Digital Commons Network^™

Administration Of The Criminal Justice System: When Efficiency Trumps A Fundamental Right, Sean Mcleod

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Montgomery V. Louisiana: An Attempt To Make Juvenile Life Without Parole A Practical Impossibility, Erin Dunn

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

"I Plead The Fifth": New York's Integrated Domestic Violence Courts And The Defendant's Fifth Amendment Dilemma, Rhona Mae Amorado

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Policing In The Era Of Permissiveness: Mitigating Misconduct Through Third-Party Standing, Julian A. Cook

Scholarly Works

On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was driving his vehicle when he was stopped by Officer Michael T. Slager of the North Charleston, South Carolina, police department for a broken taillight. A dash cam video from the officer’s vehicle showed the two men engaged in what appeared to be a rather routine verbal exchange. Sometime after Slager returned to his vehicle, Scott exited his car and ran away from Slager, prompting the officer to pursue him on foot. After he caught up with Scott in a grassy field near a muffler establishment, a scuffle between the men ensued, purportedly …

Mass Incarceration: An Annotated Bibliography, Nicole P. Dyszlewski, Lucinda Harrison-Cox, Raquel Ortiz

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Parental Kidnapping: An Epidemic That Is Escalating, Michael Samson

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note examines the complex legal and emotional challenges surrounding international parental child abduction, emphasizing the limitations of existing legal frameworks like The Hague Convention and the need for a more comprehensive approach to address this growing issue. It highlights the psychological and jurisdictional complexities involved, particularly when countries like China and Russia are not signatories to the Convention. The analysis advocates for stronger enforcement mechanisms, international cooperation, and preventive measures to protect children and families affected by such abductions.

Understanding Offenders With Serious Mental Illness In The Criminal Justice System, Jillian Peterson, Kevin Heinz

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rules, Standards, Sentencing, And The Nature Of Law, Russell D. Covey

Faculty Publications By Year

Sentencing law and practice in the United States can be characterized as an argument about rules and standards. Whereas in the decades prior to the 1980s when sentencing was largely a discretionary activity governed only by broad sentencing standards, a sentencing reform movement in the 1980s transformed sentencing practice through the advent of sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum provisions. As a result, sentencing became far less standard-like and far more rule-like. Although reform proponents believed that this "rulification" of sentencing would reduce unwarranted sentencing disparities and enhance justice, it is far from clear that these goals were achieved. Indeed, the …

Fourth Amendment Time Machines (And What They Might Say About Police Body Cameras), Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

When it comes to criminal investigation, time travel is increasingly possible. Despite longstanding roots in traditional investigation, science is today providing something fundamentally different in the form of remarkably complete digital records. And those big data records not only store our past, but thanks to data mining they are in many circumstances eerily good at predicting our future. So, now that we stand on the threshold of investigatory time travel, how should the Fourth Amendment and legislation respond? How should we approach bulk government capture, such as by a solar-powered drone employing wide-area persistent stare technology? Is it meaningfully different …

Contemporary Perspectives On Wrongful Conviction: An Introduction To The 2016 Innocence Network Conference, San Antonio, Texas, Gwen Jordan, Aliza B. Kaplan, Valena Beety, Keith A. Findley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Innocent people have been convicted of crimes they did not commit throughout history. The exact number of wrongful convictions is unknowable. In 2014, however, the National Academy of Sciences (“NAS”) released a study of the cases of criminal defendants who were convicted and sentenced to death and concluded that 4.1% were wrongfully convicted. The researchers explained that “this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.” According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1,561,500 adults were incarcerated in federal prisons, state prisons, and county jails in 2014, …

Police Impunity In Mexico: Creating Openings For Justice In A New Democracy, Emily Boyce

Honors Theses

In this project, I investigate why police impunity has persisted in Mexico, and why the application of justice, when it does occur, happens unequally. Mexico has undergone a democratic transition with a specific focus on increasing accountability in the judiciary. These persistent trends of police impunity and unequal application of justice are especially puzzling in the face of these recent shifts. Existing literature argues that the institutional changes that occur as a result of democratization should yield changes that further the individual rights of citizens. A majority of the scholarly work regarding police impunity and justice in Mexico focuses on …

