Criminal Procedure Commons^™

Corporate Conspiracy: How Not Calling A Conspiracy A Conspiracy Is Warping The Law On Corporate Wrongdoing, Josephine Sandler Nelson

J.S. Nelson

The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine immunizes an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy. The doctrine, however, misplaces incentives in contravention of agency law, criminal law, tort law, and public policy. As a result, harmful behavior is ordered and performed without consequences, and the victims of the behavior suffer without appropriate remedy.

Especially in the wake of the financial crisis, prosecutors and the public are searching for new tools to combat corporate conspiracy. The most ...

Structural Police Reform, Stephen Rushin

Stephen Rushin

For most of American history, courts and policymakers have relied on a small handful of relatively non-invasive tools to fight police misconduct. These traditional approaches to police regulation merely incentivized, but did not force, police departments to adopt costly reforms aimed at curbing unconstitutional behavior. In 1994, Congress passed 42 U.S.C. §14141, a statute authorizing the Attorney General to initiate structural reform litigation against local police agencies engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct. Although some of the nation’s largest cities have now undergone this sort of structural police reform, there has been little empirical legal ...

Orwellian Surveillance Of Vehicular Travels, Sam Hanna

Sam Hanna

What would someone learn about you if all your automobile travels were ubiquitously tracked beginning today? Creating an indefinite database of a person’s previous automobile travels to formulate deductions on intimate details of people's lives is precisely what law enforcement agencies are currently able to accomplish with automatic license plate recognition (“ALPR”). With the ubiquity of ALPR cameras, continuous government surveillance of automobile travels is no longer a figment of the imagination. Consequently, the judicial and legislative branches of government must embark on balancing the private and public interests implicated by this technology. Failure to set suitable boundaries ...

Federal Enforcement Of Police Reform, Stephen Rushin

Stephen Rushin

Congress passed 42 U.S.C. § 14141 in an effort to combat police misconduct and incentivize proactive reform in local law enforcement agencies. The statute gives the Attorney General the power to initiate structural reform litigation against local police departments engaged in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional behavior. While academics initially praised the law’s passage, many have since worried that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has not effectively administered the measure. No research has empirically analyzed how the DOJ has used its authority to initiate structural police reform. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, I fill ...

The Need For Additional Safeguards Against Racist Police Practices: A Call For Change To Massachusetts & Illinois Wiretapping Laws, Andrew Martinez Whitson

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

Police misconduct is still prevalent throughout the United States. Unfortunately for members of minority communities, this misconduct often comes in the form of racially discriminatory police practices. In many cases, such practices are deeply rooted in the police department’s culture. It is imperative that all citizens are equipped with every possible safeguard from such abuse at the hands of the police. In Massachusetts and Illinois, however, wiretapping and eavesdropping laws prevent people from employing one such safeguard that has proven to help change unconstitutional police practices. The safeguard that those laws criminalize is the ability to surreptitiously record on-duty ...

Collateral Damage: Drug Enforcement & Its Impact On The Deportation Of Legal Permanent Residents, Wilber A. Barillas

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

The United States’ legislation and jurisprudence regulating the deportation of legal permanent residents is harsh by many standards. The harshness of the legal regime is particularly acute as it relates to minor drug crimes. Under current U.S. law, possession of a single pill of Xanax leads to mandatory detention and can even lead to deportation. This Note explores the impact that the United States’ drug policy has had on deportation law, the current legislative regime surrounding drug-based deportations, the changing landscape of drug enforcement, and the lack of meaningful protection that current legislation and jurisprudence affords permanent residents facing ...

Suspicionless Searches: U.S. V. King And The Ninth Circuit’S Dismissal Of The Probationer-Parolee Distinction, Tricia Nicholson

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

In U.S. v. King, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit considered whether a suspicionless search of a probationer, conducted pursuant to a condition of his probation, violated the Fourth Amendment. The Ninth Circuit held that the search did not violate the Fourth Amendment because legitimate governmental interests outweighed the probationer’s privacy interest. In conducting the balancing test, however, the court failed to give significance to the distinction between probationers and parolees for Fourth Amendment purposes and used an analysis that overrides any individual privacy interest that a probationer may have.

