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Trumping Asylum: Criminal Prosecutors For Illegal Entry And Reentry Violate The Rights Of Asylum Seekers, Natasha Arnpriester

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

Criminal prosecution for the immigration-related infractions of illegal entry and illegal reentry have escalated dramatically under the Trump Administration, which has made targeting immigrants a top priority. This escalation is happening at a time when the population coming to the U.S. southern border is largely seeking safety from persecution and danger. The United States does not recognize asylum as a defense to illegal entry or illegal reentry, and asylum seekers are not excluded from being charged and criminally prosecuted for these infractions, despite U.S. treaty obligations prohibiting this practice. As a result, people coming to the United States to seek …

The Fragile Victory For Unaccompanied Children's Due Process Rights After Flores V. Sessions, Elizabeth P. Lincoln

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

In 2017, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that when the federal government detains an unaccompanied child, that child has the right to request legal review of his or her custody before an immigration judge. In Flores v. Sessions, the court reaffirmed the right, which had been present in the text of the laws governing the treatment of immigrant youth, but had been ignored by executive branch bodies. In its analysis, the court considered the relationship between a twenty-year-old settlement and two acts of Congress that govern the treatment of immigrant youth. The Flores decision affects the lives of …

Mass Monitoring, Avlana Eisenberg

Scholarly Publications

Business is booming for criminal justice monitoring technology: these days “ankle bracelet” refers as often to an electronic monitor as to jewelry. Indeed, the explosive growth of electronic monitoring (“EM”) for criminal justice purposes—a phenomenon which this Article terms “mass monitoring”—is among the most overlooked features of the otherwise well-known phenomenon of mass incarceration.

This Article addresses the fundamental question of whether EM is punishment. It finds that the origins and history of EM as a progressive alternative to incarceration—a punitive sanction—support characterization of EM as punitive, and that EM comports with the goals of dominant punishment theories. Yet new …

Congress Blewett By Not Explicitly Making The Fair Sentencing Act Of 2010 Retroactive, Andrew Cockroft

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

In 2013, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals was the first Circuit Court to retroactively apply the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. The Fair Sentencing Act sought to end the discriminatory effects of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and its treatment of one gram of crack cocaine as the equivalent to one hundred grams of powder cocaine. The Fair Sentencing Act was meant to remedy the injustices brought about by the infamous 100:1 ratio in crack-cocaine and powder cocaine minimum sentencing. Despite this purpose, the Fair Sentencing Act does not contain language that explicitly and unequivocally requires that the …

Special Education In Adult Correctional Facilities: A Right Not A Privilege, Melissa Edelson

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the Legislature shall encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvement. – California Constitution art. IX §1.

A New Balance Of Evils: Prosecutorial Misconduct, Iqbal, And The End Of Absolute Immunity, Mark C. Niles

Faculty Publications

Criminal prosecutors wield immense power in the criminal justice system. While the majority of prosecutors exercise this power in a professional manner, there is compelling evidence of a serious and growing problem of prosecutorial misconduct in this country. Although much prosecutorial misconduct results in the violation of the constitutional and other legal rights of criminal defendants, prosecutors are protected from any liability arising from these violations in all but the most exceptional cases by the defense of absolute immunity. The US. Supreme Court has justified the application of absolute prosecutorial immunity, in part, by noting that other means of incentivizing …

Capital Punishment Of Unintentional Felony Murder, Guyora Binder, Brenner Fissell, Robert Weisberg

Journal Articles

Under the prevailing interpretation of the Eighth Amendment in the lower courts, a defendant who causes a death inadvertently in the course of a felony is eligible for capital punishment. This unfortunate interpretation rests on an unduly mechanical reading of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Enmund v. Florida and Tison v. Arizona, which require culpability for capital punishment of co-felons who do not kill. The lower courts have drawn the unwarranted inference that these cases permit execution of those who cause death without any culpability towards death. This Article shows that this mechanical reading of precedent is mistaken, because the …

Comity, Finality, And Oklahoma’S Lethal Injection Protocol, Jon Yorke

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

A License To Kill: State Sponsored Death In The Oldest Colony In The World, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud

Faculty Scholarship

The article discusses the death penalty in Puerto Rico as a means of state violence by the United States over Puerto Rico. In light of this, the author recounts the Puerto Rican colonial experience through a legal lens, beginning with the first organic law of Puerto Rico and the Insular Cases. Afterwards, the author examines the imposition of the death penalty on Puerto Rico and the challenges it has faced based on the due process of the fourteenth amendment. The article concludes with the stating how the death penalty is as another expression of the U.S. Congress plenary powers over …

