Digital Commons Network^™

Eroding Confidentiality In Delinquency Proceedings: Should Schools And Public Housing Authorities Be Notified?, Kristin N. Henning

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Article, Professor Henning examines how schools and public housing authorities obtain juvenile records and explains how these institutions may use the records to exclude children and their families from the basic benefits of education and housing. Drawing on recent research in the field of developmental psychology, Professor Henning reevaluates early assumptions about adolescents' amenability to treatment and the impact of stigma on children and explores the practical implications of sharing records with schools and public housing authorities, questioning whether new confidentiality exceptions actually will yield the expected benefits of improved public safety. She concludes that legislators should deny …

Defense-Oriented Judges, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this essay, I argue in favor of so-called "defense-oriented judges." Instead of the increasingly prosecution-oriented judicial aspirants who ascend to the bench, we need more judges who care about protecting the rights of the accused, who will put the government to the test, and who have some compassion for those who come before them. Instead of judges who are nothing more than rubber-stamps for prosecutors, deferring to prosecutors at every step because they believe most defendants are in fact guilty, or because they dislike defense lawyers, we need judges who are truly neutral and disinterested. Instead of judges who …

Aedpa's "Adjudication On The Merits" Requirement: Collateral Review, Federalism, And Comity, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

The modern law of federal habeas corpus is a labyrinth of counterfactuals and arcane procedural hurdles that few state petitioners manage to navigate-as Justice Blackmun once wrote less charitably in dissent, "a Byzantine morass of arbitrary, unnecessary, and unjustifiable impediments to the vindication of federal rights." The convoluted inquiries required arise from the need to reconcile three developments of the past four decades that remain in tension with one another: first, the Warren Court's expansion of federal habeas relief, identified with Fay v. Noia and its progeny; second, the Burger and Rehnquist Courts' curtailment of that expansion, identified with Wainwright …

O Say, Can You See: Free Expression By The Light Of Fiery Crosses, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article presents a comprehensive, context-based theory which both places cross burning in its proper doctrinal framework and recognizes the history of cross burning as one of Ku Klux Klan-inspired terrorism directed at African Americans. The author prefaces critical commentary on the Supreme Court's decision in Virginia v. Black with analysis of the full landscape of cross burning cases including another issue to which others have paid little attention - the ways in which state courts have negotiated First Amendment challenges to cross burning statutes. Thoroughly examining cross burning from each of these perspectives, the Article argues that cross burning …

Neighborhood, Crime, And Incarceration In New York City, Jeffery Fagan, Valerie West, Jan Holland

Faculty Scholarship

Several new studies suggest that social and spatial incarceration of young males has become part of the developmental ecology of adolescence in the nation's poorest neighborhoods. This concentration began in the 1970s, and has grown steadily through the last quarter century.The story of young men such as Cesar in Random Family illustrates the pervasive effects of both direct and vicarious prison experiences for young men and women in poor neighborhoods. Studies of street life such as Random Family, Code of the Streets, and American Project show how these experiences are now internalized in the social and psychological fabric of neighborhood …

Crime, Law, And The Community: Dynamics Of Incarceration In New York City, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Random Family (LeBlanc 2003) tells the story of a tangled family and social network of young people in New York City in which prison threads through their lives since childhood. Early on, we meet a young man named Cesar, who sold small amounts of crack and heroin in the streets near his home in the Bronx. During one of his many spells in jail, Cesar sees his father pushing a cafeteria cart in the Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York City’s jail. Cesar had not seen his father in many years, but he was not very surprised to see him …

Be Careful What You Wish For: Legal Sanctions And Public Safety Among Adolescent Offenders In Juvenile And Criminal Court, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik, Akiva Liberman

Faculty Scholarship

Three decades of legislative activism have resulted in a broad expansion of states' authority to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. At the same time that legislatures have broadened the range of statutes and lowered the age thresholds for eligibility for transfer, states also have reallocated discretion away from judges and instituted simplified procedures that permit prosecutors to elect whether adolescents are prosecuted and sentenced in juvenile or criminal court. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that relatively lenient or attenuated punishment in juvenile court violates proportionality principles for serious crimes committed by adolescents, and is …

The Mens Rea For The Crime Of Providing Material Resources To A Foreign Terrorist Organization, Randolph N. Jonakait

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law, Marla Graff Decker, Stephen R. Mccullough

