Law Commons^™

Summary Of Howard V. State, 128 Nev. Adv. Op. 67, Priscilla Baker

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court considered the State’s motion to reconsider and other various motions regarding the sealing of the ex parte motion to substitute counsel. It further deliberated whether documents and records could be filed under seal in a pending criminal case before the Court. In addition, the Court also addressed the requirements and procedures for sealing such documents and records.

Summary Of State V. Tricas, 128 Nev. Adv. Op. 62, Katelyn Franklin

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court considered the State’s appeal from a district court order granting the defendant’s motion to withdraw her guilty plea and to dismiss the criminal case under Nevada’s prosecutorial immunity statutes, NRS 178.572 and NRS 178.574.

Summary Of Jackson V. State, 128 Nev. Adv. Op. 55, Sarah Mead

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeals from district court judgments of conviction based on similar questions regarding double jeopardy and redundancy. The Court considered whether a criminal defendant who is charged with both attempted murder and battery or aggravated battery through a single act can be so charged, or whether such a charge constitutes double jeopardy, or violates Nevada’s common law redundancy theory.

Plea Bargaining And The Right To The Effective Assistance Of Counsel: Where The Rubber Hits The Road In Capital Cases, John H. Blume

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Custom, General Principles And The Great Architect Cassese, Mary Fan

Articles

Major advances in international criminal law and procedure rose on the trusses of judicially elucidated sources of international law—custom and general principles. These sources depend on the crucial art of derivation advanced by the architect of modern international criminal justice, President Antonio Cassese. What has transformed international criminal justice into flourishing law able to address changing configurations of violence is the development of the art of finding law in the dark and wilds of murky unwritten norms. [para] President Cassese pioneered paths through a perilous bog. "[T]he law lives in persons," and to understand the law one must study the …

A Preliminary Survey Of The Right To Presumption Of Innocence In Singapore, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The right to presumption of innocence is said to exist in almost all criminal justice systems, including Singapore. Curiously, however, no Singapore case has ever attempted to establish the exact source and contours of this longstanding right. This is unsatisfactory, as this diminishes the meaningfulness of what is supposed to be a fundamental right in the criminal justice process. The primary aim of this article is thus to conduct a preliminary survey of the law on the presumption of innocence in Singapore. It begins by proposing the Woolmington conception as a workable starting point, but posits a guiding principle to …

Taking Crime Out Of Crime Business, Mark James Findlay, Nafis Hanif

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

It is one thing to assert that conventional market analysis is critically useful in understanding criminal enterprise. It is more challenging to suggest that corrupt and compromised legal regulation interacts with other critical market variables to maximise market advantage for crime business in a similar manner to legitimate regulatory forces in their protection and enhancement of legitimate business enterprise. The central argument of this paper is that crime business mirrors other business forms when considered in terms of critical market variables, and that in particular regulatory forces when inverted from their original purposes can influence market conditions in the same …

Deporting The Pardoned, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Federal immigration laws make noncitizens deportable on the basis of state criminal convictions. Historically, Congress implemented this scheme in ways that respected the states’ sovereignty over their criminal laws. As more recent federal laws have been interpreted, however, a state’s decision to pardon, expunge, or otherwise set-aside a conviction under state law will often have no effect on the federal government’s determination to use that conviction as a basis for deportation. While scholars have shown significant interest in state and local laws regulating immigrants, few have considered the federalism implications of federal rules that ignore a state’s authority to determine …

Perfecting Criminal Markets, David Jaros

All Faculty Scholarship

From illicit drugs to human smuggling to prostitution, legislators may actually be perfecting the very criminal markets they seek to destroy. Criminal laws often create new dangers and new criminal opportunities. Criminalizing drugs creates the opportunity to sell fake drugs. Raising the penalties for illegal immigration increases the risk that smugglers will rely on dangerous methods that can injure or kill their human cargo. Banning prostitution increases the underground spread of sexually transmitted disease. Lawmakers traditionally respond to these “second order” problems in predictable fashion — with a new wave of criminalization that imposes additional penalties on fake drug dealers, …

The Legal Significance Of The Psychological Ability To Appreciate The “Other”, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Recently the U.S. Supreme Court, citing neurological and psychological studies, held that because juveniles are deficient in appreciating consequences to others, they should never be given the death penalty. The author found, in his years as a legal scholar, educator, and practitioner, that “appreciating the ‘other’”--putting oneself in the position of others---is critical to law and the study of law in more than the obvious ways.

