Criminal Law Commons^™

"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 ...

Incompetent Plea Bargaining And Extrajudicial Reforms, Stephanos Bibas

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 that ...

Beyond Batson'S Scrutiny: A Preliminary Look At Racial Disparities In Prosecutorial Preemptory Strikes Following The Passage Of The North Carolina Racial Justice Act, Barbara O'Brien, Catherine M. Grosso

Faculty Publications

The exercise of peremptory challenges remains the least regulated area of jury selection, largely left to the wisdom or whimsy of each litigator. One need not look back far to find a time when litigators brazenly used peremptory strikes to prevent black citizens from serving on juries. In fact, all-white juries remain common in 2012, even in jurisdictions with a substantial African-American population. Our paper explores whether the North Carolina Racial Justice Act might provide a better tool to mitigate the tenacious influence of race in the selection of juries.

The Proper Role Of The Community In Determining Criminal Liability And Punishment, Paul H. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship

This essay argues that community views ought to have a central role in constructing criminal law and punishment rules, for both democratic and crime-control reasons, but ought not to have a role in the adjudication of individual cases. The differences in the American and Chinese debates on these issues are examined and discussed.

Prison, Foster Care, And The Systemic Punishment Of Black Mothers, Dorothy E. Roberts

Faculty Scholarship

This article is part of a UCLA Law Review symposium, “Overpoliced and Underprotected: Women, Race, and Criminalization.” It analyzes how the U.S. prison and foster care systems work together to punish black mothers in a way that helps to preserve race, gender, and class inequalities in a neoliberal age. The intersection of these systems is only one example of many forms of overpolicing that overlap and converge in the lives of poor women of color. I examine the statistical overlap between the prison and foster care populations, the simultaneous explosion of both systems in recent decades, the injuries that ...

The Effect Of Privately Provided Police Services On Crime, John M. Macdonald, Jonathan Klick, Ben Grunwald

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.

Four Distinctions That Glanville Williams Did Not Make: The Practical Benefits Of Examining The Interrelation Among Criminal Law Doctrines, Paul H. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship

While Glanville Williams was a pioneer in his time, he remained quite mainstream when it came to the framework for organizing criminal law doctrines. His books were influential and he could have helped reshaped that framework but was content to leave it as essentially that which evolved at common law, even though many improvements could have be made. For example, he was well aware of the justification-excuse distinction but rejected it as an organizing principle, not because he did not see the distinction as rational, but because he did not see it as having practical value.

This essay attempts to ...

Women In Prison In Argentina: Causes, Conditions, And Consequences, Cornell Law School. Avon Global Center For Women And Justice, DefensoríA General De La NacióN (Argentina), University Of Chicago. Law School. International Human Rights Clinic

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

In recent years, the number of women in prison has increased throughout the world, including in Argentina. In Argentina’s federal prisons, the population of female prisoners has expanded nearly 200% in the past two decades, a much higher rate than the increase in the number of incarcerated men. It is important to understand why these numbers have increased so significantly and to recognize the gender-specific needs and challenges of women prisoners.

This report offers a valuable contribution towards our understanding of the causes, conditions, and consequences of women’s imprisonment in Argentina. It is based on extensive research, including ...

Juvenile Criminal Record Confidentiality, James B. Jacobs

New York University Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Confidentiality of the juvenile's criminality and contacts wit the criminal justice system was central to the raison d'etre of the juvenile court. Consequently, juvvenile court personnel and their legislative allies limited the disclosure of juvenile respondents' identities,c riminal conduct and court processing. Nevertheless, to do its work, the court collected and shared a great deal of information. Even more information was purposefully and/or inadvertently disclosed by police departments. After the Gault decision, the commitment to confidentiality waned. By the 1980s, emphasis on government transparency and protecting society significantly undermined the policy and practice of juvenile justice ...

Inequality's Frontiers, Melissa Murray

Melissa Murray

No abstract provided.