The Criminalization Of Title Ix, Erin R. Collins

Law Faculty Publications

This essay proceeds in three parts. Part I provides a brief overview of the history of feminist-influenced criminal rape law reform and the rise of carceral feminism. Part II demonstrates how key tenets of the criminal law approach have been imported into emerging Title IX policies. Part III engages in a brief distributional analysis to identify who benefits and who loses from this approach. Then, drawing on insights from critical feminist critiques of rape law reform, begins to identify ways to use the opportunity Title IX presents to craft a very different kind of response to sexual assault--one that focuses …

Charging On The Margin, Paul T. Crane

Law Faculty Publications

The American criminal justice system has experienced a significant expansion in the number and severity of penalties triggered by misdemeanor convictions. In particular, legislatures have increasingly attached severe collateral consequences to misdemeanor offenses- penalties such as requirements to register as a sex offender, prohibitions on owning or possessing a firearm, and deportation. Although there is a wealth of scholarship studying the effect this development has on defendants and their attorneys, little attention has been paid to the impact collateral consequences have on prosecutorial incentives. This Article starts to remedy that gap by exploring the influence that collateral consequences exert on …

The Death Penalty And The Fifth Amendment, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

Can the Supreme Court find unconstitutional something that the text of the Constitution “contemplates”? If the Bill of Rights mentions a punishment, does that make it a “permissible legislative choice” immune to independent constitutional challenges?

Recent developments have given new hope to those seeking constitutional abolition of the death penalty. But some supporters of the death penalty continue to argue, as they have since Furman v. Georgia, that the death penalty must be constitutional because the Fifth Amendment explicitly contemplates it. The appeal of this argument is obvious, but its strength is largely superficial, and is also mostly irrelevant …

Criminal Adjudication, Error Correction, And Hindsight Blind Spots, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

Concerns about hindsight in the law typically arise with regard to the bias that outcome knowledge can produce. But a more difficult problem than the clear view that hindsight appears to provide is the blind spot that it actually has. Because of the conventional wisdom about error review, there is a missed opportunity to ensure meaningful scrutiny. Beyond the confirmation biases that make convictions seem inevitable lies the question whether courts can see what they are meant to assess when they do look closely for error. Standards that require a retrospective showing of materiality, prejudice, or harm turn on what …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Professors Of Law In Support Of Petitioner, Barbara Allen Babcock, Jeffrey Bellin, Darryl K. Brown, Robert P. Burns, James E. Coleman Jr., Lisa Kern Griffin, Robert P. Mosteller, Deborah Tuerkheimer, Neil Vidmar, Jessica L. West

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Disciplinary Regulation Of Prosecutors As A Remedy For Abuses Of Prosecutorial Discretion: A Descriptive And Normative Analysis, Samuel J. Levine, Bruce A. Green

Scholarly Works

Although courts have traditionally relied primarily on prosecutors’ individual self-restraint and institutional self-regulation to curb prosecutors’ excesses and redress their wrongdoing, aspects of prosecutors’ conduct can be regulated externally as well. One potential source of external regulation is professional discipline. As lawyers, prosecutors are regulated by state courts, which oversee processes for disciplining lawyers who engage in misconduct. In responding to prosecutors’ wrongdoing, courts generally express a preference for professional discipline over civil liability, which is limited by principles of absolute and qualified immunity. Likewise, courts favor professional discipline over adjudicatory remedies such as reversal of criminal convictions or suppression …

Miscarriage Of Justice: The Cognizability Of § 2255 Claims For Erroneous Career Offender Sentences, Matthew B. Rosenthal

Georgia Law Review

Career offender sentencing enhancements present difficult questions for courts. One of the most difficult of these questions is deciding what crimes warrant the application of these serious enhancements. Federal courts sentencing defendants often must decide, with little guidance, what offenses constitute a "crime of violent" or "violent felony." On a few occasions, the Supreme Court has stepped in and told lower courts that certain crimes do not fit within these categories, and that their interpretation of the career offender enhancement is incorrect. Often, the recognition of this misapplication of the enhancements occurs years after an individual defendant has been convicted, …

