Criminal Law Commons^™

Losing All Sense Of Just Proportion: The Peculiar Law Of Accomplice Liability, 87 St. John’S Law Rev. 129 (2013), Michael G. Heyman

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Good Step In The Right Direction: Illinois Eliminates The Conflict Between Attorneys And Guardians, 38 J. Legal Prof. 161 (2013), Alberto Bernabe

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Carter V. Canada (Attorney General): Canadian Courts Revisit The Criminalization Of Assisted Suicide, 59 Wayne L. Rev. 561 (2013), Donald L. Beschle

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

It's Not Just For Death Cases Anymore: How Capital Mitigation Investigation Can Enhance Experiential Learning And Improve Advocacy In Law School Non-Capital Criminal Defense Clinics, 50 Cal. W. L. Rev. 31 (2013), Hugh Mundy

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

As this article proposes, law school criminal defense clinics provide an excellent environment to design and implement a non-capital mitigation investigation protocol based on the techniques used in death penalty cases. From a pedagogical perspective, such a model promotes student development of foundational lawyering skills and values, especially in the vital area of “narrative thinking characteristic of everyday practice.” From a pragmatic standpoint, creation of a mitigation investigation model benefits clinic clients and boosts the likelihood that similar investigative methods will become a staple of the student's post-graduate practice.

Part I charts the evolution of capital mitigation investigation and highlights …

My Life Is Not My Own: Do Criminal Arrestees’ Privacy Interests In Mug Shots Outweigh Public’S Desire For Disclosure?, 30 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 307 (2013), Jocelyn Watkins

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

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The Rule Of Law, Constitutional Reform, And The Death Penalty In The Gambia, Andrew Novak

Richmond Journal of Global Law & Business

No abstract provided.

The Virtues Of Thinking Small, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Professor Lain argues that, in efforts to determine how close American states are to abolishing the death penalty, scholars should "think small," examining the ground level issues that affect its imposition. Among the issues she explores are exonerations of defendants, the legality and obtainability of lethal injection drugs, and the high costs of seeking and imposing capital punishment.

Beyond “Life And Liberty”: The Evolving Right To Counsel, John D. King

Scholarly Articles

The majority of Americans, if they have contact with the criminal justice system at all, will experience it through misdemeanor courtrooms. More than ever before, the criminal justice system is used to sort, justify, and reify a separate underclass. And as the system of misdemeanor adjudication continues to be flooded with new cases, the value that is exalted over all others is efficiency. The result is a system that can make it virtually painless to plead guilty (which has always been true for low-level offenses), but that is now overlaid with a new system of increasingly harsh collateral consequences. The …

Drugs, Dignity And Danger: Human Dignity As A Constitutional Constraint To Limit Overcriminalization, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Scholarly Articles

This Article proposes a constitutional constraint to limit criminalization of victimless crimes and, particularly, to alleviate the pressures on the criminal justice system emanating from its continuous “war on drugs.” To accomplish this goal, the Article explores the concept of human dignity, a fundamental right yet to be invoked in the context of substantive criminal law. The U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence invokes conflicting accounts of human dignity: liberty as dignity, on the one hand, and communitarian virtue as dignity, on the other. However, the Court has not yet developed a workable mechanism to reconcile these competing concepts in cases where …

Florida V. Jardines: The Wolf At The Castle Door, Timothy C. Macdonnell

Scholarly Articles

The purpose of this article is to examine the controversy regarding the application of the contraband exception to the home and the potential impact of the Florida v. Jardines decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. The article will begin by examining the cases that make up the Supreme Court's contraband exception and some of the Court's precedent regarding the home and warrantless searches. Next, the article will examine the Florida Supreme Court's holding in Jardines and discuss how the Florida court arrived at the conclusion that the canine sniff in that case was a search. This section will compare the …

Examining Montana's Right To Attack Unconstitutional Prior Convictions At Sentencing: State V. Maine, Paul M. Leisher

Montana Law Review

The Maine Court had good reason to reject Custis. Between 1967 when Burgett announced the rule that a current sentence could not be enhanced based on an unconstitutional prior sentence and 1994 when Custis limited the scope of that rule, all but one of the federal circuit courts to consider the issue held the Burgett Court’s rationale for barring the use of a conviction obtained in violation of Gideon must apply to other constitutional rights as well. The arguments for limiting collateral attacks on prior convictions at sentencing to only claims of Gideon violations are unpersuasive. Faced with the decision …

