Digital Commons Network^™

Police, Heroes, And Child Trafficking: Who Cries When Her Attacker Wears Blue?, Samuel Vincent Jones

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Unstitching Scarlet Letters?: Prosecutorial Discretion And Expungement, Brian M. Murray

Fordham Law Review

This Article argues that scholarly discussions about prosecutorial discretion need to extend their focus beyond the exercise of prosecutorial judgment pretrial or questions of factual and legal guilt. Given that the primary role of the prosecutoris to do “justice,” this Article calls for increased attention to the exercise of discretion after the guilt phase is complete, specifically in the context of expungement of nonconviction andconviction information. It offers a framework for exercising such discretion and, in doing so, hopes to initiate additional conversation about the role of prosecutors during the phases that follow arrest and prosecution.

Framed By Forensics: Fulfilling Daubert's Gatekeeping Function By Segregating Science From The Adversarial Model, Kayla Marie Mannucci

Cardozo Law Review

The note argues that flawed forensic expert testimony significantly contributes to wrongful convictions, undermining the criminal justice system's objective to acquit the innocent. It highlights how partisan bias, lack of scientific validation, and inadequate judicial gatekeeping under Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. have led to the admission of unreliable forensic evidence. The note proposes a reform: requiring neutral, court-appointed experts in high-stakes forensic cases to ensure objective testimony and prevent partisan bias.

A Model For Rigorously Applying The Exploration, Preparation, Implementation, Sustainment (Epis) Framework In The Design And Measurement Of A Large Scale Collaborative Multi-Site Study, Jennifer E. Becan, John P. Bartkowski, Danica K. Knight, Tisha R. A. Wiley, Ralph Diclemente, Lori Ducharme, Wayne N. Welsh, Diana Bowser, Kathryn Mccollister, Matthew Hiller, Anne C. Spaulding, Patrick M. Flynn, Andrea Swartzendruber, Megan F. Dickson, Jacqueline Horan Fisher, Gregory A. Aarons

Center on Drug and Alcohol Research Faculty Publications

Background

This paper describes the means by which a United States National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-funded cooperative, Juvenile Justice-Translational Research on Interventions for Adolescents in the Legal System (JJ-TRIALS), utilized an established implementation science framework in conducting a multi-site, multi-research center implementation intervention initiative. The initiative aimed to bolster the ability of juvenile justice agencies to address unmet client needs related to substance use while enhancing inter-organizational relationships between juvenile justice and local behavioral health partners.

Methods

The EPIS (Exploration, Preparation, Implementation, Sustainment) framework was selected and utilized as the guiding model from inception through project completion; including the …

Department Of Corrections V. Superior Court: Hear No Evil, Aaron T. Morel

Maine Law Review

On December 9, 1991, professional ethical and moral considerations prompted heated litigation in Department of Corrections v. Superior Court. Justice Donald G. Alexander of Maine's Superior Court displayed considerable foresight while sentencing two borderline mentally retarded child sex offenders. Although both defendants had committed repugnant crimes, Justice Alexander anticipated that they would be subjected to impermissible abuse if incarcerated in the Department of Corrections. He believed that preventive measures were necessary to ensure the safety of the defendants being sentenced and to avoid the potential that conditions of their incarceration would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Alexander subsequently …

Getting There: On Strategies For Implementing Criminal Justice Reform, Susan Herman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Prison To Homelessness Pipeline: Criminal Record Checks, Race, And Disparate Impact, Valerie Schneider

Indiana Law Journal

Study after study has shown that securing housing upon release from prison is critical to reducing the likelihood of recidivism,1 yet those with criminal records— a population that disproportionately consists of racial minorities—are routinely denied access to housing, even if their offense was minor and was shown to have no bearing on whether the applicant would be likely to be a successful renter. In April of 2016, the Office of General Counsel for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued much anticipated guidance dealing directly with the racially disparate impact of barring those with criminal records …

Principles Of Risk Assessment: Sentencing And Policing, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Risk assessment — measuring an individual’s potential for offending — has long been an important aspect of criminal justice, especially in connection with sentencing, pretrial detention and police decision-making. To aid in the risk assessment inquiry, a number of states have recently begun relying on statistically-derived algorithms called “risk assessment instruments” (RAIs). RAIs are generally thought to be more accurate than the type of seat-of-the-pants risk assessment in which judges, parole boards and police officers have traditionally engaged. But RAIs bring with them their own set of controversies. In recognition of these concerns, this brief paper proposes three principles — …

