreme Court's Reticent Qualified Immunity Retreat, Katherine Mims Crocker

Faculty Publications

The recent outcry against qualified immunity, a doctrine that disallows damages actions against government officials for a wide swath of constitutional claims, has been deafening. But when the Supreme Court in November 2020 and February 2021 invalidated grants of qualified immunity based on reasoning at the heart of the doctrine for the first time since John Roberts became Chief Justice, the response was muted. With initial evaluations and competing understandings coming from legal commentators in the months since, this Essay explores what these cases appear to say about qualified immunity for today and tomorrow.

The Essay traces idealistic, pessimistic, and …

Voices From A Prison Pandemic: Lives Lost From Covid-19 At Lakeland Correctional, Kimberly Thomas

Articles

Coronavirus tore through jails and prisons like wildfire. In some states, more than half of the people incarcerated there tested positive for COVID-19; nearly 400,000 people in prison across the United States have tested positive. For people in prison, COVID-19 brought the loss of close friends, solitary confinement, loss of connection with family and programming, lack of information, and fear of contracting the virus. It has also reminded those who are incarcerated of the one-dimensional way in which people in prison are perceived. As stated by one collaborator, Cory Souders, "[s]o many men and women who come to prison are …

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (Lvmpd) Budget Review, Fiscal Years 2018-2021, Olivia K. Cheche, Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Criminal Justice

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s (LVMPD) annual budget increased every fiscal year (FY) from 2018 to 2021. Using data provided by the LVMPD’s final budget reports for FY 2018 to 2021, this Fact Sheet details LVMPD funding increases and summarizes budget expenditures by unit and area command.

Meek Mill’S Trauma: Brutal Policing As An Adverse Childhood Experience, Todd J. Clark, Caleb Gregory Conrad, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Amy Dunn Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Meek Mill’s life and career have been punctuated by trauma, from his childhood lived on the streets of Philadelphia, through his rise to fame and eventual arrival as one of hip hop’s household names. his 2018 track "Trauma," Meek Mill describes, in revealing prose, just how the traumatic experiences he endured personally impacted and harmed him. He also embodies a role as narrator in describing the same traumas and harms that impact the daily lives of countless similarly situated young Black people in the United States. As a child, Mill’s lived experience was one of pervasive poverty and fear, as …

Keynote: How I Became A Family Policing Abolitionist, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

This piece is a written version of Professor Dorothy Roberts' keynote speech at the Columbia Journal of Race and Law's 11th annual symposium, titled Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being.

(Re)Framing Race In Civil Rights Lawyering, Anthony V. Alfieri, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Articles

This Review examines the significance of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s new book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, for the study of racism in our nation's legal system and for the regulation of race in the legal profession, especially in the everyday labor of civil-rights and poverty lawyers, prosecutors, and public defenders. Surprisingly, few have explored the relevance of the racial narratives distilled by Gates in Stony the Roa - the images, stereotypes, and tropes that Whites constructed of Blacks to deepen and ensure the life and legacy of white supremacy-to the practice …

Grand-Vision: An Intelligent System For Optimized Deployment Scheduling Of Law Enforcement Agents, Jonathan Chase, Tran Phong, Kang Long, Tony Le, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Law enforcement agencies in dense urban environments, faced with a wide range of incidents to handle and limited manpower, are turning to data-driven AI to inform their policing strategy. In this paper we present a patrol scheduling system called GRAND-VISION: Ground Response Allocation and Deployment - Visualization, Simulation, and Optimization. The system employs deep learning to generate incident sets that are used to train a patrol schedule that can accommodate varying manpower, break times, manual pre-allocations, and a variety of spatio-temporal demand features. The complexity of the scenario results in a system with real world applicability, which we demonstrate through …

To “Defund” The Police, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Much public debate circles around grassroots activists’ demand to “defund the police,” raised in public consciousness in the summer of 2020. Yet confusion about the demand is pervasive. This Essay adopts a literal interpretation of “defund” to clarify and distinguish four alternative, substantive policy positions that legal reforms related to police funding can validate. It argues that the policy debates between these positions exist on top of the ideological critique launched by grassroots activists, who use the term “defund the police” as a discursive tactic to make visible deeper transformations in government practices that normalize the structural marginalization of black …

Reimagining Criminal Justice: How We Traded Out Asylums For Prisons, Zaynah Zaman

Reimagining Criminal Justice

The criminal justice system fails to adopt alternative mental health reforms better equipped to handle mental health crises rather than placing the mentally ill in institutions that have proven to worsen their illness. The criminalization of mental illness must end, says Zaynah Zaman, a student at Golden Gate University School of Law.

