Digital Commons Network^™

Declining Homicide In New York City: A Tale Of Two Trends, Jeffery Fagan, Franklin E. Zimring, June Kim

Faculty Scholarship

The mass media pay plenty of attention to crime and violence in the United States, but very few of the big stories on the American crime beat can be classified as good news. The driveby shootings and carjackings that illuminate nightly news broadcasts are the opposite of good tidings. Most efforts at prevention and law enforcement seem more like reactive attempts to contain ever expanding problems rather than discernable public triumphs. In recent American history, crime rates seem to increase on the front page and moderate in obscurity.

The recent decline in homicides in New York City is an exception …

Character At The Crossroads, Roger C. Park

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Policing For Profit: The Drug War’S Hidden Economic Agenda, Eric D. Blumenson, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

In the following pages, we first describe in more detail how the Drug War’s financial largess has kept its soldiers in business. We then discuss the destructive impact of this economic regime, marshaling evidence to show that the corruption of law enforcement priorities and wholesale miscarriages of justice can be attributed to the operation of these incentives. Finally, we explore potential legal and legislative remedies through which law enforcement may regain its bearings.

Our investigation focuses on the economic underpinnings of current drug law enforcement policy. Drug policy also raises an extraordinarily broad range of moral, health, and criminological concerns, …

The American Bar Association And Federal Habeas Corpus, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

The ABA explains its proposed moratorium on capital punishment in part on the ground that recent decisions rendered by the Supreme Court and legislation enacted by Congress limit the ability of prisoners under sentence of death to challenge their sentences in the federal courts.' According to the ABA, the Supreme Court has placed numerous hurdles in the path of prisoners who apply to the federal courts for a writ of habeas corpus, claiming that their convictions were obtained or their sentences were imposed in violation of federal law. Congress, for its part, has added even more barriers in Title I …

Section 2254(D) Of The New Habeas Statute: An (Opinionated) User's Manual, Evan Tsen Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Hearsay Hazards In The American Criminal Trial: An Adversary-Oriented Approach, Gordon Van Kessel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Academic Mestizaje: Re/Producing Clinical Teaching And Re/Framing Wills As Latina Praxis, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

What follows is an analysis that draws connections between activist teaching and activist scholarship and posits that it is the activism, the focus on the needs of Latinas/as, that makes them community service. In Part I, I describe the community lawyering program, one of the clinical law options, available at the University of New Mexico School of Law. In Part Il, I undertake to re-frame the law of wills in order to make this end-of-life ritual more relevant to the lives of Latinas/os. I then I enact a LatCritique of academic discussions and Outsider discourses. I conclude by examining our …

Of 'Subtle Prejudices,' White Supremacy And Affirmative Action: A Reply To Paul Butler, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

I analyze the connection of affirmative action to two models of race and racism. I contend that the Supreme Court Justices who continue to support affirmative action adhere to a "prejudice" model in which race is a concept to be overcome and racism is merely a condition of individual ignorance. 13 On the other hand, I posit that Professor Butler's proposals fall within a "white supremacy" model, which looks at race as a historically contingent concept that has been used to subordinate non-white peoples from precolonial times through the present. This historical perspective offers the possibility that the concept of …

Dangerous Games And The Criminal Law, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

This essay means to correct the ways in which the law of homicide deals with lucky winners or survivors of dangerous games that end in the deaths of unlucky (dead) "losers" or even unluckier non-participants. Drag racing and Russian roulette are my focus, not only because they are so frequently litigated, but also because most other (unlawful) excessive risk-taking ventures are not, grammatically, what we mean when we say "game." It is not so much my intention to evaluate the role that "moral luck" plays generally in the world or specifically in the criminal law. It is my position that …

Will Boys Just Be Boyz N The Hood? African-American Directors Portray A Crumbling Justice System In Urban America, Justin P. Brooks

Faculty Scholarship

In the 1990s several African-American directors have explored issues of urban justice through stories of children growing up in urban America. Films such as Boyz N the Hood have brought vivid images of disenfranchised and violent neighborhoods and the obstacles involved in growing up in these neighborhoods. These films question whether the criminal justice system works in neighborhoods isolated from both the creation and the protections of the legal system, and where the rules of the criminal justice system sometimes collide with the rules of the neighborhood justice system.