Reassessing Prosecutorial Power Through The Lens Of Mass Incarceration, Jeffrey Bellin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For decades, legal commentators sounded the alarm about the tremendous power wielded by prosecutors. Scholars went so far as to identify uncurbed prosecutorial discretion as the primary source of the criminal justice system's many flaws. Over the past two years, however, the conversation shifted. With the emergence of a new wave of "progressive prosecutors," scholars increasingly hail broad prosecutorial discretion as a promising mechanism for criminal justice reform. The abrupt shift from decrying to embracing prosecutorial power highlights a curious void at the center of criminal justice thought. There is no widely accepted normative theory of the prosecutorial role. As …

Admissibility Of First Time In-Court Eyewitness Identifications: An Argument For Additional Due Process Protections In New York, Dakota Kann

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Testimonial Statements, Reliability, And The Sole Or Decisive Evidence Rule: A Comparative Look At The Right Of Confrontation In The United States, Canada, And Europe, Deborah Paruch

Catholic University Law Review

Criminal trials in the United States are meant to ascertain the truth. But other societal values, such as fairness to the parties and public confidence in the integrity of the process, are at stake as well. Among the cornerstone rights to protect a defendant’s right to a fair trial is the right to confrontation. The right to confrontation enables a criminal defendant to exclude hearsay evidence from a trial when the defendant did not have an opportunity to cross-examine the witness. This right has undergone substantial changes and revisions over the last decade, both in the United States and abroad. …

Cuyahoga County Bail Task Force: Report And Recommendations, Jonathan Witmer-Rich, Jay Milano, Carmen Naso, Mary Jane Trapp

Law Faculty Reports and Comments

Introduction:

All Cuyahoga County courts should transition from a bail system based on bond schedules, which vary widely from one court to the next, to a centralized, consistent, and comprehensive system of pretrial services initiated immediately after arrest. For most minor offenses, the presumption should be release on personal recognizance. Money bail should not be used to simply detain defendants. Rather than relying on bond schedules, courts should assess each defendant’s risk of non-appearance and danger to the community using a uniform risk assessment tool. If money bail is considered, courts should evaluate each defendant’s risk of non-appearance and ability …

The Deweyan Approach To Learning Victim Advocacy: Seeing Beyond Stigmas And Facilitating Second Chances, Ashley Peake Wellman, Sherri Dioguardi

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

Fundamentally, criminal justice practitioners are public safety promoters, yet safety can be compromised if a divide exists between them and the communities they serve. The best way to train future criminal justice practitioners may be found in the progressive education proposed by John Dewey in the early 20th-century. Dewey’s experiential approach, specifically service-learning, has gained traction as an effective teaching tool for broadening perspectives, deepening understanding of diverse populations, and fostering higher order reasoning, all of which are critical characteristics for criminal justice professionals as well as for all American citizens. Undergraduate students participated in service-learning during a semester-long honors …

Commerce Clause Challenges Spawned By United States V. Lopez Are Doing Violence To The Violence Against Women Act (Vawa): A Survey Of Cases And The Ongoing Debate Over How The Vawa Will Fare In The Wake Of Lopez, Lisanne Newell Leasure

Maine Law Review

On September 14, 1994, in response to and in recognition of the epidemic of violence against women in the United States, Congress enacted the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The VAWA is a comprehensive statute designed to provide women greater protection from and recourse against violence and to impose accountability on abusers and those who commit crimes of violence based on gender animus. The VAWA, which contains seven parts, creates new federal crimes, strengthens penalties for existing federal sex crimes, and provides $1.6 billion over six years for education, research, treatment of domestic and sex crime victims, and the improvement …

18 U.S.C. § 922(G)(1) Under Attack: The Case For As-Applied Challenges To The Felon-In-Possession Ban, Kari Lorentson

Notre Dame Law Review

Part I of this Note outlines the relevant statutory scheme governing the felon-in-possession ban, along with its applicable exceptions. Part II surveys landmark Supreme Court precedent related to the Second Amendment— namely, District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago. In Part III, this Note conducts an overview of the current circuit split percolating in the courts of appeals. Part IV presents a rationale and justification for permitting judicial review of as-applied challenges to § 922(g)(1). Finally, Part V provides a critique of the Binderup analysis and puts forth an alternative standard to analyze similar cases.