Specter Of Reform: Understanding The Violent Crime Control And Law Enforcement Act Of 1994 And Its Role In Expanding The Modern Prison Industrial Complex, Timothy Nii-Okai Welbeck

Arlen Specter Center Research Fellowship

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation in recorded history, and currently houses roughly 25% of the world’s prison population. Though the US prison population dipped in 2016 to its lowest rate since 1993, the sheer number of people under the supervision of the criminal justice system within the country is staggering. As of 2012, one in one hundred adults in the US are in jail or prison, which makes the US the nation with the world’s largest prison population. The US also leads the world in rate of incarceration. Thus, the nation’s prisons teem …

Seeing Color: America's Judicial System, Elizabeth Poulin

Senior Honors Projects

In many eyes, it often seems as though being white in America is easy, or a privilege. Being white in America is considered a safety blanket, with an abundance of opportunities beneath it. Yet, how does a physical difference such as skin color manifest itself as privilege? Noticing color is not wrong, hateful, or oppressive. Even children notice color, and we define them as the ultimate innocence. But in fact, skin color is often a trigger. When the world has preconceived notions about people of color, an oppressive system designed to harm people who have never done anything to deserve …

Disbanding Police Agencies, Anthony O'Rourke, Rick Su, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

Since the killing of George Floyd, a national consensus has emerged that reforms are needed to prevent discriminatory and violent policing. Calls to defund and abolish the police have provoked pushback, but several cities are considering disbanding or reducing their police forces. This Essay assesses disbanding as a reform strategy from a democratic and institutionalist perspective. Should localities disband their police forces? One reason to do so is that discriminatory police departments are often too insulated from democratic oversight to be reformed. But can localities succeed in disbanding and replacing their forces with something better? Unfortunately, the structural entrenchment of …

Slamming The Courthouse Door: 25 Years Of Evidence For Repealing The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Andrea Fenster, Margo Schlanger

Other Publications

Twenty-five years ago today, in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The “PLRA,” as it is often called, makes it much harder for incarcerated people to file and win federal civil rights lawsuits. For two-and-a-half decades, the legislation has created a double standard that limits incarcerated people’s access to the courts at all stages: it requires courts to dismiss civil rights cases from incarcerated people for minor technical reasons before even reaching the case merits, requires incarcerated people to pay filing fees that low-income people on the outside are exempt from, makes it hard to find …

United States Judicial System Failures And Solutions, Braden P. Barker

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

For years, the American judicial system has unfairly punished the American people. These actions have led to serious societal consequences. We have prisons that sentence people to harsh punishment for nonviolent offenses, an overfunded and militarized police force, and racial biases that lead to the tragic killings of black people at the hands of the police that are intended to protect and serve us. This essay looks to diagnose the United States judicial system’s woes. More importantly, we take a look at what steps can be taken immediately to begin reversing the negative impact of these issues.

The Qualified Immunity Paradox And The Sixth Circuit’S Moderwell Opinion: A Harbinger Of Better Things To Come?, Doron M. Kalir

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This note discusses the requirement of "clearly-established law," which a plaintiff needs to show in order to overcome a qualified immunity defense. This requirement--in essence, asking a plaintiff to show that someone else in their shoes has already prevailed in similar circumstances--may lead to an infinite regression paradox. The Note discusses this paradox and the ways in which the Supreme Court, and now the Sixth Circuit, have begun to resolve it.

Sometimes They Don't Die: Can Criminal Justice Reform Measures Help Halt Police Sexual Assault On Black Women?, Michelle S. Jacobs

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the eighteen months between March 2019 and August 2020, at least eight Black women were murdered by the police. Breonna Taylor was one of them. Officer Brett Hankison, one of the three officers who murdered Breonna Taylor, was eventually discharged from the Louisville Police Department. In the memo discharging him, the police chief cited behavior that amounted to an extreme indifference to the value of human life: Hankison blindly fired ten rounds into the home of Ms. Taylor's neighbor. Additionally, in the aftermath of Ms. Taylor's death, two women came forward and accused Hankison of sexually assaulting them while …

The Trauma Of Awakening To Racism: Did The Tragic Killing Of George Floyd Result In Cultural Trauma For Whites?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

The act of witnessing the killing of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old, African-American father, brother, partner, and son, at the hands of the police caused many white individuals to experience an epiphany about racism, specifically structural racism, in the United States. Following the horrific killing of George Floyd, many white people began to shift their thinking about the existence and prevalence of racialized police brutality, reconsidering the manner in which they had always viewed the world around them. Indeed, many white individuals began to recognize and acknowledge the varied ways in which whiteness worked to privilege them in our society, even …

Divided Court Issues Bright-Line Ruling On Fourth Amendment Seizures, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Reimagining Criminal Justice: In Defense Of Self-Defense, Jude Diebold

Reimagining Criminal Justice

Since the Louisville, Kentucky police killed Breonna Taylor in the middle of the night in her own apartment, the United States has seen an uptick in protests against racially motivated police violence. However, the officers responsible for her death have not been criminally charged, in part because her boyfriend, unaware that police were entering the apartment in the middle of the night, shot one of the officer’s in the leg, “justifying” the next six rounds that were shot by the police and ultimately killed an innocent woman during the botched police raid.

As if this was not outrageous enough, in …