Digital Commons Network^™

The Constitutionality Of Collateral Post-Conviction Claims Of Actual Innocence Comment., Craig M. Jacobs

St. Mary's Law Journal

The notion that the state can punish innocent people disrupts public confidence in the usefulness of the criminal justice system. If, by legislative design, the criminal justice system is not concerned with or is accepting of situations where innocent people are punished by the state, should courts take immediate action? Once criminal defendants exhaust the appellate process, Supreme Court Justices have stated, federal courts should not hear claims of actual innocence. Such statements are supported by the federal habeas corpus statute as amended by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). AEDPA requires federal habeas courts to …

A Case Study In Tanzania: Police Round-Ups And Detention Of Street Children As A Substitute For Care And Protection, Sheryl L. Buske

South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business

No abstract provided.

From The Welfare State To The Militarized Market: Losing Choices, Controlling Losers, Martha T. Mccluskey

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 1 in Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life, Shelley Feldman, Charles Geisler & Gayatri A. Menon, eds.

Beneath a libertarian surface, free market economic ideas and policies have helped rationalize the strengthening of anti-democratic moral and political fundamentalism. The triumph of market freedom has been accompanied by increasing authoritarian government control in many spheres.

This chapter explains how a two-step rhetorical move in prevailing economic ideology turns authoritarianism and austerity into the route to freedom and growth. First, free market ideology constructs the increasingly limited and bad economic choices of a declining …

Hyper-Incarceration As A Multidimensional Attack: Replying To Angela Harris Through The Wire, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

In this article, Professor Frank Rudy Cooper responds to a symposium article by Angela Harris, arguing "mass incarceration" should be understood as "hyper-incarceration" because it is targeted based on multiple dimensions of identities. He extends Harris's analysis of the multidimensionality of identities by means of a case study of how class operates during the drug war era, as depicted in the critically acclaimed HBO drama The Wire.

A Primer On Batson, Including Discussion Of Johnson V. California, Miller-El V. Dretke, Rice V. Collins, & Synder V. Louisiana., Mikal C. Watts, Emily C. Jeffcott

St. Mary's Law Journal

Fundamental to the existence of the rights guaranteed to every citizen is the assurance that the right to equal protection under the law will be defended at all costs. Key to the United States’ system of adjudication is the right to a trial by jury, which is embodied in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to the Constitution. These rights are also incorporated into all state constitutions through the Fourteenth Amendment. During jury selection, the judicial system permits the elimination of a certain number of jurors without cause. This form of elimination is known as a peremptory challenge. Over time, however, …

Congress's Consistent Intent To Utilize Military Commissions In The War Against Al-Qaeda And Its Adoption Of Commission Rules That Fully Comply With Due Process., Michael T. Mccaul, Ronald J. Sievert

St. Mary's Law Journal

Congress responded to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 by passing the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). In the following years Congress augmented that authority with the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA of 2006) and the Military Commissions Act of 2009 (MCA of 2009). In passing these acts, Congress responded to the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which found that President Bush’s attempt to establish military commissions required Congressional authorization. When drafting both MCAs, Congress recognized numerous evidentiary and trial procedures from federal civilian court were inappropriate for trying unlawful combatants. By these …

A Synopsis Of Texas And Federal Sovereign Immunity Principles: Are Recent Sovereign Immunity Decisions Protecting Wrongful Governmental Conduct., Marilyn Phelan

St. Mary's Law Journal

The Texas Supreme Court recently rendered several decisions involving governmental entities reflecting the court’s inflexible application of the doctrine of sovereign immunity. These decisions raise concerns that the Court may be insulating government employees from adherence to ethical codes of conduct. Just as Congress enacted legislation requiring accuracy and reliability from financial officers of corporations, there exists a similar need for Texas courts to protect the public from governmental harm through misconduct. The current awareness of governmental officials lessens the likelihood of governmental transparency and accountability. This Article analyzes the Court’s current application of the sovereign immunity doctrine to provide …

Those Who Ignore The Successes Of The Past Suffer Recurrent, Intensifying Crises, William K. Black

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Rationing Justice By Rationing Lawyers, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

The number of lawyers in the United States continues to increase, but low and middle-income persons still find it difficult, if not impossible, to afford legal assistance. National and state surveys reveal that more than 80 percent of the civil legal needs of the poor go unmet, as do a majority of the needs of middle-income persons. Legal representation can often dramatically increase a person’s ability to win at trial or to negotiate a favorable outcome, and the lack of access to lawyers effectively closes the courthouse doors for millions. This Article focuses on the crisis in Missouri's public defender …

Is The "Post" In Post-Racial The "Blind" In Colorblind?, Ian F. Haney López

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Balance Of Silence: Weighing The Right To Remain Silent Against The Right Of Access To Florida Civil Courts, Matthew C. Lucas

University of Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Killing The Messenger: The Intersection Between Sex Trafficking, Planned Parenthood & The Marginalization Of Youth Victims, Sarah Primrose

University of Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Do Sex Offender Registration And Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior?, J. J. Prescott, Jonah E. Rockoff

Articles

Sex offenders have become the targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime legislation in the U.S. Two key innovations in recent decades have been registration and notification laws which, respectively, require that convicted sex offenders provide valid contact information to law enforcement authorities, and that information about sex offenders be made public. Using the evolution of state law during the 1990s and 2000s, we study how registration and notification affect the frequency of reported sex offenses and the incidence of such offenses across victims. We find evidence that registration reduces the frequency of sex offenses by providing …

The Illusory Right To Counsel, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

Imagine a woman wrongly accused of murdering her fiance. She is arrested and charged with first-degree murder. If convicted, she faces a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Her family scrapes together enough money to hire two attorneys to represent her at trial. There is no physical evidence connecting her to the murder, but the prosecution builds its case on circumstantial inferences. Her trial attorneys admit that they were so cocky and confident that she would be acquitted that they did not bother to investigate her case or file a single pre-trial motion. Rather, they waived the …