Solitary Troubles, Alexander A. Reinert

Notre Dame Law Review

Solitary confinement is one of the most severe forms of punishment that can be inflicted on human beings. In recent years, the use of extreme isolation in our prisons and jails has been questioned by correctional officials, medical experts, and reform advocates alike. Yet for nearly the entirety of American history, judicial regulation of the practice has been extremely limited. This Article explains why judges hesitate to question the use of solitary confinement, while also providing a path forward for greater scrutiny of the practice.

Incorrigible Students: A Criminal Oxymoron?, Shannon Lewry

Notre Dame Law Review

The Note proceeds in two Parts. The remainder of the Introduction presents a closed door: the Supreme Court’s hesitancy, to date, to find juvenile- life-without-parole sentences unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. After exploring the contours of the closed Door, the Introduction turns to an open window: education law. This, I argue, may be wielded to attack the lawfulness of juvenile-life-without-parole sentences on wholly nonconstitutional grounds. The Introduction concludes with remarks regarding this Note’s relevance and timeliness. Part I tracks the Note’s central argument, premise by premise, that state compulsory education laws and juvenilelife- without-parole sentences are wholly incompatible. Part II …

Fixing A Non-Existent Problem With An Ineffective Solution: Doe V. Snyder And Michigan's Punitive Sex Offender Registration And Notification Laws, Joshua E. Montgomery

Akron Law Review

Sex offender registration and notification laws (SORAs) in the United States apply not only to those who commit sex offenses after the enactment of such laws, but also to those who committed sex offenses before those laws were enacted. However, the Ex Post Facto Clause of the Constitution prevents the retroactive application of a punitive law; this means that a person cannot be punished for a bad act that the person committed before the law punishing that act was enacted. Importantly, the Ex Post Facto Clause does not prohibit the retroactive application of a civil, regulatory—i.e., non-punitive—law. Thus, to survive …

Dissecting The Aba Texas Capital Punishment Assessment Report Of 2013: Death And Texas, A Surprising Improvement, Patrick S. Metze

Akron Law Review

Professor Metze dissects the American Bar Association report, September 2013, entitled Evaluating Fairness and Accuracy in State Death Penalty Systems: The Texas Capital Punishment Assessment Report—An Analysis of Texas’s Death Penalty Laws, Procedures and Practices. This Report was produced by the ABA’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, specifically the Death Penalty Due Process Review Project, which identified 12 inadequacies in the Texas Capital Punishment System, recommended changes, and evaluated compliance. Now, four years and two legislative sessions later, this Article explores what Texas has done in the interim to improve its death penalty process. Incredibly, the Article concludes …

Exploring Places Of Street Drug Dealing In A Downtown Area In Brazil: An Analysis Of The Reliability Of Google Street View In International Criminological Research, Elenice De Souza Oliveira, Ko-Hsin Hsu

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This study assesses the reliability of Google Street View (GSV) in auditing environmental features that help create hotbeds of drug dealing in Belo Horizonte, one of Brazil’s largest cities. Based on concepts of “crime generators” and “crime enablers,” a set of 40 items were selected using arrest data related to drug activities for the period between 2007 and 2011. These items served to develop a GSV data collection instrument used to observe features of 135 street segments that were identified as drug dealing hot spots in downtown Belo Horizonte. The study employs an intra-class correlation (ICC) statistics as a measure …

Revisiting The Role Of Federal Prosecutors In Times Of Mass Imprisonment, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

None available.

Moral Mode Switching: From Punishment To Public Health, Stephen Koppel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A public health response to drug offenses has potential to improve both public safety and public health. However, the public’s desire for retribution represents a possible hindrance to reform. Relying on dual-process theory of moral decision-making, this dissertation examines agreement among laypeople about the relative blame deserved for various crime types, and probes several possible predictors of support—the need for cognition (“NFC”), intergroup bias, and free-will doubt—for retributive as well as consequentialist responses to crime. Findings from several web-based experiments show: (a) in comparison to core crimes (eg., murder) substantially less agreement about the relative blame deserved for noncore crimes …

Innovating Criminal Justice, Natalie Ram

Northwestern University Law Review

From secret stingray devices that can pinpoint a suspect’s location, to advanced forensic DNA-analysis tools, to recidivism risk statistic software—the use of privately developed criminal justice technologies is growing. So too is a concomitant pattern of trade secret assertion surrounding these technologies. This Article charts the role of private law secrecy in shielding criminal justice activities, demonstrating that such secrecy is pervasive, problematic, and ultimately unnecessary for the production of well-designed criminal justice tools.

