Law Commons^™

Habitations Of Cruelty - Pitfalls Of Expanding Hate Crime Legislation To Include The Homeless, Scott A. Steiner

Scott A Steiner

Hate crime law has developed and expanded substantially since its earliest form. A concerted effort is currently underway to expand existing hate crime legislation to include the homeless.

This paper provides a history of both state and federal hate crime legislation, examines precisely what a hate crime is (and how that definition differs from state to state), explores the growing problem of violence against the homeless, and analyzes recent developments in expanding state and local law to protect based on homelessness.

It offers both arguments in favor and arguments against the expansion of hate crime laws to include the homeless …

Race, Genes, And Justice: A Call To Reform The Presentation Of Forensic Dna Evidence In Criminal Trials, Jonathan Kahn

Jonathan Kahn

The article considers how and when, if at all, is it appropriate to use race in presenting forensic DNA evidence in a court of law? This relatively straightforward question has been wholly overlooked by legal scholars. By pursuing it, this article promises to transform fundamentally the presentation forensic DNA evidence. Currently, it is standard practice for prosecutors to use race in presenting the odds that a given defendant’s DNA matches DNA found at a crime scene. This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to question the validity of this widespread but largely uninterrogated practice. It examines how race came to enter …

Free To Leave? An Empirical Look At The Fourth Amendment’S Seizure Standard, David K. Kessler

David K Kessler

Whether a person has been “seized” often determines if he or she receives Fourth Amendment protection. The Supreme Court has established a standard for identifying seizures: a person is seized when a reasonable person in his situation would not have felt free to leave or otherwise terminate the encounter with law enforcement. In applying that standard, today’s courts conduct crucial seizure inquiries relying only on their own beliefs about when a reasonable person would feel free to leave. Both the Court and scholars have noted that, though empirical evidence about whether people actually feel free to leave would help guide …

Portland, Prohibition And Probable Cause: Maine's Role In Shaping Modern Criminal Procedure, Wesley M. Oliver

Wesley M Oliver

At the time the Constitution was written, police officers had very little power. In most cases they were required to wait for a complaint from a victim to arrest, or a warrant from a magistrate to perform a search of any kind. Victims had extraordinary discretion in this era. Generally, only victims could seek arrest or search warrants and they were required only to allege that they had probable cause to support the arrest or search they sought. In most cases, an officer could not obtain a warrant even if he could provide the facts supporting his suspicions. Warrantless arrests …

Dead Wrong, Ronald Wright, Marc Miller

Ronald F. Wright

DNA-driven exonerations offer many lessons for police, for prosecutors, and for legislatures. Many scholars have focused on novel procedures to identify and remedy wrongful convictions after they occur. Scholars have also concluded that in our administrative criminal justice system we need prosecutors who are driven less by testosterone and more by a balanced search for the truth.

In our view, the most enduring changes to the work of prosecutors will focus not on softening their adversarial perspective, but on enhancing and staying true to the traditional core of their work on the front end of the process—the charging decisions.

Accuracy …