Values And Assumptions In Criminal Adjudication, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Response to Andrew Manuel Crespo's Systemic Facts: Toward Institutional Awareness in Criminal Courts proceeds in two Parts. In Part I, I argue that Crespo presents a compelling case for the importance of systemic factfinding to the task of criminal court judges. If, as a range of scholars has argued, criminal courts are increasingly serving a quasi-administrative function, then shouldn’t they at least be administrating accurately? Systemic Facts provides a novel account of how — with comparatively little institutional reform — courts might begin to serve as more effective administrators. However, in Part II, I also argue that Crespo’s account …

A Federal Certificate Of Rehabilitation Program: Providing Federal Ex-Offenders More Opportunity For Successful Reentry, Lisa A. Rich

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Article is to propose a new federal certificate of rehabilitation program. The creation of such a program not only would help the thousands of federal offenders released back into their communities every year overcome employment barriers but would also serve as a model for states to use in addressing the need of their own burgeoning population of former offenders. In order to understand the magnitude of the problem, it is essential to understand the pool of offenders affected by their criminal history, the intent of the federal agencies to assist this disadvantaged group, and the barriers …

Challenges To Fingerprint Identification Evidence: Why The Courts Need A New Approach To Finality, Sarah Lucy Cooper

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Seeking Inconsistency: Advancing Pluralism In International Criminal Sentencing, Nancy Amoury Combs

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Training For Bargaining, Jenny M. Roberts, Ronald F. Wright

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

While plea bargaining dominates the practice of criminal law, preparation for trial remains central to defense attorneys’ training. Negotiation is still peripheral to that training. Defense lawyers enter practice with little exposure to negotiation techniques and strategies in the plea bargaining context, the most significant skills they use every day.

Empirical research on plea negotiations has concentrated on outcomes of negotiations rather than the process itself. Our multi-phase field study examines the negotiation techniques that attorneys use during plea bargaining, as well as their preparation and training for negotiation. This Article explores the data on the training aspects of our …

Brief For Amici Curiae Professors Of Law In Support Of Petitioner, Barbara Allen Babcock, Jeffrey Bellin, Robert P. Burns, Sherman J. Clark, James E. Coleman Jr., Lisa Kern Griffin, Robert P. Mosteller, Deborah Tuerkheimer, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Orange Is The New Equal Protection Violation: How Evidence-Based Sentencing Harms Male Offenders, Shaina D. Massie

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Under School Colors: Private University Police As State Actors Under § 1983, Leigh J. Jahnig

Northwestern University Law Review

Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, individuals may sue those who violate their constitutional rights while acting under color of state law. The Supreme Court has held that private actors may act under color of state law, and may be sued under § 1983 in some circumstances. However, courts have not been consistent in determining whether private university police forces act under color of state law. Private universities often maintain police forces that are given extensive police powers by state statutes but are controlled by private entities. Some courts have looked directly to the state statutes that delegate police power, but …

Alternative Visions For The Federal Criminal Justice And Corrections System: Is True Change Possible?, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

None available.

The Immortal Accusation, Lindsey Webb

Washington Law Review

In the American criminal justice system, accusations have eternal life. Prosecutors, judges, and prison officials regularly consider dismissed charges and even prior acquittals in the defendant’s criminal history when making decisions ranging from the filing of charges to the imposition of punishment. This Article argues that the criminal justice system’s reliance on “accusation evidence” should be understood as furthering that system’s larger allegiance to attaining and preserving findings of guilt. Once the government obtains a guilty plea or verdict, appellate courts rarely overturn convictions based on concerns about the accuracy of the conviction; indeed, post-conviction review procedures often are structured …

Why Ban "Assault Weapons"?, James B. Jacobs

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taxing Legalized Marijuana: How Courts Should Treat Drug Tax Statutes In Light Of The Fifth Amendment's Self-Incrimination Clause And Executive Non-Enforcement Of The Controlled Substances Act, Joseph A. Goldstein

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.