Law Commons^™

Summary Of State V. Bennett, 119 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 63, Shane Jasmine Young

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal and cross-appeal from a district court order granting in part and denying in part Defendant’s post-conviction petition for a writ of habeas corpus in a capital case.

Summary Of Smith V. State, 120 Nev. Adv. Op. 96, Sally L. Galati

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Defendant appealed from a judgment of conviction for one count of burglary following a jury verdict. Defendant’s primary contention was that the district court erred in refusing his proffered jury instruction on the lesser crime of trespass.

Delusions Of Grand Juries, Niki Kuckes

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Exonerations Change Judicial Views On Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel, Adele Bernhard

Articles & Chapters

Law evolves more slowly than pop culture or public attitude. Because most exonerations have not resulted in written legal opinions, their impact is slowly seeping into case law. However, courts are influenced by the same news that sways the rest of us. Even without explicitly referring to innocence or wrongful convictions, modern trial courts are undoubtedly more likely to admit expert testimony on the question of eyewitness identification because they are painfully aware of just how easily such witnesses - no matter how honest or passionate - can be wrong. They are certainly more inclined to view confessions suspiciously, especially …

Killing The Non-Willing: Atkins, The Volitionally Incapacitated, And The Death Penalty, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Jamie Wilson, nineteen years old and severely mentally ill, walked into a school cafeteria and started shooting. Two children died, and Jamie was charged with two counts of capital murder. Because he admitted his guilt, the only issue at his trial was the appropriate punishment. The trial judge assigned to his case, after hearing expert testimony on his mental state, found that mental illness rendered Jamie unable to conform his conduct to the requirements of law at the time of the crime—not impaired by his mental illness in his ability to control his behavior, but unable to control his behavior. …

Freeing The Innocent: Obtaining Post-Conviction Dna Testing In Florida, Catherine Arcabascio

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

How Many Terrorists Are There? The Escalation In So-Called Terrorism Prosecutions, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

Not available.

Section 6: Criminal Procedure, Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law, William & Mary Law School

Supreme Court Preview

No abstract provided.

Summary Of Camacho V. State, 119 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 47, Hilary Barrett

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a judgment of conviction and sentence entered after a guilty plea.

Marital Immunity, Intimate Relationships, And Improper Inferences: A New Law On Sexual Offenses By Intimates , Michelle J. Anderson

Working Paper Series

Today, to one degree or another, marital immunity for sexual offenses persists in over half the states. Underlying the marital rape immunity has been the assumption that when a woman enters into a marriage, she is giving her ongoing consent to sexual intercourse. Professor Michelle Anderson argues that states must abolish this immunity to make the law formally neutral on the marital status of the parties. However, Professor Anderson argues, such formal neutrality is insufficient. The ideology of ongoing consent underlying the marital rape immunity has infected the way the legal system treats sexual offenses among intimates who are not …

The Conviction Of Andrea Yates: A Narrative Of Denial, Sherry F. Colb

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This piece discusses the case of Andrea Yates, the woman who confessed to drowning her five children to death and was subsequently convicted of murder (though the conviction has since been overturned). In this piece, Colb contends that Andrea Yates was convicted because of the jurors’ emotional/psychological response to the possibility that post-partum psychosis could cause an otherwise decent person to commit such brutal acts. As a symptom of denial, Colb argues, the jury rejected the insanity defense and thereby reassured itself that only evil people could do what Yates did. If that were the case, then it would be …

Summary Of State V. Bayard, 119 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 29, Melanie Koep

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Expedited appeal from an order of the Second Judicial District Court, State of Nevada, granting a motion to suppress evidence of narcotics obtained by searching defendant after arrest for two minor traffic violations.-flas

Addressing Sexual Misconduct In Community Corrections_June 2-4, 2003, Brenda V. Smith

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Sexual Abuse Of Women In United States Prisons: A Modern Corollary Of Slavery_April 25, 2003, Brenda V. Smith

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Virginia's Capital Jurors, Stephen P. Garvey, Paul Marcus

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Next to Texas, no state has executed more capital defendants than Virginia. Moreover, the likelihood of a death sentence actually being carried out is greater in Virginia than it is elsewhere, while the length of time between the imposition of a death sentence and its actual execution is shorter. Virginia has thus earned a reputation among members of the defense bar as being among the worst of the death penalty states. Yet insofar as these facts about Virginia's death penalty relate primarily to the behavior of state and federal appellate courts, they suggest that what makes Virginia's death penalty unique …

Lay Participation In Legal Decision Making: Introduction To Law & Policy Special Issue, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

United States scholarship on lay participation revolves around one predominant form of lay participation, the jury (Hans & Vidmar forthcoming 2004). However, in the legal systems of many countries, laypeople participate as decision makers in other ways. Laypersons serve as judges (Provine 1986), magistrates (Diamond 1993), and private prosecutors (Perez Gil 2003). Lay and law-trained judges may also decide cases together in mixed tribunals (Kutnjak Ivkovi6 2003; Machura 2003; Vidmar 2002). Although diverse in structure, these methods share with the jury a set of animating ideas about lay involvement in legal decision making.

