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Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Criminal Law
How To Get Away With Murder: When A White Male Police Officer Kills A Young Black Person, Mitchell F. Crusto
How To Get Away With Murder: When A White Male Police Officer Kills A Young Black Person, Mitchell F. Crusto
Washington and Lee Law Review Online
Systemic racism in policing allows police officers, in particular white men, to continue to perpetuate the violent killings of Black people. This violence is not accidental. Rather it is intentional and allowed to continue due to a failure by the Supreme Court to hold police officers accountable. This Article explains how the doctrines of qualified immunity, willful intent, and objective reasonableness, as condoned by the Court, allow police officers to “get away with murder.”
On Lenity: What Justice Gorsuch Didn’T Say, Brandon Hasbrouck
On Lenity: What Justice Gorsuch Didn’T Say, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
This Essay was first published online at 108 Va. L. Rev. Online 239 (2022).
Facially neutral doctrines create racially disparate outcomes. Increasingly, legal academia and mainstream commentators recognize that this is by design. The rise of this colorblind racism in Supreme Court jurisprudence parallels the rise of the War on Drugs as a political response to the Civil Rights Movement. But, to date, no member of the Supreme Court has acknowledged the reality of this majestic inequality of the law. Instead, the Court itself has been complicit in upholding facially neutral doctrines when confronted with the racial disparities they create. …
Senseless Sentencing: The Uneven Application Of The Career Offender Guidelines, Christopher Ethan Watts
Senseless Sentencing: The Uneven Application Of The Career Offender Guidelines, Christopher Ethan Watts
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
Federal appellate courts are currently split on the definition of “controlled substance” in the career offender guideline, with one side using federal law to define the phrase, and the other side allowing standalone state law offenses to trigger the guideline. Allowing state law to define the phrase allows countless substances Congress never intended to penalize to be able to trigger one of the most severe penalties in the Sentencing Guidelines. This Note assesses the landscape of the circuit split and analyzes the arguments for and against federally defining “controlled substance offense.” This Note then proposes a novel way to resolve …