Sex Offender Commitments: Debunking The Official Narrative And Revealing The Rules-In-Use, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

Sex offender commitment laws present courts with a difficult choice: either allow creative efforts to prevent sexual violence or enforce traditional constitutional safeguards constraining the power of the state to deprive citizens of their Iiberty. Three state supreme courts have deflected this hard choice while upholding sex offender commitment schemes. As part of their ""official narrative"" that legitimizes sex offender commitments, the courts claim that society can have prevention and still maintain the primacy of the criminal justice system. This narrative neutralizes the conflict in values by claiming that sex offender commitments are just like mental illness commitments, a small, …

The Underfederalization Of Crime, A. Kimberley Dayton

Faculty Scholarship

This article contends that judicial and academic complaints about the overfederalization of crime largely have matters backwards. The image of a runaway national government increasingly taking away the enforcement of the criminal law from the States is essentially false. The available evidence indicates that the national government's share in the enforcement of criminal law has been actually diminishing for more than the last half century. The national government does have concurrent authority over a greater range of criminal activity now, including much violent street crime. But, contrary to Lopez and the conventional wisdom it embraces, this expanded authority does not …

Images Of Women And Capital Sentencing Among Female Offenders: Exploring The Outer Limits Of The Eighth Amendment And Articulated Theories Of Justice, Jenny E. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

This Note explores the effect on women of this process of demarcating boundaries of unacceptable behavior within the context of a capital punishment system. Additionally, this Note explores the Eighth Amendment implications of these boundaries within capital jurisprudence. Part I examines the two most prominent theories put forth by feminist scholars to explain sentencing patterns among female capital offenders-the "chivalry theory" and the "evil woman" theory. These theories attempt to account for both the limited use of the death penalty for women and the presence of certain women on death row. In Part II, this Note considers the limited empirical …

Fourth Amendment Accommodations: (Un)Compelling Public Needs, Balancing Acts, And The Fiction Of Consent, Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

The problems of public housing-including crime, drugs, and gun violence- have received an enormous amount of national attention. Much attention has also focused on warrantless searches and consent searches as solutions to these problems. This Note addresses the constitutionality of these proposals and asserts that if the Supreme Court's current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is taken to its logical extremes, warrantless searches in public housing can be found constitutional. The author argues, however, that such an interpretation fails to strike the proper balance between public need and privacy in the public housing context. The Note concludes by proposing alternative consent-based regimes …

Institutionalization: Savior Or Saboteur Of Mediation?,, Sharon Press

Faculty Scholarship

This article is a reflection on the history and spread of the field of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). The author focuses on the increased institutionalization of ADR – particularly in relation to mediation within the court system, with examples drawn from Florida’s experience.

Commentary [Symposium: Politicians On Judges: Fair Criticism Or Intimidation], Susan Herman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sexuality, Rape, And Mental Retardation, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, Professor Denno addresses the question of when sexual relations with a mentally retarded individual should be considered nonconsensual and therefore criminal. The article first explores the early treatment of mental retardation. It next demonstrates how old stereotypes influence the moralism inherent in modern conceptions of consent in rape determinations. Illustrating the point with reference to the Glen Ridge rape case, the article shows how courts applying contemporary rape statutes typically hold mentally retarded individuals to a higher standard of consent than nonretarded individuals. As a result, courts are hurting the very people they are supposed to protect …

Less Is More: Teaching Legal Ethics In Context Symposium: 1997 W. M. Mikeck Foundation Forum On The Teaching Of Legal Ethics, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

We who teach legal ethics employ many of the teacher's arts to win our students' appreciation for the course. We do not always succeed. As Deborah Rhode has observed, "[t]here are inherent problems and infinite ways to fail in teaching this subject." Yet, we continue to seek a method for teaching the course effectively. If nothing else, our efforts have led to the development of a substantial body of literature on teaching legal ethics to which this Article will contribute. Its focus is on what, rather than how, to teach. This Article asks: What should be the content of the …

Conflicts Of Interest In Legal Representation: Should The Appearance Of Impropriety Rule Be Eliminated In New Jersey - Or Revived Everywhere Else , Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Sixty-five years ago, an American Bar Association (ABA) committee interpreting the Canons of Professional Ethics (Canons) concluded that it would be professionally improper for a part-time prosecutor to agree to defend an individual in a civil action while simultaneously prosecuting him on felony charges. The committee acknowledged that the representation of conflicting interests is ordinarily proper with the respective clients' consent. But it said that client consent does not suffice in a case involving a public officer, who has a duty "to be and remain above all suspicion, even at personal financial sacrifice." It concluded that such "[a]n attorney should …

Inside The Restatement, Aaron Twerski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Attorney-Client Privilege, Ethical Rules, And The Impaired Criminal Defendant, The , James A. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

Attorneys who represent possibly incompetent defendants charged with criminal conduct face difficult ethical issues, implicating professional duties of loyalty, zealous representation, and confidentiality-as an ethical question and as a matter of the law of evidence. The principles of agency underlying the attorney-client relationship are also implicated when the defendant's capacity is in doubt. In the ordinary criminal case, the client has at least implicitly authorized his lawyer's conduct. But if the defendant is impaired, the client may not have the mental capacity to authorize the attorney's actions. Defense counsel representing the possibly incompetent criminal defendant will often be the only …

Voicing Differences (Comment), Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

