Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

To Free Or Not To Free: Rethinking Release Orders Under The Prison Litigation Reform Act After Brown V. Plata, Kyle T. Sullivan

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

The United States Supreme Court made one of its most controversial decisions in recent memory in May 2011. Brown v. Plata involved a class action by inmates in California who alleged that their Eighth Amendment rights had been violated because overcrowding in the State’s prisons prevented access to adequate physical and mental health care. After California failed to comply with previous orders to remedy those conditions, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California ordered the State to reduce its prison population by forty-six thousand inmates. Forced to either affirm the release order and jeopardize public ...

Municipal Liability And Liability Of Supervisors: Litigation Significance Of Recent Trends And Developments, Karen Blum, Celeste Koeleveld, Joel B. Rudin, Martin A. Schwartz

Touro Law Review

"The purpose of this presentation is to examine two recent Supreme Court decisions, Connick v. Thompson and Ashcroft v. Iqbal with an eye to their impact on how lower federal courts will assess such claims in the wake of new constraints imposed by these cases. The focus of the discussion will be on developments in single-incident liability cases after Connick and supervisory liability claims after Iqbal."

Public Duties, Private Rights: Privacy And Unsubstantiated Allegations In Washington’S Public Records Act, Robert E. Miller

Seattle University Law Review

Open government laws allow private citizens to monitor public servants. But this vital function of access presents a clash of competing interests: the privacy of public employees versus the public’s right to know. Washington’s Public Records Act (PRA) seeks to balance these interests, and the Washington Supreme Court has fought to adhere to the PRA’s spirit of open government while creating bright-line rules for the ease of government agencies. The Bainbridge Island Police Guild court held that investigative reports of unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct against public officials are highly offensive to a reasonable person and that ...

Comment: First Amendment Rights Of Prisoners To Have Access To The News Media In Relation To Administrative Policy Bans Upon Such Access , Sharon Hass

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

This Alj Said Too Much: Prison Hearing Officer Charges Michigan Department Of Corrections With First Amendment Violations And Race Discrimination, Carolyn Amadon

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

This Alj Said Too Much: Prison Hearing Officer Charges Michigan Department Of Corrections With First Amendment Violations And Race Discrimination, Carolyn Amadon

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

Making Detention Reform Work For Girls: A Guide To Juvenile Detention Reform, Francine T. Sherman, Richard A. Mendel, Angela Irvine

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Throughout the nation, court-involved girls frequently pose minimal risk to public safety but suffer with significant social service needs. Data on detention utilization show that girls are being disproportionately detained for misdemeanors, status offenses and technical violations of probation and parole. In short, many girls enter detention for the wrong reasons and many remain in detention for extended periods harmful to them and contrary to best practice.

This practice guide responds to a call from both mature and new sites from within the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) network, which continue to find that effectively serving and supervising girls is ...

Three Strikes And You're Out… Maybe: "Violent Felonies" And The Armed Career Criminal Act In United States V. Vann, Nick Poli

Boston College Law Review

On October 11, 2011, in United States v. Vann, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, held that Torrell Vann’s three prior indecent liberties convictions were not violent felonies under the federal Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA). In so doing, the per curiam majority attempted to interpret the vague residual clause of the ACCA and concluded that taking improper liberties or committing lewd acts on the body of a child were not the type of convictions worthy of the fifteen-year mandatory minimum prison sentence mandated by the ACCA. This Comment argues that the ...

Breaking The Mexican Cartels: A Key Homeland Security Challenge For The Next Four Years, Carrie F. Cordero

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although accurate statistics are hard to come by, it is quite possible that 60,000 people have died in the last six-plus years as a result of armed conflict between the Mexican cartels and the Mexican government, amongst cartels fighting each other, and as a result of cartels targeting citizens. And this figure does not even include the nearly 40,000 Americans who die each year from using illegal drugs, much of which is trafficked through the U.S.-Mexican border. The death toll is only part of the story. The rest includes the terrorist tactics used by cartels to ...

Insurmountable Hill: How Undue Aedpa Deference Has Undermined The Atkins Ban On Executing The Intellectually Disabled, Nathaniel Koslof

Boston College Law Review

On November 22, 2011, in Hill v. Humphrey, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, sitting en banc, held that a petitioner’s federal habeas petition challenging his death sentence must be denied in light of the degree of deference owed to the state habeas court’s decision under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). In so doing, the court rejected the petitioner’s argument that Georgia’s beyond a reasonable doubt standard for proving a defendant’s intellectual disability is unconstitutionally stringent and thus eviscerates the right of the intellectually disabled to ...