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

United States V. Bean: Shoveling After The Elephant?, Pannal A. Sanders

ExpressO

Thomas Bean’s felony conviction in Mexico implicated provisions of federal law that preclude certain persons, including specified felons, from owning or trading in firearms and ammunition which have been transported in interstate commerce. 18 USC Sec. 922. Affected persons can seek relief from the federal firearms disability by invoking procedures established in 18 USC Sec. 925(c) under the Dept of Treasury, Director of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (“ATF”). Beginning in 1992, Congress has enacted provisions annually in the ATF’s appropriations laws that ban it from investigating or acting upon Sec. 925(c) applications from individuals. Section 925(c) contains provisions for judicial …

Fundamental Retribution Error: Criminal Justice And The Social Psychology Of Blame, Donald A. Dripps

Vanderbilt Law Review

At least since the M'Naghten case of the 1840s,' Anglo- American criminal law has concerned itself closely, famously, and contentiously with the psychology of the accused. Another significant body of scholarship addresses the psychology of juries, and other valuable research has approached some of the rules of criminal evidence from the perspective of social and cognitive psychology. There has, however, yet to be a general investigation of what social cognition research might teach us about the criminal law's pervasive concern with blameworthiness.

This Article undertakes that investigation. It brings research on the psychology of social cognition to bear on the …

Dignity And Desert In Punishment Theory, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Coherence Of Orthodox Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence, Samuel C. Rickless

ExpressO

In the legal academy it is widely believed that the U.S. Supreme Court's orthodox (post-Katz, pre-Houghton) fourth amendment jurisprudence is theoretically incoherent. In particular, the Court has been criticized (on doctrinal and textual grounds) for accepting (i) Justice Harlan's definition of a "search" as an infringement of a subjective expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable, (ii) the Warrant Requirement and Probable Cause Requirement (according to which searches and seizures without a warrant or probable cause are presumptively unreasonable), and (iii) the Exclusionary Rule (according to which any evidence obtained in violation of a person’s fourth …

Is The End Of The War In Sight: An Analysis Of Canada's Decriminalization Of Marijuana And The Implications For The United States "War On Drugs", Kara Godbehere Goodwin

Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Guardrails On The Information Superhighway: Supervising Computer Use Of The Adjudicated Sex Offender, Brian W. Mckay

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Addressing Sexual Misconduct In Community Corrections_June 2-4, 2003, Brenda V. Smith

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Sex Offender Registration And Community Notification Laws: Will These Laws Survive?, Kimberly B. Wilkins

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Russia's War On Political And Religious Extremism: An Appraisal Of The Law "On Counteracting Extremist Activity", J. Brian Gross

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminalization Of People With Mental Illnesses: The Role Of Mental Health Courts In System Reform, Robert Bernstein, Tammy Seltzer

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Doe V. District Psychiatric Board For Adults, Aharon Barak, Dorit Beinisch, Eliahu Mazza

Translated Opinions

Facts: The Treatment of the Mentally Ill Law-1991 provides that, when a court is of the opinion that one accused of a criminal offence is unfit to stand trial, the accused may be hospitalized. The District Psychiatric Board is responsible to review the case of such a mentally ill accused person, and it can order the accused’s release from the hospital. This petition concerns the amount of time a mentally ill accused person may be hospitalized on the authority of the initial judicially issued criminal hospitalization order.

Held: The Supreme Court held that the treatment of the psychiatric patient must …

Abusing State Power Or Controlling Risk?: Sex Offender Commitment And Sicherungverwahrung, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

This article addresses a paradigmatic risk-based collateral sanction, the so-called civil confinement. In contrast to many other collateral sanctions, it does not follow automatically but is judicially imposed following a hearing. In Hendricks v. Kansas (1997) the Supreme Court specifically upheld involuntary confinement following a criminal justice sentence for a sexually violent predator. The Kansas statute mandated confinement based on an assessment of dangerousness which had to result from a mental abnormality. Once it characterized the sanction as civil, the Court concluded that procedural protections traditional in the criminal context, such as double jeopardy, do not apply. The narrow majority …

Jacob's Legacy: Sex Offender Registration And Community Notification Laws, Practice And Procedure In Minnesota, Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

Triggered in significant part by the October, 1989, abduction of eleven-year-old Jacob Wetterling in rural St. Joseph, Minnesota, Americans during the 1990s were beset by a "moral panic" over convicted sex offenders living in their midst. To be sure, this panic in itself was not unprecedented in American history. At regular intervals throughout the twentieth century, heinous sexual victimizations, of women and children in particular, preoccupied the nation, often after receiving intense media attention. The 1990s panic, however, was unique in its force and scope, taking tangible form in what has been aptly called a "'legislative' panic." As a result …

Living "Off-Stage": The Semiotic Potential Of Narrative In Paula Johnson's Inner Lives: Voices Of African-American Women In Prison, Emily Houh