A Contextual Approach To Harmless Error Review, Justin Murray

Articles & Chapters

Harmless error review is profoundly important, but arguably broken, in the form that courts currently employ it in criminal cases. One significant reason for this brokenness lies in the dissonance between the reductionism of modern harmless error methodology and the diverse normative ambitions of criminal procedure. Nearly all harmless error rules used by courts today focus exclusively on whether the procedural error under review affected the result of a judicial proceeding. I refer to these rules as “result-based harmlesserror review.” The singular preoccupation of result-based harmless error review with the outputs of criminal processes stands in marked contrast with criminal …

Legislating The First Amendment: A Trio Of Recommendations For Lawmakers Targeting Free Expression, Clay Calvert

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

This Article offers three recommendations for lawmakers attempting to restrict expression that is presumptively protected by the First Amendment. The proposals include: (1) embracing a "prism of protection" through which all potential laws affecting expression are filtered prior to drafting; (2) mandating inclusion of sunset clauses in all statutes that may detrimentally impact free expression; and (3) adopting a comprehensive legislative oversight and review process for determining if an expired statute should be renewed, revised or abandoned. Although far from creating what Dean Roscoe Pound more than 100 years ago called a "science of legislation, " the proposals here nonetheless …

Firearms In The Family, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article considers firearms prohibitions for domestic violence offenders, in light of recent Supreme Court decisions and the larger, national debate about gun control. Unlike other scholarship in the area, it confronts the costs of ratcheting up the scope and enforcement of such firearms bans and argues that the politicization of safety has come at the expense of a sound approach to gun control in the context of intimate-partner abuse. In doing so, it expands scholarly arguments against mandatory, one-size-fits-all criminal justice responses to domestic violence in a direction that other critics have been reluctant to go, perhaps because of …

Cognitive Competence In Executive-Branch Decision Making, Anna Spain Bradley

Publications

The decisions Presidents and those operating under their authority take determine the course of our nation and the trajectory of our lives. Consequently, understanding who has the power and authority to decide has captured both the attention of legal scholars across a variety of fields for many years and the immediate worry of the public since the 2016 Presidential election. Prevailing interventions look for ways that law can offer procedural and institutional reforms that aim to maintain separation of powers and avoid an authoritarian regime. Yet, these views commonly overlook a fundamental factor and a more human one: the individuals …

Judges Need To Exercise Their Responsibility To Require That Eligible Defendants Have Lawyers, Robert C. Boruchowitz

Faculty Articles

There are many courts in the United States, particularly misdemeanor courts, in which accused persons appear and often plead guilty without ever receiving the advice of counsel, even when they are eligible for a public defender. In various states, between twenty-five and sixty-eight percent of the defendants in misdemeanor cases do not have lawyers. In many courts in South Carolina, there is no public defender ever available. The American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) has filed a class action lawsuit against two South Carolina cities, alleging that they are unconstitutionally denying counsel to eligible accused persons.

There is no question that …

Freedom Of Speech And The Criminal Law, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Because the Free Speech Clause limits government power to enact penal statutes, it has a close relationship to American criminal law. This Article explores that relationship at a time when a fast-growing “decriminalization movement” has taken hold across the nation. At the heart of the Article is the idea that free speech law has developed in ways that have positioned the Supreme Court to use that law to impose significant new limits on the criminalization of speech. More particularly, this article claims that the Court has developed three distinct decision-making strategies for decriminalizing speech based on constitutional principles. The first …

The Downstream Consequences Of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention, Paul Heaton, Sandra G. Mayson, Megan Stevenson

Scholarly Works

In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas—the thirdlargest county in the United States—to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are 25% more likely than similarly …

Religious Accommodation, Religious Tradition, And Political Polarization, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

A religious accommodation is an exemption from compliance with the law for some but not for others. One might therefore suppose that before granting an accommodation, courts would inquire about whether a legal interference with religious belief or practice is truly significant, if only to evaluate whether the risk of political polarization that attends accommodation is worth hazarding. But that is not the case: any assessment of the significance of a religious belief or practice within a claimant's belief system is strictly forbidden.

Two arguments are pressed in support of this view: (1) courts have institutional reasons for acquiescing on …

A Higher Power Produces Greater Problems: How Religious Honor Codes And Religious Schools Exacerbate Campus Sexual Assault, Samuel T. Jay

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Fair For Whom? Why Debt-Collection Lawsuits In St. Louis Violate The Procedural Due Process Rights Of Low-Income Communities, Aimee Constantineau

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Prisonization Of America's Public Schools, Maryam Ahranjani

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Regulating Gun Rentals, Ira P. Robbins

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

A machine gun overpowers a nine-year-old girl, erratically spraying bullets and accidentally killing her instructor; a perturbed mother slays her son and then takes her own life; a convicted felon circumvents federal prohibitions to access a firearm to commit suicide; and, perhaps most notably, Navy SEAL war veteran Chris Kyle, focus of the movie “American Sniper,” is murdered while attempting to help another veteran recover from post-traumatic stress disorder. We have all seen the headlines, but we have largely ignored the source of this heartbreak. The ramifications of these examples are not merely cinematic, but also involve families suffering from …

