Digital Commons Network^™

Official Indiscretions: Considering Sex Bargains With Government Informants, Susan S. Kuo

Faculty Publications

This article addresses an alarming new investigatory practice employed by law enforcement officials: requiring arrestees to carry out sexual tasks as confidential informants. Requiring arrestee informants to engage in sexual activities in exchange for a reduction or possible elimination of criminal penalties they might otherwise incur raises constitutional concerns. Informants can and do accept a variety of investigative assignments. But, as this article shows by drawing on sociological research, sex tasks differ fundamentally from more conventional informant undertakings. The importance of this distinction is that while adult individuals undoubtedly can provide consent to sexual matters, the validity of such consent …

The Failure Of The Federal Sentencing System: A Structural Analysis, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

For most of the last decade, I numbered myself among the supporters of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and wrote extensively in their defense, while chronicling their defects. In the past year, I have reluctantly concluded that the federal sentencing guidelines system has failed. This Article explains the Guidelines' failure. The Sentencing Reform Act was intended to distribute the power to make sentencing policy and rules and to control individual sentencing outcomes among a range of national and local actors - the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Congress, the federal appellate courts, and the Department of Justice at the national level, and district …

Murder, Meth, Mammon & Moral Values: The Political Landscape Of American Sentencing Reform (In Symposium On White Collar Crime), Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the ongoing American experiment in mass incarceration and considers the prospects for meaningful sentencing reform.

Shifting The Focus From The Myth Of "The Vanishing Trial" To Complex Conflict Management Systems, Or I Learned Almost Everything I Need To Know About Conflict Resolution From Marc Galanter, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

To say that The Vanishing Trial is a myth is not to suggest that the facts or analysis in Professor Marc Galanter's seminal report on the vanishing trial are fictional or inaccurate. Indeed, he marshals a massive amount of data to show that the number of trials and the trial rates have been declining for the past four decades, particularly in the federal courts. The report documents an apparent paradox: the proportion of cases going to trial has dropped sharply during the past forty years despite substantial increases in many other legal indicators including the number of lawyers, the number …

The Invisible Pillar Of Gideon, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Publications

In 1996, the State of South Carolina charged Larry McVay with common-law robbery. McVay, who was employed part-time and took home less than $160 per week after taxes, claimed that after paying his basic living expenses he had no money left with which to hire an attorney. A South Carolina court disagreed and denied McVay’s request for appointed counsel. Seven years later, Scott Peterson was arrested for the murder of his wife and unborn child in California. Although Peterson owned a home, drove an expensive SUV, and was carrying $10,000 in cash when he was captured, he claimed to be …

Causing Constitutional Harm: How Tort Law Can Help Determine Harmless Error In Criminal Trials, Jason M. Solomon

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Strategies For Challenging Police Drug Jargon Testimony, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Myth Of Uniformity, Michael M. O'Hear

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Jefferson And Juries: The Problem Of Law, Reason, And Politics In The New Republic, Daniel D. Blinka

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Beyond Bandaids: A Proposal For Reconfiguring Federal Sentencing After Booker, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This Article proposes a simplified sentencing table consisting of nine base sentencing ranges, each subdivided into three sub-ranges. The base sentencing range would be determined by combining offense facts found by a jury or admitted in a plea with the defendant's criminal history. A defendant's placement in the sub-ranges would be determined by post-conviction judicial findings of sentencing factors. No upward departures from the base sentencing range would be permissible, but defendants might be sentenced below the low end of the base sentencing range as a result of an acceptance of responsibility credit or due to a downward departure motion. …

Do Former Leaders Have An International Right To Act As Their Own Lawyer In War Crimes Trials?, Michael P. Scharf, Christopher Rassi

Faculty Publications

Picture what would happen if former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sought to represent himself at his war crimes trial before the Iraqi Special Tribunal. While doing so, assume that the judge presiding over his case decided to follow the precedent of the Trial Chamber of the International

Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that tried the case of Slobodan Milosevic, which held: "[U]nder customary international law, the defendant has a right to counsel, but he also has a right not to have counsel."

Errors And Missteps: Key Lessons The Iraqi Special Tribunal Can Learn From The Icty, Ictr, And Scsl, Michael P. Scharf, Ahran Kang

Faculty Publications

In a few months, the trial of Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi regime leaders will begin before the Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST). The IST is a unique "internationalized-domestic tribunal" whose Statute and Rules of Procedure are modeled upon the UN-created Yugoslavia War Crimes Tribunal (ICTY), Rwanda Genocide Tribunal (ICTR), and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), but whose judges are all Iraqis and whose courtroom is in Baghdad. There is much the IST can learn both from the successes and missteps of the ICTY, ICTR, and SCSL; many of the issues that will arise in the trials of …

Reforming Juvenile Delinquency Treatment To Enhance Rehabilitation, Personal Accountability And Public Safety, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article describes the widespread violence, beatings and other abuse the U.S. Justice Department has found in its inspections of several state juvenile detention facilities. The article then discusses Missouri's Division of Youth Services (DYS), which is widely considered the national model of sound practices. The article concludes with recommendations for national reform.