The author became aware of empirical studies and psychological experiments demonstrating that children below a certain age have trouble seeing things from another’s vantage point, and found that the facility to do so develops …

Cybercrime And The Law: Challenges, Issues, And Outcomes, Susan W. Brenner

School of Law Faculty Publications

The exponential increase in cybercrimes in the past decade has raised new issues and challenges for law and law enforcement. Based on case studies drawn from her work as a lawyer, Susan W. Brenner identifies a diverse range of cybercrimes, including crimes that target computers (viruses, worms, Trojan horse programs, malware and DDoS attacks) and crimes in which the computer itself is used as a tool (cyberstalking, cyberextortion, cybertheft, and embezzlement). Illuminating legal issues unique to investigations in a digital environment, Brenner examines both national law enforcement agencies and transnational crime, and shows how cyberspace erodes the functional and empirical …

The Effect Of Private Police On Crime: Evidence From A Geographic Regression Discontinuity Design, John M. Macdonald, Jonathan Klick, Ben Grunwald

All Faculty Scholarship

Research demonstrates that police reduce crime. The implication of this research for investment in a particular form of extra police services, those provided by private institutions, has not been rigorously examined. We capitalize on the discontinuity in police force size at the geographic boundary of a private university police department to estimate the effect of the extra police services on crime. Extra police provided by the university generate approximately 45-60 percent fewer crimes in the surrounding neighborhood. These effects appear to be similar to other estimates in the literature.

Commentary: Pleau-Sharing, Jonah J. Horwitz

The Docket

In light of recent debate about the proper roles of federal and state governments, Jonah J. Horwitz laments how little attention has been paid to federal encroachment on the prosecution of commonplace crimes, specifically as it pertains to the death penalty controversy in United States v. Pleau.

‘The Messaging Effect’: Eliciting Credible Historical Evidence From Victims Of Mass Crimes, Mahdev Mohan

2008 Asian Business & Rule of Law initiative

No abstract provided.

Encountering Attica: Documentary Filmmaking As Pedagogical Tool, Teresa A. Miller

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Racial Disparity In The Criminal Justice Process: Prosecutors, Judges, And The Effects Of United States V. Booker, Sonja Starr, M. Marit Rehavi

Law & Economics Working Papers

Current empirical estimates of racial and other unwarranted disparities in sentencing suffer from two pervasive flaws. The first is a focus on the sentencing stage in isolation. Studies control for the “presumptive sentence” or closely related measures that are themselves the product of discretionary charging, plea-­‐bargaining, and fact-­‐finding processes. Any disparities in these earlier processes are built into the control variable, which leads to misleading sentencing-­‐disparity estimates. The second problem is specific to studies of sentencing reforms: they use loose methods of causal inference that do not disentangle the effects of reform from surrounding events and trends.

This Article explains …

Incompetent Plea Bargaining And Extrajudicial Reforms, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Last year, in Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye, a five-to-four majority of the Supreme Court held that incompetent lawyering that causes a defendant to reject a plea offer can constitute deficient performance, and the resulting loss of a favorable plea bargain can constitute cognizable prejudice, under the Sixth Amendment. This commentary, published as part of the Harvard Law Review’s Supreme Court issue, analyzes both decisions. The majority and dissenting opinions almost talked past each other, reaching starkly different conclusions because they started from opposing premises: contemporary and pragmatic versus historical and formalist. Belatedly, the Court noticed …

The Borrower's Tale: A History Of Poor Debtors In Lochner Era New York City, Anne Fleming

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This study adds to the recent scholarship on Progressivism in practice—fine-grained, place-based studies of reform at the local level—but focuses closely on the relationships among reformers, industry, and the law that an earlier generation of historians studied at the national level and outlined in broad brushstrokes. This study also builds upon the creditor-centered work of historians such as Mark H. Haller and John V. Alviti, but moves beyond their reliance upon distinctions and categories, such as those separating profit making credit providers from philanthropic credit providers, which were less important to borrowers than they have been for historians. In focusing …

Summary Of Goudge V. State, 128 Nev. Adv. Op. 52, Joseph Sakai

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

An appeal addressing a district court’s discretion when deciding a petition for release from a special sentence of lifetime supervision under NRS 176.0931(3) and whether the district court has the discretion to deny the release if the requirements in the statute have been met.

2012 Maine Juvenile Justice Data Book, Becky Noréus, George Shaler Mph, Desiree Girard Mppm

Justice Policy

The 2012 Maine Juvenile Justice Data Book presents a portrait of youth involvement with the Maine juvenile justice system. The data book consists of five sections, (1) Maine Youth Population Trends, (2) Maine Juvenile Justice System Trends, (3) Maine County Trends, (4) Maine Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC) Trends, and (5) Youth Recidivism Outcomes in Maine.