No Cilia Left Behind: Analyzing The Privacy Rights In Routinely Shed Dna Found At Crime Scenes, David Gusella

Boston College Law Review

As science advances, researchers are learning more about the meaning of information that is contained in the human genome. Because we routinely shed DNA in public, this has significant implications for an individual’s ability to keep genetic information private. If routinely shed DNA is found at a crime scene, there is a significant governmental interest to sequence the DNA in order to uncover suspects or potential witnesses. This Note analyzes the implications of advancing technology on an individual’s right to privacy in one’s own genetic information, and it argues that informational privacy should be protected for non-phenotypic ...

Forgiving The Unforgivable: Reinvigorating The Use Of Executive Clemency In Capital Cases, Molly Clayton

Boston College Law Review

Clemency, the power to reduce the sentence of a convicted criminal, has existed since ancient times. Yet, the use of this power in the United States has significantly declined in recent decades. The U.S. Supreme Court has called executive clemency “the fail safe” of the criminal justice system, and has determined that some minimal procedural safeguards apply in clemency proceedings. Lower courts, however, have failed to require any significant procedural safeguards in the clemency process. Because clemency plays a crucial function in the criminal justice system, this Note argues that states should enact both procedural requirements and substantive guidelines ...

Wherefore Art Though Romeo: Revitalizing Youngberg's Protection Of Liberty For The Civilly Committed, Rosalie Berger Levinson

Boston College Law Review

Thirty years ago, in Youngberg v. Romeo, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that those who are involuntarily committed in a state institution enjoy a constitutionally protected liberty interest, which protects the right to reasonably safe conditions of confinement, freedom from unreasonable restraint, and minimally adequate training sufficient to ensure these liberty interests. In a unanimous decision, the Court held that when government officials make decisions that constitute a substantial departure from professional judgment, causing injury to these liberty interests, the officials violate the substantive due process guarantee of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Despite ...

Equal Protection "In Flux": The Seventh Circuit's Inability To Clarify A Standard For Class-Of-One Equal Protection Claims In Del Marcelle V. Brown County Corp, Andrew Martinez Whitson

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

On May 17, 2012, in Del Marcelle v. Brown County Corp., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit sitting en banc split three ways on what standard to apply in class-of-one equal protection cases. The judges were concerned about how to account for a state actor’s motive while also ensuring that low-level government officials’ discretionary authority is adequately protected. The Seventh Circuit could have balanced these concerns appropriately had they adopted Judge Wood’s proposed framework, which evaluates a state actor’s behavior using a rational basis standard and allows the defendant’s motive to be ...

Searching For "Jurisdictional Hook": United States V. Kebodeaux And The Constitutional Limits Of The Sex Offender Registration And Notification Act, Casey B. Nathan

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

On July 6, 2012, in United States v. Kebodeaux, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act’s registration requirements were unconstitutional when applied to the intrastate relocation of former federal convicts who had been unconditionally released from federal custody. This decision obfuscates whether former federal sex offenders must follow state or federal sex offender registration requirements in order to avoid criminal penalties. A contrary interpretation of the Act’s statutory history that requires uniform registration requirements among all federal sex offenders would resolve this ambiguity and ensure a ...

The Visit, Jiordan Castle

Student Research & Creativity - Day of Celebration

I will be reading a creative essay constructed for Professor Ryan Van Meter's spring 2012 workshop in nonfiction. English Department Chair Dean Rader assisted me in getting my paper chosen for presentation (with a Q&A session) at the upcoming Sigma Tau Delta International Convention this month. The essay is about visiting my father in prison as a teenager and relates to race relations and our justice system in a personal, yet unsentimental way.

Protecting Prisoners During Custodial Interrogations: The Road Forward After Howes V. Fields, Michelle Parilo

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

In 1966, in Miranda v. Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court sought to mitigate the inherently coercive atmosphere of custodial interrogations to protect victims from involuntary self-incrimination. In analyzing custody for Miranda purposes, courts look at whether a reasonable person would feel that his freedom of movement had been restricted. When conducting this analysis for a prisoner questioned during incarceration, courts should thoroughly consider the negative psychological effects of prisons in order to understand the prisoner’s mindset. The Court had the opportunity to do so in Howes v. Fields, but it instead minimized the coercive effects of prisons. Moreover ...