State Sentencing Policy And New Prison Admissions, Ben L. Trachtenberg

Faculty Publications

As the academy's focus has turned to sentencing in the wake of Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker, most commentators have continued their benign neglect of actual sentencing practices as they occur in state courts, not to mention whether and how such policies are effective in achieving the goals of criminal justice.This note examines trends in state sentencing policies and prison populations from the perspective of a would-be state reformer hoping to decrease her state's prison budget. Economic pressures, efficiency arguments, and social justice claims have combined to cause some states to desire lower prison populations, but few …

Racial Threat, Urban Conditions And Police Use Of Force: Assessing The Direct And Indirect Linkages Across Multiple Urban Areas, Karen F. Parker, John M. Macdonald, Wesley G. Jennings, Geoffrey P. Alpert

Faculty Publications

Traditionally explanations of police use of force have relied on a racial threat perspective. Tests of this perspective, however, typically offer a single indicator of threat (the relative size of the black population) and fail to adequately take into account the complex relationship between racial threat and police use of force. Drawing on racial threat, social disorganization, and police use of force literature, this study hypothesizes that macro-level patterns in police use of force are embedded in the racial and structural composition of cities and the organizational climate of local politics and police departments. The present study examines these relationships …

A Half-Century Since Brown: The Legal Academy's Views Of Racism, Patrick Garry

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Democracy And Social Justice: Founding Centers For Social Justice In Law Schools, Stephanie M. Wildman

Faculty Publications

Protecting democracy by combating inequality is the task of social justice lawyers. The practice of democracy mandates inclusion of the diverse populations of this nation into the social order. Social justice lawyers seek to give material meaning to democratic ideals in the daily lives of individuals and communities that are marginalized, subordinated, and underrepresented. Currently, not enough lawyers serve the disenfranchised and not enough lawyers emerge from disenfranchised communities. Hence, the disenfranchised continue to be denied access to legal resources, to the detriment of democracy.

Legal educators must begin to think about how to institutionalize consciousness about social justice as …

Catholic Jurors And The Death Penalty, Gerald F. Uelmen

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Congressional Threats Of Removal Against Federal Judges, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The federal judicial branch has lately become the object of increasing scrutiny and distrust by its legislative counterpart. Congressional suspicion is often directed toward judicial discretion in criminal sentencing and, more generally, the degree to which judges are perceived to be beholden to a particular ideological point of view or personal bias. This distrust has bred a potent strain of political opportunism that Congress has manifested in several recent bills. One of these, the Feeney Amendment to the PROTECT Act, all but eliminated judicial discretion in sentencing and tacitly threatens judges' continued employment. Though the Supreme Court's recent decision in …

The Challenge Of Motive In The Criminal Law, Elaine M. Chiu

Faculty Publications

The purchase of illegal drugs by an undercover police officer is commonly known as a “buy and bust” operation. In the twenty-first century, the stakes in the longstanding war on drugs are high as law enforcement and national security agencies join forces to confront the disturbing ties between terrorism and illegal narcotics. In addition to being a weapon in the arsenal of law enforcement, the buy and bust operation also tells an interesting story about motive in the criminal law. This article uses the simple street sale to demonstrate how the criminal law suffers from its ambivalent attitude towards the …

International Judicial Decisions, Domestic Courts, And The Foreign Affairs Power, A. Mark Weisburd

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Academic Expert Before Congress: Observations And Lessons From Bill Van Alstyne's Testimony, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sexual Violence And International Criminal Law: An Analysis Of The Ad Hoc Tribunal's Jurisprudence & The International Criminal Court's Elements Of Crimes, Angela M. Banks

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Crawford's Impact On Hearsay Statements In Domestic Violence And Child Sexual Abuse Cases, Robert P. Mosteller

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Penny For Their Thoughts: Draft Resistance At The Poston Relocation Center, Eric L. Muller

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Function Over Formalism: A Provisional Theory Of The Constitutional Law Of Crime And Punishment, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This Article is, in effect, the second half of the author's argument against the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Sixth Amendment in Blakely v. Washington. The first half appeared in "Train Wreck? Or Can the Federal Sentencing System Be Saved? A Plea for Rapid Reversal of Blakely v. Washington," 41 American Criminal Law Review 217 (2004), and made a pragmatic, consequentialist argument against the Blakely result. This Article takes the next step of providing an alternative constitutional model of criminal sentencing to that offered by Justice Scalia in Blakely. The model emphasizes that a good constitutional model should pay particular …

Reappraising T.L.O.'S Special Needs Doctrine In An Era Of School-Law Enforcement Entanglement, Josh Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Publications

This essay presents one doctrinal method for lawyers to defend children accused of criminal charges in juvenile or adult court: attacking the applicability of the twenty-year old case, New Jersey v. T.L.O., to most school searches. T.L.O. based its application of a lower standard for searches of students by school officials on the presumption that firm gates separate public school from law enforcement and criminal justice institutions. Later administrative search cases inside and outside of the school context show that tee lower standard of T.L.O. depends entirely on programmatic purposes that distinguish school systems and ordinary law enforcement. Porous schoolhouse …

Culture Clash: Teaching Cultural Defenses In The Criminal Law Classroom, Susan S. Kuo

Faculty Publications

In the law school classroom, the Socratic method of legal analysis removes a dispute at issue in a given case from its sociocultural context and takes the cultural backgrounds of the parties into account only when they serve the legal argument. The language of the law commands law students to siphon off the emotional and cultural content because of the enduring belief that the law is neutral and impartial. Accordingly, cultural conflicts are deemed irrelevant to legal analysis because laws are unbiased and culture-blind. This detached outlook has been termed perpectivelessness to denote a neutral, odorless, colorless non-perspective.

This essay …

Judicial Dialogue For Legal Multiculturalism, Charles H. Koch Jr.

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Memorandum Presenting The Case For Rapid Congressional Action In Response To Blakely V. Washington, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

Soon after the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Blakely v. Washington, which invalidated the Washington state sentencing guidelines and cast doubt on the constitutionality of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on "Blakely v. Washington and the Future of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines." Witnesses from the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and the judiciary downplayed the seriousness of the situation and urged caution in any congressional action. Concerned that the situation in the courts was more dire than the institutional witnesses had been willing to admit, Professor Frank Bowman subsequently …