Many of these ideas appear to be …

Mercy By The Numbers: An Empirical Analysis Of Clemency And Its Structure, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Clemency is an extrajudicial measure intended both to enhance fairness in the administration of justice, and allow for the correction of mistakes. Perhaps nowhere are these goals more important than in the death penalty context. The recent increased use of the death penalty and concurrent decline in the number of defendants removed from death row through clemency call for a better and deeper understanding of clemency authority and its application. Questions about whether clemency decisions are consistently and fairly distributed are particularly apt. This study uses 27 years of death penalty and clemency data to explore the influence of defendant …

The Scottsboro Trials: A Legal Lynching (Part Ii), Faust Rossi

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Challenge To The Rationale For General Economic Crime Sentence Increases Following Sarbanes-Oxley, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

I am writing in response to the Commission's request for comment published in the Federal Register on January 17, 2003. I will address the question of whether the base offense level and/or the loss table of U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1 should be further modified to provide across-the-board sentence increases for economic crime offenders at virtually all loss levels. In my view, no case for doing so has yet been made.

Editor's Observations: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act And What Came After, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

On December 2, 2001, the Enron Corporation filed the largest bankruptcy petition in U.S. history. Losses to investors, creditors, employees, and pensioners were in the billions. Criminal investigations are ongoing. On May 1, 2003, the U.S. Sentencing Commission passed a set of amendments to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines that will, among other things, prevent a federal district judge from awarding a sentence of straight probation to a defendant convicted at trial of an $11,000 mail fraud. This Issue of FSR tells the story of how the first of these apparently unrelated events led to the second. Put another way, this …

Killing For The State: The Darkest Side Of American Nursing, Dave Holmes, Cary H. Federman

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive ‘caring’ nursing discourse and the most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practices the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of death work as an application of healthcare professionals’ skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of …

Summary Of Buchanan V. State, Akke Levin

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a judgment by the Second Judicial District Court of Washoe County, convicting Denise Dianna Buchanan of two counts of first-degree murder.

The Gatekeeping Role In Civil Litigation And The Abdication Of Legal Values In Favor Of Scientific Values, Neil B. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

International Decisions: Prosecutor V. Plavsic, Nancy Amoury Combs

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Unprincipled Punishment: The U.S. Sentencing Commission's Troubling Silence About The Purposes Of Punishment, Aaron J. Rappaport

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The New Frontier Of Constitutional Confession Law - The International Arena: Exploring The Admissibility Of Confessions Taken By U.S. Investigators From Non-Americans Abroad, Mark A. Godsey

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article is part two in an ongoing series. Part I, published at 51 DUKE L. J. 1703 (2002), argued that Miranda warnings should not be strictly required when U.S. agents interrogate non-U.S. citizens abroad. This Article picks up where the first left off, and asks the question: "In the absence of Miranda, do any provisions in the Bill of Rights restrict the ability of U.S. agents to obtain confessions from non-Americans abroad?"

The Article begins by examining the back up or default rules to Miranda in the domestic setting. These rules are the "due process involuntary confession rule," which …

Einstein On The Bench?: Exposing What Judges Do Not Know About Science And Using Child Abuse Cases To Improve How Courts Evaluate Scientific Evidence, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

It has been a decade since the Supreme Court made judges the arbiters of scientific validity through Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Although this decision was intended to improve how courts use science, recent empirical evidence reveals that judges continue to struggle with scientific evidence and that Daubert has failed to yield accurate or consistent decisions. This also means that judges have received little useful guidance from ten years of academic literature expounding on the science-law chasm.

If the academic discourse is not helpful, it may be because non-scientists too often try to tame science by treating it as …

A Healer Or An Executioner: The Proper Role Of A Psychiatrist In A Criminal Justice System, Gregory Dolin

All Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that despite the benefits of ridding the criminal justice system of some uncertainty and ignorance with respect to mental health issues, the very close involvement of psychiatrists in the criminal justice system as practiced in the United States is not only illogical and bad policy, but also unethical from the viewpoint of medical ethics. Part II of this article will lay the groundwork for the argument by discussing the history of the insanity defense, and of science's involvement with criminal justice; while Part III, will look into the association of science and the administration of justice in …

Affirming Brahimi: East Timor Makes The Case For A Model Criminal Code, Megan A. Fairlie

Faculty Publications

In August of 2000, the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (the “Brahimi Report”) considered the issue of transitional civil administration as an element of United Nations field operations. The Brahimi Report recommended the creation of an interim legal code as part of a U.N. justice package so that any future UN transitional administrations would be able to address the issue of “applicable law” in the early stages of its mission. Using the experience of the United National Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) as a case study, this article establishes how and why a complete model …

The Real-World Shift In Criminal Procedure, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.