Class Matters, Erica J. Hashimoto

Scholarly Works

Poor people constitute one of the most overrepresented categories of people in the criminal justice system. Why is that so? Unfortunately, we simply do not know, in large part because we have virtually no information that could provide an answer. As a result of that informational vacuum, policymakers either have ignored issues related to socioeconomic class, instead focusing on issues like drug addiction and mental illness as to which there are more data, or have developed fragmented policy that touches on socioeconomic class issues only tangentially. The bottom line is that without better data on the profile of poor defendants, …

Franz Kafka, Lawrence Joseph, And The Possibilities Of Jurisprudential Literature, Patrick J. Glen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it offers a complementary reading of Franz Kafka’s writings on the law and Lawrence Joseph’s novel Lawyerland. This reading focuses on the distinct perspectives offered by these authors. Whereas Kafka approaches the law from the perspective of the litigant or accused, Joseph’s perspective, through the eyes of his lawyers and judges, is that of the consummate insider. The importance of perspective rests with the fact that although law might constitute an objective system, its experience is inevitably subjective. The absurd malevolence of law in Kafka can thus be rationalized by the system …

Symposium: Bob Dylan And The Law, Foreword, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Pot As Pretext: Marijuana, Race, And The New Disorder In New York City Street Policing, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Although possession of small quantities of marijuana has been decriminalized in New York State since the late 1970s, arrests for marijuana possession in New York City have increased more than tenfold since the mid-1990s, and remain high more than 10 years later. This rise has been a notable component of the city’s “Order Maintenance Policing” strategy, designed to aggressively target low-level offenses, usually through street interdictions known as “stop, question, and frisk” activity. We analyze data on 2.2 million stops and arrests carried out from 2004 to 2008, and identify significant racial disparities in the implementation of marijuana enforcement. These …

Purple Haze, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

It takes only a glance at the headlines every political season – with battles over issues ranging from abortion and abstinence-only education to same-sex marriage and single parenthood – to see that the culture wars have become a fixed feature of the American political landscape. The real puzzle is why these divides continue to resonate so powerfully. In Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone offer an ambitious addition to our understanding of this puzzle, illustrating pointedly why it is so hard to talk across the political divide. In a …

The Costs Of Abusing Probationary Sentences: Overincarceration And The Erosion Of Due Process, Andrew Horwitz

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Collateral Consequences Of Masculinizing Violence, Jamie Abrams

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Before an enraged gunman fired thirty-six deadly shots into an exercise class filled with women, on August 4, 2009, in Pennsylvania, he blogged that his killing spree was the result of his failure to meet society’s expectations of him as a man. This violent act tragically affirms that hegemonic masculinity – a dominant form of masculinity whereby some types of men have power over women and over some other men – can directly cause violence against women and reveals both the underlying connection between masculinities scholarship and feminist scholarship and the value in exploring that linkage further in both theory …

A Critical Analysis Of The Theoretical And Empirical Literature Comparing The Effects Of Traditional Versus Community Policing On Quality Of Life And Associated Quality Of Life Issues, Rodney Polite

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

There are two major issues that will be addressed in this study to determine if they influence the selection of an appropriate policing strategy. The first is citizen perception of whether crime has decreased or increased in their community. The second is whether the length of time a citizen has lived in the community has an effect on their perception of crime and their attitude towards a specific policing strategy.

Historically, each policing strategy, although at times labeled differently (professional policing, team policing, neighborhood policing, zero-tolerance policing), has evolved and adapted based on various dynamics within police organizations and the …

Doubting Free Will: Three Experiments, John A. Humbach

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This paper describes three experiments that cast doubt on the existence free will. All deal with the phenomenon that, for a variety of reasons, people do not consciously experience events (including their own “choices”) at the exact instant they occur. The existence of these delays is sufficient to cast serious doubt on the possibility of conscious free will, i.e., free will as we usually understand it.

While these experiments do not definitely exclude the possibility of free will, they do provide affirmative evidence that our brains do not consciously make decisions in quite the way that introspection tells us. As …

Ua12/8 Wku Police - Annual Security Report, Wku Police

WKU Administration Documents

This report is designed to provide students, potential students, parents, facility and staff with crime statistics and information on university services and crime prevention programs. These programs are designed to help inform our campus communities about safety practices that will help you reduce the risk of being a crime victim. I feel hat these lessons can give people information that they can carry with them beyond college and will help keep them safe for the rest of their lives.

Diminishing The Legal Impact Of Negative Social Attitudes Toward Acquaintance Rape Victims, Michelle J. Anderson

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

War And Peace In The Jury Room: How Capital Juries Reach Unanimity, Scott E. Sundby

Articles

No abstract provided.

Letter From Executive Board, The Modern American

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

Volume 6, Issue1, The Modern American

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

Book Review & Essay: Let’S Get Free, Camille Jones

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

Killing, Letting Die, And The Case For Mildly Punishing Bad Samaritanism, Ken Levy

Georgia Law Review

For over a century now, American scholars(among others) have been debating the merits of "bad-Samaritan" laws-laws punishing people for failing to attempt "easy rescues." Unfortunately, the opponents of bad-Samaritan laws have mostly prevailed. In the United States, the "no-duty-to-rescue" rule dominates. Only four states even have bad-Samaritan laws, and these laws impose only the most minimal punishment-either sub-$500 fines or short-term imprisonment. This Article argues that this situation needs to be remedied. Every state should criminalize bad Samaritanism. For, first, criminalization is required by the supreme value that we place on protecting human life, a value that motivates laws against …