While Maine’s youth arrest rates are consistently among the lowest in the country, the state faces challenges in ensuring that limited resources are targeted most efficiently and effectively for programs and services aimed at rehabilitating youth who encounter the juvenile justice system. The analyses presented …

Real-Time Collection Of The Value-Added Tax: Some Business And Legal Implications, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Boryana Madzharova

Faculty Scholarship

Recent estimates of the level of VAT fraud in the EU are commensurate with the EU budget. With the Green paper on the future of VAT, the European Commission stressed the urgency and necessity of comprehensive VAT reforms. This paper analyses the business and legal implications of the recently proposed split-payment mechanism, which, if implemented, would move VAT’s method of collection to real-time. The discussion is positioned in the context of two increasingly visible trends in the EU – the general shift towards greater reliance on indirect taxation and the growing popularity of electronic payment instruments. The potential implementation of …

Rational Criminal Justice, Andy Brunner-Brown

GGU Law Review Blog

No abstract provided.

Summary Of State V. Javier C., 128 Nev. Adv. Op. 50, Sarah Stephan

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

An appeal from a district court order dismissing a category B felony charge of battery under NRS 200.481(2)(f), finding the statute’s definition of “prisoner” was not meant to include juvenile defendants committed to a detention center for delinquency.

Summary Of Sherriff V. Andrews, 128 Nev. Adv. Op. 51, Robert Stewart

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

In an appeal from a district court order granting a pretrial petition for a writ of habeas corpus and dismissing a charge for possession of an item commonly used to escape, the Court determined whether NRS 212.093(1) encompasses a prohibition on cell phones.

The Relational Contingency Of Rights, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Separate But Equal: Miranda's Rights To Silence And Counsel, Steven P. Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

Three decades ago, the Supreme Court created a dubious distinction between the rights accorded to suspects in custody who invoke their right to silence and who invoke their right to counsel. This distinction significantly disadvantages those who do not have the good sense or good fortune to specify they want an attorney when they invoke their right to remain silent. This article argues that this distinction was flawed at its genesis and that it has led to judicial decisions that are inconsistent, make little sense, and permit police behavior that substantially diminishes the right to silence as described in Miranda …

The Delaware Death Penalty: An Empirical Study, Sheri Johnson, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Valerie P. Hans, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

For the last five years, we have conducted an empirical study of the “modern era” of capital punishment in Delaware. By “modern era,” we refer to the time period after the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v.Georgia, which invalidated all then-existing state death penalty regimes. Some readers might ask, “Why Delaware?” They might observe that it is a small state and is not a significant national player in terms of death sentences imposed or death row inmates executed. While both are true, several features of Delaware’s capital punishment system intrigue us. First, Delaware has a high death sentencing rate. …

"They Are Destroying Our Futures": Sexual Violence Against Girls In Zambia's Schools, Women And Law In Southern Africa Trust-Zambia, Cornell Law School. Avon Global Center For Women And Justice, Cornell Law School. International Human Rights Clinic

Avon Global Center for Women and Justice and Dorothea S. Clarke Program in Feminist Jurisprudence

This report examines the problem of sexual violence against girls in Zambian schools. In Zambia, many girls are raped, sexually abused, harassed, and assaulted by teachers and male classmates. They are also subjected to sexual harassment and attack while travelling to and from school. Such abuse is a devastating and often overlooked manifestation of the gender-based violence that occurs in numerous settings in Zambia and other countries throughout the world.

This report explores these issues from an international human rights perspective, drawing upon extensive desk research and interviews with 105 schoolgirls and many other stakeholders in Zambia’s Lusaka Province. The …

The "Smart On Crime" Prosecutor, Roger Fairfax

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

"Smart on Crime" criminal justice reforms have emerged in recent years as shrinking government budgets and exploding incarceration rates have prompted scrutiny of the efficiency and efficacy of existing criminal justice approaches. Policymakers across the country have sought out new strategies designed to prevent crime and recidivism, enhance community safety, reduce our reliance on incarceration, and save taxpayer dollars. As a result, law enforcement, courts, and correctional agencies have been implementing innovative approaches in areas such as diversion, problem-solving courts, alternatives to incarceration, and ex-offender re-entry. However, the role of prosecutors and prosecutorial agencies in this story is often overlooked. …

Policing Identity, Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

Identity has long played a critical role in policing. Learning “who” an individual is not only affords police knowledge of possible criminal history, but also of “what” an individual might have done. To date, however, these matters have eluded sustained scholarly attention, a deficit that has assumed ever greater significance as government databases have become more comprehensive and powerful. Identity evidence, in short, has and continues to suffer from an identity crisis, which this Article seeks to remedy. The Article does so by first surveying the methods historically used by police to identify individuals, from nineteenth-century efforts to measure bodies …