Getting Beyond Intuition In The Probable Cause Inquiry, Erica Goldberg

School of Law Faculty Publications

Courts are proudly resigned to the fact that the probable cause inquiry is “nontechnical.” In order to conduct a search or make an arrest, police need to satisfy the probable cause standard, which the Supreme Court has deemed “incapable of precise definition or quantification into percentages.” The flexibility of this elusive standard enables courts to defer to police officers’ reasonable judgments and expert intuitions in unique situations. However, police officers are increasingly using investigative techniques that replace their own observational skills with test results from some other source, such as drug sniffing dogs, facial recognition technology, and DNA matching. The …

A Good Enough Reason: Addiction, Agency And Criminal Responsibility, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

The article begins by contrasting medical and moral views of addiction and how such views influence responsibility and policy analysis. It suggests that since addiction always involves action and action can always be morally evaluated, we must independently decide whether addicts do not meet responsibility criteria rather than begging the question and deciding by the label of ‘disease’ or ‘moral weakness’. It then turns to the criteria for criminal responsibility and shows that the criteria for criminal responsibility, like the criteria for addiction, are all folk psychological. Therefore, any scientific information about addiction must be ‘translated’ into the law’s folk …

Abolition Of The Insanity Defense Violates Due Process, Stephen J. Morse, Richard J. Bonnie

All Faculty Scholarship

This article, which is based on and expands on an amicus brief the authors submitted to the United States Supreme Court, first provides the moral argument in favor of the insanity defense. It considers and rejects the most important moral counterargument and suggests that jurisdictions have considerable leeway in deciding what test best meets their legal and moral policies. The article then discusses why the two primary alternatives to the insanity defense, the negation of mens rea and considering mental disorder at sentencing, are insufficient to achieve the goal of responding justly to severely mentally disordered offenders. The last section …

The Movement Of U.S. Criminal And Administrative Law: Processes Of Transplanting And Translating, Toby S. Goldbach, Benjamin Brake, Peter Katzenstein

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article examines the transplanting and translating of law in the domains of criminal procedure and administrative law. The transnational movement of law is full of unexpected twists and turns that belie the notion of the United States as a legal behemoth. Furthermore, the movement of legal procedures which occurs both within and across countries with common and civil law legal traditions challenges preconceived notions of an orderly divide between legal families. While the spread of elements of the U.S. jury system and methods of plea bargaining reveals the powerful influence of U.S. legal ideas, the ways that these procedures …

Response To Comments By Professors Baer, Candeub, Medwed, Painter, And Prentice, Manuel A. Utset

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Criminal Justice In Indian Country, Sarah Deer

Faculty Scholarship

On March 7,2013, President Obama signed the 2013 Violence Against Women Act Re-authorization ("VAWA 2013"). Contained within that legislation is a partial re-authorization of tribal criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians, which is a topic covered in this short article. VAWA 2013 recognizes that the inherent right of tribal nations includes criminal jurisdiction over non-Indian defendants accused of domestic violence. The topics discussed in this article-statistical evidence, interdiction of violence, and protecting Native women-will likely become even more important as tribal leaders and jurists consider the future of tribal self-determination and seek to realize the full potential of the changes created by …

Blanket Retroactive Amelioration: A Remedy For Disproportionate Punishments, S. David Mitchell

Faculty Publications

While statutes determine the conditions under which an individual is to be held accountable for their actions and identifies the punishment that shall attach to that conduct, they are not engraved in stone. Laws can and are changed. Legislatures will revisit whether a penalty is too harsh (or too lenient), and amend an existing statute to reflect the legislature’s evaluation of what is contemporaneously appropriate. This re-evaluation of a statutory punishment is ongoing assessment to determine whether the punishment is proportional to the conduct. Blanket retroactive amelioration allows society to correct overly harsh, overreactions and to restore the balance between …

Freeing Morgan Freeman: Expanding Back-End Release Authority In American Prisons, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This article, written for a symposium hosted by the Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy on “Finality in Sentencing,” makes four arguments, three general and one specific. First, the United States incarcerates too many people for too long, and mechanisms for making prison sentences less “final” will allow the U.S. to make those sentences shorter, thus reducing the prison population surplus. Second, even if one is agnostic about the overall size of the American prison population, it is difficult to deny that least some appreciable fraction of current inmates are serving more time than can reasonably be justified on …

Panel Iv: Challenges To Proving Cases Of Torture Before The Committee Against Torture, Juan E. Mendez

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.