Digital Commons Network^™

Section 1: Moot Court: Pena-Rodriguez V. Colorado, Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law, William & Mary Law School

Supreme Court Preview

No abstract provided.

'Serial' Should Release Bergdahl Interviews, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Anti-Incarcerative Remedies For Illegal Conditions Of Confinement, Margo Schlanger

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

Securing Sequences: Ensuring Adequate Protections For Genetic Samples In The Age Of Big Data, Elizabeth R. Pike

Cardozo Law Review

Bulk collection of our personal data is increasingly common. Our internet browser history leads to personalized, targeted advertising; credit card companies aggregate billions of our collective transactions to gain insight into our spending patterns; and, as recently revealed, the National Security Agency engaged in the widespread collection of our telephone data without our knowledge or consent. But what if the data being collected, stored, shared, and used without our knowledge or consent is arguably the most personal of all data - our unique genetic sequence? In ways underreported and underexamined, the genetic information of nearly every American is likely to …

Reconsidering The History Of Open Courts In The Digital Age, Rory B. O'Sullivan, Catherine Connell

Seattle University Law Review

Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution of the State of Washington guarantees, “Justice in all cases shall be administered openly, and without unnecessary delay.” The Washington State Supreme Court has interpreted this clause to guarantee the public a right to attend legal proceedings and to access court documents separate and apart from the rights of the litigants themselves. Based on this interpretation, the court has struck down laws protecting the identity of both juvenile victims of sexual assault and individuals subject to involuntary commitment hearings. Its interpretation has also compromised the privacy rights of litigants wrongly named in legal …

How Much Are You Worth?: A Statutory Alternative To The Unconstitutionality Of Experts’ Use Of Minority-Based Statistics, Anne M. Anderson

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Moving Beyond Miranda: Concessions For Confessions, Scott W. Howe

Northwestern University Law Review

The law governing police interrogation provides perverse incentives. For criminal suspects, the law rewards obstruction and concealment. For police officers, it honors deceit and psychological aggression. For the courts and the rest of us, it encourages blindness and rationalization. This Article contends that the law could help foster better behaviors. The law could incentivize criminals to confess without police trickery and oppression. It could motivate police officers involved in obtaining suspect statements to avoid chicanery and duress. And, it could summon courts and the rest of us to speak more truthfully about whether suspect admissions are the product of informed, …

Confrontation As A Rule Of Production, Pamela R. Metzger

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Trending @ Rwu Law: Dean Yelnosky's Post: What The Tragedy In Orlando Means For Rwu Law 6/17/2016, Michael Yelnosky

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Private Prisons And The New Marketplace For Crime, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Adam Lamparello

Law Faculty Scholarship

A saner and safer prison policy in the United States begins by ending the scourge of the private prison corporation and returning crime and punishment to public function. We continue by radically reimagining our sentencing policies and reducing them significantly for non-violent crimes. We end the War on Drugs, once and for all, and completely reconfigure our drug and prison policy by legalizing and regulating marijuana use and providing health services to addicts of harder drugs and using prison for only violent drug kingpins and cartel bosses. We stop the current criminalization of immigration in its tracks and block the …

“Criminal Records” - A Comparative Approach, Sigmund A. Cohn

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Retroactivity In Criminal Procedure, Alex Stein, Dov Fox

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Predicate Offenses, Foreign Convictions, And Trusting Tribal Courts, Alexander S. Birkhold

Michigan Law Review Online

Concerns about the reliability of criminal justice systems in foreign countries have resulted in uneven treatment of foreign convictions in U.S. courts. Federal courts, however, have historically accepted tribal court convictions as predicate offenses under recidivist statutes. But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently rejected the uncounseled convictions obtained against Michael Bryant, Jr., a serial domestic abuser, in the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Court. The court dismissed a federal indictment that had been brought against Bryant under 18 U.S.C § 117, which makes it a felony to commit domestic violence against a spouse or partner in Indian country if the …

Constitutional Regulation Of Forensic Evidence, Brandon L. Garrett

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mental Illness, Severe Emotional Distress, And The Death Penalty: Reflections On The Tragic Case Of Joe Giarratano, Richard J. Bonnie

Washington and Lee Law Review

Joe Giarratano was on death row for twelve years, and remains incarcerated today, because mental illness and severe emotional distress wholly undermined reliable adjudication in his case. Using Giarratano’s remarkable story as a case study, I illustrate some of the ways in which mental illness and acute emotional distress can lead to unreliable findings and judgments and—even worse—can actually propel the criminal justice system toward a death sentence. I cover the unreliability of his confession, his impaired ability to assist counsel, his impaired capacity to make a rational decision regarding whether to initiate or continue post-conviction proceedings, his diminished mental …

The Supreme Court’S Talmudic Debate On The Meanings Of Guilt, Innocence, And Finality, Jonathan D. Colan

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Demise Of Capital Clemency, Paul J. Larkin Jr.