The Dangers Of Eyewitness Identification: A Call For Greater State Involvement To Ensure Fundamental Fairness, Dana Walsh

Boston College Law Review

In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Perry v. New Hampshire, the Court’s first case on the admissibility of eyewitness identifications in thirty-five years. The Court held that the Due Process Clause does not require a preliminary judicial assessment of the reliability of an eyewitness identification that was not procured under unnecessarily suggestive circumstances orchestrated by law enforcement. The Court retained factors for assessing reliability when police misconduct is involved that were adopted in the 1970s, despite the emergence of new data highlighting the inherent unreliability of eyewitness identification. This Note argues that the Supreme Court did not ...

Defending Those People, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Many practitioners and scholars have written perceptively about the motivations of criminal defenders. Some have written eloquently. I have my own body of work on this and related questions.

This essay is about why the author has devoted her professional career--her life--to defending people most of society would just as soon banish and forget. After nearly thirty years of criminal law practice, her reasons are such a part of her that they are nearly inarticulable. The author is a criminal defender in her soul. She also has been teaching and writing about criminal defense for almost as long as she ...

Humane Punishment For Seriously Disordered Offenders: Sentencing Departures And Judicial Control Over Conditions Of Confinement, E. Lea Johnston

Faculty Publications

At sentencing, a judge may foresee that an individual with a major mental disorder will experience serious psychological or physical harm in prison. In light of this reality and offenders’ other potential vulnerabilities, a number of jurisdictions currently allow judges to treat undue offender hardship as a mitigating factor at sentencing. In these jurisdictions, vulnerability to harm may militate toward an order of probation or a reduced term of confinement. Since these measures do not affect offenders’ day-to-day experience in confinement, these expressions of mitigation fail to protect adequately those vulnerable offenders who must serve time in prison. This Article ...

Executive Summary Of Special Report Submitted To The Honorable Jack Markell Governor, State Of Delaware, May 10, 2010, Independent Review Of The Earl Brian Bradley Case, Linda L. Ammons

Linda L. Ammons

No abstract provided.

Safe To Drive? Police Powers Of Search And Seizure In The Vehicular Context, Mark Rucci

Honors College

Since their creation, automobiles have become a central facet of the American culture and psyche. As status symbols and modes of transportation their importance cannot be overstated. Americans love their cars, and the average citizen believes that he or she has legitimate privacy interests in his or her vehicle. But is this the case? For decades, The Court has struggled to balance 4th Amendment privacy rights with effective police procedure, and has thus handed down dozens of rulings on the topic, many of which often seem disparate and contradictory. In the face of such confusion, the Court’s answer has ...

A Jury Of Whose Peers?: Eliminating Racial Discrimination In Jury Selection Procedures, Hilary Weddell

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

The jury system is intended to instill fairness and increase confidence in the American legal system as a whole. Despite this goal, widespread discrimination remains in jury selection procedures. In order to adequately protect both a defendant’s right to be tried by a jury of his peers and every citizen’s right to participate in the legal system, representativeness should be improved at each of three levels where juror exclusion takes place: (1) the assembly of the jury pool; (2) the issuance of exemptions and excusals from jury service; and (3) the use of peremptory challenges in empanelling the ...

Reaching Batson's Challenge Twenty-Five Years Later: Eliminating The Peremptory Challenge And Loosening The Challenge For Cause Standard, Matt Haven

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor…And Your Convicted? Teaching “Justice” To Law Students By Defending Criminal Immigrants In Removal Proceedings, Michael S. Vastine

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Criminalization Of Housing: A Revolving Door That Results In Boarded Up Doors In Low-Income Neighborhoods In Baltimore, Maryland, Sarah Spangler Rhine

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Death By Incarceration As A Cruel And Unusual Punishment When Applied To Juveniles: Extending Roper To Life Without Parole, Our Other Death Penalty, Robert Johnson, Sonia Tabriz

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.