This Article makes three contributions to the existing literature. First, the Article establishes that trade secrecy now permeates American criminal justice, shielding privately developed criminal justice …

Improving The Indigent Defense Crisis Through Decriminalization, Bryan Altman

Arkansas Law Review

“The Sixth Amendment stands as a constant admonition that if the constitutional safeguards it provides be lost, justice will not still be done.” The constitutional right to the assistance of counsel in criminal prosecutions is one of the many safeguards contained within the Sixth Amendment designed to protect the fundamental human rights of life and liberty. Unfortunately, for indigent defendants that safeguard of life and liberty operates as a mere platitude today. Stephen Bright, founder of the Southern Center for Human Rights, has bleakly summarized the crisis of indigent defense, noting that while the right to counsel is widely celebrated, …

Hb 452 - Domestic Terrorism, John J. Crowley, Tatiana E. Posada

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act creates and defines the offense of domestic terrorism in Georgia. It establishes that a person must have the intent to intimidate the public or coerce the government while causing significant harm in order to be liable for domestic terrorism. The Act also provides for training law enforcement to identify and combat domestic terrorism, to share the information with the Georgia Information Sharing and Analysis Center, and for the Georgia Information Sharing and Analysis Center to share that information with the United States Department of Homeland Security.

Sb 160 - "Blue Lives Matter" Protection Of Public Safety Officers, Caitlin V. Fox, Joseph A. Wallace Jr.

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act redefines and broadens protection for public safety officers who are subjected to violent attacks while engaged in their duties. The Act creates original jurisdiction and stiffens penalties for juvenile offenders charged with violent crimes. The Act also increases indemnification payments made to the surviving spouse of a law enforcement officer who loses his or her life in the line of duty.

Cybersurveillance Intrusions And An Evolving Katz Privacy Test, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

To contextualize why a new approach to the Fourth Amendment is essential, this Article describes two emerging cybersurveillance tools. The first Cybersurveillance tool, Geofeedia, has been deployed by state and local law enforcement. Geofeedia uses a process known as "geofencing" to draw a virtual barrier around a particular geographic region, and then identifies and tracks public social media posts within that region for predictive policing purposes. The second tool, Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), is under development by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS). FAST is another predictive policing tool that analyzes physiological and behavioral signals with the …

Structuring Relief For Sex Offenders From Registration And Notification Requirements: Learning From Foreign Jurisdictions And From The Model Penal Code: Sentencing, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

This paper first discusses the scope of sex offender registration and notification under federal and state laws, and contrasts U.S. laws with those in other countries. Part III turns to the prevailing rationales for these laws and tests their empirical validity. It highlights the negative effect of registries and notification on criminal investigations, and the cost they impose on public coffers, public safety, and those labeled sex offenders. Part IV discusses a set of proposals to turn registries, which may serve a limited legitimate function, into more effective law enforcement tools while restricting public notification. This section outlines ex ante …

Brock Turner: Sorting Through The Noise, Michael Vitiello

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

PART I. THE MEDIA’S ROLE ............................................................................... 634

A. Six Months for Rape? ............................................................................ 634

B. Okay, But Sixth Months for Sexual Assault? ......................................... 638

C. But Vitiello, You are Cherry-Picking the Facts ..................................... 643

D. But Judge Persky Showed Bias, Racial or Otherwise ........................... 646

PART II: TAKING THE WRONG PATH TOWARDS RECALL ................................... 649

A. Existing Checks on Judicial Misconduct ............................................... 650

B. What’s Not to Like About Recall? ......................................................... 652

III. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ............................................................................. 659

Unlocking The Fifth Amendment: Passwords And Encrypted Devices, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Each year, law enforcement seizes thousands of electronic devices — smartphones, laptops, and notebooks — that it cannot open without the suspect’s password. Without this password, the information on the device sits completely scrambled behind a wall of encryption. Sometimes agents will be able to obtain the information by hacking, discovering copies of data on the cloud, or obtaining the password voluntarily from the suspects themselves. But when they cannot, may the government compel suspects to disclose or enter their password?

This Article considers the Fifth Amendment protection against compelled disclosures of passwords — a question that has split and …