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Matters Of Strata: Race, Gender, And Class Structures In Capital Cases, Phyllis Goldfarb

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Post-Trial Plea Bargaining In Capital Cases: Using Conditional Clemency To Remove Weak Cases From Death Row, Adam M. Gershowitz

Washington and Lee Law Review

Plea bargaining accounts for over ninety percent of criminal convictions and it dominates the American criminal justice system. Yet, once a defendant is convicted, bargaining almost completely disappears from the system. Even though years of litigation are on the horizon, there is nearly no bargaining in the appellate and habeas corpus process. There are two reasons for this. First, prosecutors and courts typically lack the power to alter a sentence that has already been imposed. Second, even if prosecutors had the authority to negotiate following a conviction, they would have little incentive to do so. Affirmance rates in ordinary criminal …

“Merchants And Thieves, Hungry For Power”: Prosecutorial Misconduct And Passive Judicial Complicity In Death Penalty Trials Of Defendants With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Jurisdiction Of The Irish Courts In The Protection Of The Constitutional Rights Of A Person Accused Of A Crime., Adrian Berski

Reports

Studying the Irish Constitutional Law, requires the understanding of how the Irish Political System was evolved. Montesquieu's tripartite system, adopted by the Republic of Ireland is the judiciary[1] has a particular place in the Irish Constitution in articles 34 - 37[2].

The main purpose of this essay is to analyse the balance between the jurisdiction of the Irish Courts in the protection of the constitutional rights of a person accused of a crime and the functioning of the criminal justice system in protecting Society`s general interest. The first section presents a brief summary of the courts functions …

Is Modern Day Slavery A Private Act Or A Public System Of Oppression?, Maria L. Ontiveros

Seattle University Law Review

The government focuses on trafficking as the definitive form of modern day slavery. In doing so, it portrays modern day slavery as a private act with identifiable wrongdoers and views the Thirteenth Amendment through the lens of forced labor. Workers’ advocates, on the other hand, portray modern day slavery as a systemic form of oppression, supported by governmental policies on immigration and occupational exclusions. These groups focus on the Thirteenth Amendment through the lens of class. A historical analysis suggests that the proper approach views the Thirteenth Amendment through the lens of both class and labor.

A New Peonage?: Pay, Work, Or Go To Jail In Contemporary Child Support Enforcement And Beyond, Noah D. Zatz

Seattle University Law Review

Child support enforcement is one of several contemporary contexts in which the state threatens to incarcerate people if they fail to work. This symposium essay explores whether this practice violates the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on involuntary servitude. At first glance, such threats fall squarely within the ambit of the early 20th century peonage cases. There, the Supreme Court struck down criminal enforcement of legal obligations to work off a debt. Several modern courts have declined to reach a similar conclusion when child support enforcement puts obligors to a choice between paying, working, and going to jail. To do so, these …

The Costs Of Charter Litigation, Alan Young

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

“The enactment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 fundamentally altered both the substance and form of constitutional review. In the first decade of Charter litigation, many novel claims were advanced and resolved, yet there still remained a great deal of confusion with respect to the scope of the substantive principles and the procedural mechanisms for raising and applying them. After 35 years, most of the relevant constitutional principles have been solidified and clarified, as have the guidelines on the procedures for mounting a constitutional challenge. However, despite the great achievements of the past three and a half …

Coming To Grips With The Ethical Challenges For Capital Post-Conviction Representation Posed By Martinez V. Ryan, John H. Blume, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In its groundbreaking decision in Martinez v. Ryan, 556 U.S. 1 (2012), the Supreme Court of the United States held that inadequate assistance of post-conviction counsel could be sufficient “cause” to excuse a procedural default thus allowing a federal court in habeas corpus proceedings to reach the merits of an otherwise barred claim that an inmate was deprived of his Sixth Amendment right to the effective assistance of counsel at trial. The upshot of Martinez is that, if state post-conviction counsel unreasonably (and prejudicially) fails to raise a viable claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel, then there is “cause” …

An Analysis Of Austin Lawyers Guild V. Securus Technologies, Inc.: The Constitutional And Ethical Implications Of Using Illegally Recorded Attorney–Client Telephone Conversations As Derivative Evidence, Christina Santos

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

For the justice system to operate effectively, privileged communications between an attorney and his or her client should be afforded the utmost and strictest protections. Intrusion by law enforcement upon these communications severely diminishes the confidence and candor needed in the attorney-client relationship. Although the United States Supreme Court recognizes prosecutorial immunity and generally leaves prosecutorial discipline to state bar authorities, the Court has long held that the attorney-client privilege is needed for attorneys to effectively advocate on behalf of their clients.

Austin Lawyers Guild v. Securus Technologies, Inc., a civil class-action lawsuit, is currently pending before the United …

The Constitutional Limits Of Client-Centered Decision Making, Todd A. Berger

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Quasi-Constitutional Protections And Government Surveillance, Emily Berman

BYU Law Review

The post-Edward Snowden debate over government surveillance has been vigorous. One aspect of that debate has been widespread criticism of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), alleging that the FISC served as a rubber stamp for the government, consistently accepting implausible interpretations of existing law that served to expand government surveillance authority; engaging in tortured analyses of statutory language; and ignoring fundamental Fourth Amendment principles. This Article argues that these critiques have entirely overlooked critical aspects of the FISC’s jurisprudence. A close look at that jurisprudence reveals a court that did, in fact, vigorously defend the interests customarily protected by …

Let’S Invest In People, Not Prisons: How Washington State Should Address Its Ex-Offender Unemployment Rate, Sara Taboada

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

To Call Or Not To Call: Compelling Witnesses To Appear Before Congress, Daniel Curbelo Zeidman

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.