Remedying The Remedy: Johnson V. Uribe And Determining Prejudice For Sixth Amendment Claims, Keith Kessinger

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

On November 5, 2012, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rehear Kennard G. Johnson’s habeas petition en banc, thus upholding the appellate panel’s decision to vacate his guilty plea for want of effective assistance of counsel, which overturned the district court’s resentencing remedy. The panel worked within the standard of review to establish prejudice during the plea negotiations, which provided not only an appropriate remedy but also a pragmatic framework for lower courts to assess similar claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. In dissent to the denial of rehearing en banc, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski ...

Is It Automatic?: The Mens Rea Presumption And The Interpretation Of The Machinegun Provision Of 18 U.S.C. § 924(C) In United States V. Burwell, Shannyn Gaughan

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

In United States v. Burwell, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reviewed en banc the question of whether the Government must prove that the Defendant knew of the firearm’s automatic capability before invoking 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(B)(ii)’s mandatory thirty-year minimum sentence. The majority affirmed the Defendant’s conviction, holding that the D.C. Circuit’s previous holding in United States v. Harris determined that no mens rea applies to the machinegun provision. The dissenting opinion, however, argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v ...

Proactive Gatekeepers: The Jurisprudence Of The Icc’S Pre-Trial Chambers, Christodoulos Kaoutzanis, Jocelyn Joan Courtney

Christodoulos Kaoutzanis

Due to the fairly recent inception of the International Criminal Court (“ICC), its

Pre-Trial Chambers has been the only judicial body at the ICC thus far to be exposed to

a wide variety of cases. In the seven years since Pre-Trial Chamber I held the

proceedings against the confirmation of charges against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, the

ICC’s two Pre-Trial Chambers have conducted hearings and determined the charges

against 14 individuals for crimes allegedly committed in four Situations. This article

systematically classifies the jurisprudence of the Pre-Trial Chambers in an attempt to

identify the trends that cut across the Pre-Trial ...

Discretion Abused: Reinterpreting The Appellate Standard Of Review For Hearsay, Matthew J. Peterson

Matthew J. Peterson

Matthew J. Peterson, Discretion Abused: Reinterpreting the Appellate Standard of Review for Hearsay

Abstract:

The decision by a federal a court to exclude or admit hearsay can be crucial to the case of either party. Despite this prospective impact, the federal courts of appeal currently defer to district courts’ expertise by reviewing a district court’s decision to admit or exclude hearsay for an abuse of discretion. Such deference often insulates district courts’ incorrect interpretation of the rule against hearsay and the improper application of the exclusions and exceptions to the rule from appellate reversal.

Lowering the standard of review ...

“Far From The Turbulent Space”: Considering The Adequacy Of Counsel In The Representation Of Individuals Accused Of Being Sexually Violent Predators, Michael L. Perlin, Heather Ellis Cucolo

Michael L Perlin

Abstract:

For the past thirty years, the US Supreme Court's standard of Strickland v. Washington has governed the question of adequacy of counsel in criminal trials. There, in a Sixth Amendment analysis, the Supreme Court acknowledged that simply having a lawyer assigned to a defendant was not constitutionally adequate, but that that lawyer must provide "effective assistance of counsel," effectiveness being defined, pallidly, as requiring simply that counsel's efforts be “reasonable” under the circumstances. The benchmark for judging an ineffectiveness claim is simply “whether counsel’s conduct so undermined the proper function of the adversarial process that the ...