Jane Aiken and Kimberly O'Leary undertake the difficult work of developing specific approaches and techniques for taking account of characteristics such as race/ethnicity, gender, dis/ability, and sexual identity in clinical pedagogy. Carolyn Grose uses outsider narratives and popular culture to challenge the "pre-understanding" of students, and to assist them to accept client stories as true and valid. Focusing on the professional value of striving to promote justice, fairness, and morality identified in the MacCrate Report, Professor Aiken exhorts us to promote justice by unmasking privilege, the invisible package of unearned assets--about which I (we? or you?) was "meant" to remain …

The Role Of Criminal Law In Policing Corporate Misconduct, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

In the early 1990s, I spent a couple of years as Chief of the Criminal Division in the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. One of my principal responsibilities was to hear "appeals" from defense lawyers, usually, although not exclusively, in white collar crime cases. These lawyers felt that their clients should not be indicted, or that the plea offer they had received from the prosecutor in charge of the case was unduly severe. Sometimes their arguments were essentially factual contentions that the government had the wrong take on the evidence – that the …

Police Discretion And The Quality Of Life In Public Places: Courts, Communities, And The New Policing, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

The advent of community and problem-oriented policing – the so-called "quality-of-life" policing philosophies – raises complex questions concerning police discretion in addressing minor street misconduct and judicial response to that discretion. In this Article, Debra Livingston addresses these questions by reassessing the ways in which courts have employed the facial vagueness doctrine to limit police discretion in the performance of "order maintenance" tasks. Livingston contends that aggressive employment of the facial vagueness doctrine is an inadequate mechanism for limiting police discretion and at the same time could impair positive change in the direction of community and problem-oriented policing. As an …

The Evolution Of Adolescence: A Developmental Perspective On Juvenile Justice Reform, Elizabeth S. Scott, Thomas Grisso

Faculty Scholarship

The legal response to juvenile crime is undergoing revolutionary change, and its ultimate shape is uncertain. The traditional juvenile court, grounded in optimism about the potential for rehabilitation of young offenders, has long been the target of criticism, and even its defenders have been forced to acknowledge that it has failed to meet its objectives. Beginning in the late 1960s, when the Supreme Court introduced procedural regularity to delinquency proceedings in In re Gault, courts and legislatures began to slowly chip away at the foundations of the juvenile justice system. Recent developments have accelerated and intensified that process, as …

Old Chief V. United States: Stipulating Away Prosecutorial Accountability?, Daniel Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Earlier this year, in Old Chief v. United States, the Supreme Court finally resolved a circuit split on a nagging evidentiary issue: When a defendant charged with being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm offers to satisfy one of the statute's elements by stipulating to the existence of a prior felony conviction, may the government decline the stipulation and prove the existence and the nature of that prior felony?

The question of evidence law resolved in Old Chief is not particularly earth-shattering. Indeed, while the Court divided five to four on the issue, neither Justice Souter's opinion …

Symbolic Statutes And Real Laws: The Pathologies Of The Anti-Terrorism And Effective Death Penalty Act And The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

Criminals are not popular. No politician in recent memory has lost an election for being too tough on crime. In 1996, the Republican Congress and the Democratic President collaborated on two major statutes affecting the legal protections available to criminals The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) modifies the habeas corpus statute in a number of ways, affecting the disposition of federal post-conviction challenges to all criminal convictions, not just those resulting in death sentences? The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) addresses lawsuits filed by prisoners challenging the conditions of their confinement. The PLRA covers both suits …

The Client Fraud Problem As A Justinian Quartet: An Extended Analysis, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The War On Drugs: Evening The Odds Through Use Of The Airport Drug Courier Profile, Brian A. Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

The scourge of illegal drug abuse plagues the United States despite increased efforts by various law enforcement agencies to eradicate the narcotics trade. "The toll [drug abuse inflicts] on our society in lives made wretched, in costs to citizens, and in profits of gross size funneled to the most odious criminals, is staggering." Drugs lead the abuser fortunate enough to evade his demise to physical, financial and moral devastation, although their pernicious effects are not confined to the individual who uses them. The enormous profits generated by the drug trade invite corruption of unscrupulous law enforcement officials through lucrative bribes. …

An Enlightened Addition To The Original Meaning: Voltaire And The Eighth Amendment’S Prohibition Against Cruel And Unusual Punishment, Joshua E. Kastenberg

Faculty Scholarship

This article centers on the influences of the Enlightenment through Voltaire on both the framers of American law and on the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Before discussing the weight of Voltaire's influence on the law makers in the early republic, it is first important to envision a general picture of both Enlightenment philosophy and the experiences of Voltaire in Eighteenth Century France. Therefore, in Part I, this paper examines Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Enlightenment philosophy on criminal punishment, as well as the philosophy of Voltaire. Part II addresses a similar exploration of the impact of this …