Our Criminal Laws, Our Constitution, Sarah Seo

Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews three recently published books that further explore this insight in the twentieth century. At first glance, vagrancy laws, the free will problem, and criminal records may seem to share little in common. But each study illuminates how criminal laws have defined our nation by creating what historian Barbara Welke has termed "borders of belonging," a boundary that laws create between people who enjoy full citizenship and those who do not. After all, a conviction and imprisonment are acts of social and political exclusion. Even the policing of suspected offenders often reveals who does not completely belong.

The …

A New Balance Of Evils: Prosecutorial Misconduct, Iqbal, And The End Of Absolute Immunity, Mark Niles

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Criminal prosecutors wield immense power in the criminal justice system. While the majority of prosecutors exercise this power in a professional manner, there is compelling evidence of a serious and growing problem ofprosecutorial misconduct in this country. Although much prosecutorial misconduct results in the violation of the constitutional and other legal rights of criminal defendants, prosecutors arep rotectedfrom any liability arisingf rom these violations in all but the most exceptional cases by the defense of absolute immunity. The US. Supreme Court has justified the application ofabsolute prosecutorial immunity, in part, by noting that other means of incentivizing appropriate prosecutorial conduct …

Confronting Crawford: Justice Scalia, The Judicial Method, And The Adjudicative Limits Of Originalism, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

If you conduct an online search for something like “Justice Scalia’s most important opinions” or “Justice Scalia’s most influential opinions,” you will (or at least I did) almost always end up with a list that is top-heavy with dissents. That is not surprising. Dissenting opinions gave Justice Antonin Scalia the most freedom to exercise his considerable skills as a writer and were therefore more likely to produce memorable one-liners. They were also the best occasions for him to express his views can­didly and forcefully and thus served as the best vehicles for elaboration of his jurisprudential and doctrinal positions. Majority …

Is Miranda Good News Or Bad News For The Police: The Usefulness Of Empirical Evidence, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark case of Miranda v. Arizona created a culture in which police officers regularly warn arrestees that they have a right to remain silent, that anything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law, that they have the right to an attorney, and that if they cannot afford one, an attorney will be appointed to them. These Miranda warnings have a number of possible effects. The warnings are meant to inform suspects about negative consequences associated with speaking to the police without the assistance of counsel. In this sense they …

Sex Offender Registration In New York: The Dangers Of State Law Preemption Of Local Residency Restriction Laws And Its Implications For Communities And Sex Offenders Alike, Megan Forbes

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Proposing A One-Year Time Bar For 8 U.S.C. § 1226(C), Jenna Neumann

Michigan Law Review

Section 1226(c) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) requires federal detention of certain deportable noncitizens when those noncitizens leave criminal custody. This section applies only to noncitizens with a criminal record (“criminal noncitizens”). Under section 1226(c), the Attorney General must detain for the entire course of his or her removal proceedings any noncitizen who has committed a qualifying offense “when the alien is released” from criminal custody. Courts construe this phrase in vastly different ways when determining whether a criminal noncitizen will be detained. The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and the Fourth Circuit read “when …

Federal Review Of State Criminal Convictions: A Structural Approach To Adequacy Doctrine, Eve Brensike Primus

Michigan Law Review

Modern state postconviction review systems feature procedural labyrinths so complicated and confusing that indigent defendants have no realistic prospect of complying with the rules. When defendants predictably fail to navigate these mazes, state and federal courts deem their claims procedurally defaulted and refuse to consider those claims on their merits. As a result, systemic violations of criminal procedure rights—like the right to effective counsel—persist without judicial correction.

But the law contains a tool that, if properly adapted, could bring these systemic problems to the attention of federal courts: procedural adequacy. Procedural adequacy doctrine gives federal courts the power to ignore …

The Fourth Amendment And Driving While Intoxicated: When Does A Police Officer Need A Warrant ?, Marra Kassman

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cumulative Constitutional Rights, Kerry Abrams, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

Cumulative constitutional rights are ubiquitous. Plaintiffs litigate multiple constitutional violations, or multiple harms, and judges use multiple constitutional provisions to inform interpretation. Yet judges, litigants, and scholars have often criticized the notion of cumulative rights, including in leading Supreme Court rulings, such as Lawrence v. Texas, Employment Division v. Smith, and Miranda v. Arizona. Recently, the Court attempted to clarify some of this confusion. In its landmark opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court struck down state bans on same-sex marriage by pointing to several distinct but overlapping protections inherent in the Due Process Clause, including the right to individual …