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Criminal Law

Selected Works

Criminal Law and Procedure

2008

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law

Equal Sentences For Unequal Participation: Should The Eighth Amendment Allow All Juvenile Murder Accomplices To Receive Life Without Parole?, Brian Gallini Sep 2008

Equal Sentences For Unequal Participation: Should The Eighth Amendment Allow All Juvenile Murder Accomplices To Receive Life Without Parole?, Brian Gallini

Brian Gallini

No court has addressed the constitutional significance of sentencing juvenile murder accomplices who play a minimal role in the underlying killing to life in prison without parole. Indeed, no precedent makes clear whether it is cruel and unusual to impose that sentence on juvenile offenders convicted of first-degree murder pursuant to either the felony-murder doctrine or an accomplice theory of liability, notwithstanding their minimal involvement in the victim’s death. To investigate this unanswered question, Part I of this Article explores the imposition of life without parole sentences on juvenile non-killers convicted of murder via either the felony-murder doctrine or accomplice …

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The Death Penalty In Delaware: An Empirical Study, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Johnson, Valerie P. Hans Aug 2008

The Death Penalty In Delaware: An Empirical Study, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Johnson, Valerie P. Hans

Valerie P. Hans

This article reports the findings of the first phase of a three phase empirical study of the death penalty in Delaware. In phase 1, we examined only cases in which the defendant was sentenced to death. While our findings are preliminary, there appear to be, as numerous other studies have found in other jurisdictions, race of victim effects. Seventy percent of the death sentences were imposed in white victim cases, even though the majority of the murder victims are black. Additionally, Delaware has one of the highest death sentencing rates in the country. This high rate appears to be the …

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Teaching Rape: Some Reflections On Pedagogy, Michelle Dempsey Dec 2007

Teaching Rape: Some Reflections On Pedagogy, Michelle Dempsey

Michelle Madden Dempsey

This short essay, which discusses the difficulties of teaching sexual offences, was written for the Oxford Law Society and published in the student run magazine, The Verdict, in Trinity Term 2007.

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Establishing Separate Criminal And Civil Evidence Codes, John J. Capowski Dec 2007

Establishing Separate Criminal And Civil Evidence Codes, John J. Capowski

John J. Capowski

This article suggests that the Federal Rules of Evidence (Rules) should be separated into distinct criminal and civil evidence codes. The arguments for this separation are both practical and theoretical, and this article is the first comprehensive discussion of this proposed separation.

The most important of the arguments for bifurcation is that our current unified evidence code leads to inappropriate admission decisions. These inappropriate admission decisions most often occur when the interpretation of a rule in a criminal case is applied in later civil law cases. This result is in part because our rules, and their interpretations, are transubstantive; they …

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