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The hopelessness and hopefulness in the voices of the women profiled in Inner Lives exemplify a semiotic response to the racism that permeates the criminal justice and prison systems in the United States. This article asks how, in the telling of their stories and living of their lives, the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women profiled in the book engage in a working semiotics. The extraordinary thing about the narratives collected by Johnson is that they describe how women who have been placed at the very bottom of the American social consciousness are successfully constructing their own image-repertoires rather than accepting …

Juvenile Law Developments—“One Last Chance”: Applying Adult Standards To Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile Proceedings—State V. B.Y., Kathryn A. Santelmann, Kara Rafferty

William Mitchell Law Review

In 1995, Minnesota created a blended sentencing option for serious, violent juvenile offenders. Under this new option, Extended Juvenile Jurisdiction (“EJJ”), the juvenile court retains jurisdiction over the offender until age 21. In EJJ cases the court also imposes an adult sentence, which is stayed on the condition that the offender complies with the conditions of probation. Since the passage of the EJJ statute, the Minnesota Supreme Court has issued a limited number of opinions reviewing EJJ cases. State v. B.Y., issued April 24, 2003, involves an issue of first impression. The B.Y. opinion addresses standards to be applied in …

Tracking The Circulatory Of Confession Jurisprudence After Massiah & (And) Miranda: Can A Superficial Application Of Property Law Make Sense Out Of Nonsense?, Rory Bahadur

St. Thomas Law Review

After Miranda v. Arizona and Massiah v. United States, there were arguably three doctrinally separate methodologies for determining the admissibility of confessions in criminal proceedings. The interaction of these three doctrines has generated a complex, contradictory, somewhat inexplicable, and chaotic jurisprudence. This paper re-examines the post- Miranda interaction of the three doctrines, and argues that basic property law provides a conceptual framework for reconciling what appears to be an otherwise arbitrary and unpalatable collection of Supreme Court decisions. Section one briefly examines the totality of the circumstances test and the Miranda and Massiah decisions themselves, not from the standpoint of …

No Guns Or Butter For Thomas Bean: Firearms Disabilities And Their Occupational Consequences, Mark M. Stavsky

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Through the case of Thomas Bean, a firearms dealer convicted of a felony and subsequently denied his firearms license and right to possess firearms, this Article discusses the injustice that occurs when the law arbitrarily denies an individual his occupation merely because he is a felon. The Article argues that 18 U.S.C. § 925(c) gives the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms the power to review a petition to restore those rights but that Congress has rendered the statute useless by depriving the Bureau of funding to investigate such petitions. Because this denies individuals, like Bean, the ability to reenter …

The Quandary Of Megan's Law: When The Child Sex Offender Is A Child, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 73 (2003), Timothy E. Wind

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law—Scarlet Letters: Traffic Stops Based On “Special” License Plates Must Follow The Letter Of The Constitution—State V. Henning, Piper Kenney Webb, Bruce H. Hanley

William Mitchell Law Review

The Minnesota Supreme Court recently addressed whether a Minnesota statute authorizing law enforcement to stop motorists based solely on the presence of special license plates issued primarily to repeat drunken drivers is proper under the United States and Minnesota Constitutions. In State v. Henning, the court held the statute unconstitutional by a 4-3 decision. Finding no persuasive reason to do otherwise, the court struck down the legislature's attempt to eliminate the requirement that law enforcement have “reasonable articulable suspicion” to conduct an investigatory stop of a motor vehicle. This article provides a brief survey of similar laws in other states …

Abusing State Power Or Controlling Risk?: Sex Offender Commitment And Sicherungverwahrung, Nora V. Demleitner

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This article addresses civil commitment of sexually predatory offenders. It first outlines the most common American approaches to controlling sexual offenders, then details the German concept of Sicherungsverwahrung and greater state control, and finally proposes adopting a modified German approach that assures proportionality and public safety without sacrificing individual liberties. The article concludes by arguing that criminal penalties and safety-based detention should both be seen as elements of social control, which requires that safety measures with clearly punitive components be recognized as part of the punishment process.

Are Collateral Sanctions Premised On Conduct Or Conviction?: The Case Of Abortion Doctors, Gabriel J. Chin

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Traditionally, collateral sanctions are viewed as civil measures designed to prevent undue risk by proven lawbreakers. If a collateral sanction were a criminal penalty instead, that would trigger constitutional provisions like the Ex Post Facto Clause, which would mean the sanction could not be imposed retroactively. This Article argues that collateral sanctions based on conduct and not conviction indicate a civil regulatory measure, but that when the sanctions only apply in the event of conviction, the sanction looks more like punishment. Conviction is not the only way to show risky conduct, and it is the conduct that civil sanctions should …