Making The Right Call For Confrontation At Felony Sentencing, Shaakirrah R. Sanders

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Felony sentencing courts have discretion to increase punishment based on un-cross-examined testimonial statements about several categories of uncharged, dismissed, or otherwise unproven criminal conduct. Denying defendants an opportunity to cross-examine these categories of sentencing evidence undermines a core principle of natural law as adopted in the Sixth Amendment: those accused of felony crimes have the right to confront adversarial witnesses. This Article contributes to the scholarship surrounding confrontation rights at felony sentencing by cautioning against continued adherence to the most historic Supreme Court case on this issue, Williams v. New York. This Article does so for reasons beyond the unacknowledged ...

Targeted Killing: United States Policy, Constitional Law, And Due Process, Mark Febrizio

Senior Honors Theses

The increased incorporation of targeted killing, primarily through the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, into United States policy raises salient questions regarding its consistency with the U.S. Constitution. This paper contrasts interpretations of constitutional due process with the current legal framework for conducting targeted killing operations. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution establishes the due process owed to U.S. citizens. This paper determines that the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was accomplished in a manner inconsistent with constitutional due process and demonstrates an over-extension of executive branch power. This paper examines one scholarly recommendation that seeks ...

Demon At The Back Door: Rise Of The Mexican Drug Cartels, Oliver T. Beatty

Oliver T Beatty

This article addresses the rise of the violent Mexican drug cartels and searches within the legislative and law enforcement toolbox on how to dethrone the epidemic of violence on the border. The Mexican drug cartels rose from the ashes and structural framework of the Colombian cocaine cartels which gave these new criminal empires their routes, connections, and ease at taking over Pablo Escobar’s monopoly on the drug trafficking game. In addressing the origins of the cartels this article explores the trajectory of cocaine from imported medical remedy to criminalized substance. Additionally this article explores how the Italian mafia was ...

The "Double-Edged" Dilemma: The Eleventh Circuit's Devaluation Of Mental Health Mitigators In Evans V. Secretary, Department Of Corrections, Erik Thompson

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

In Evans v. Secretary, Department of Corrections, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit denied habeas corpus relief to a death row inmate who claimed that ineffective assistance of counsel prejudiced his death sentence hearing. Despite the defense counsel’s omission of evidence suggesting that the inmate suffered from various mental disabilities, the court resolved that such evidence would not have affected the jury’s ultimate recommendation of the death sentence because some of the evidence was stigmatized. This standard creates a burden that is far too great for individuals facing the death penalty and significantly minimizes ...

Impeachment By Unreliable Conviction, Anna Roberts

Boston College Law Review

This Article offers a new critique of Federal Rule of Evidence 609, which permits impeachment of criminal defendants by means of their prior criminal convictions. In admitting convictions as impeachment evidence, courts are wrongly assuming that such convictions are necessarily reliable indicators of relative culpability. Courts assume that convictions are the product of a fair fight, that they demonstrate relative culpability, and that they connote moral culpability. But current prosecutorial practice and other data undermine each of these assumptions. Accordingly, this Article proposes that before a conviction is used for impeachment, there should be an assessment of the extent to ...

Reflections On An Extraordinary Career: Thoughts About Jerry Caplan's Retirement, Michael Vitiello

Michael Vitiello

Reflections on an Extraordinary Career: Thoughts about Gerald Caplan’s Retirement

Abstract: The occasion for this essay is the retirement of my colleague Gerald Caplan. But this is not a sentimental account of a friend’s career. Instead, I take the opportunity of Jerry’s retirement to reflect on the role of a thoughtful principled conservative as a Washington insider and as an academic. The essay explores three areas of Jerry’s distinguished career: the first is a discussion of his role in saving the Legal Services Corporation when it was under attack from the right wing, within and without ...

Unreasonable Doubt: Warren Hill, Aedpa, And Georgia’S Unconstitutional Burden Of Proof, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

No abstract provided.

Mcmanus V. Horn: The Legality Of Setting A Single Form Of Bail, Maureen Wynne

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.