Law Commons^™

Why Criminal Defendants Cooperate: The Defense Attorney's Perspective, Jessica A. Roth, Anna D. Vaynman, Steven D. Penrod

Articles

Cooperation is at the heart of most complex federal criminal cases, with profound ramifications for who can be brought to justice and for the fate of those who decide to cooperate. But despite the significance of cooperation, scholars have yet to explore exactly how individuals confronted with the decision whether to pursue cooperation with prosecutors make that choice. This Article—the first empirical study of the defense experience of cooperation—begins to address that gap. The Article reports the results of a survey completed by 146 criminal defense attorneys in three federal districts: the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District …

Resurrecting Arbitrariness, Kathryn E. Miller

Articles

What allows judges to sentence a child to die in prison? For years, they did so without constitutional restriction. That all changed in 2012’s Miller v. Alabama, which banned mandatory sentences of life without parole for children convicted of homicide crimes. Miller held that this extreme sentence was constitutional only for the worst offenders—the “permanently incorrigible.” By embracing individualized sentencing, Miller and its progeny portended a sea change in the way juveniles would be sentenced for serious crimes. But if Miller opened the door to sentencing reform, the Court’s recent decision in Jones v. Mississippi appeared to slam it …

Disaggregating Slavery And The Slave Trade, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

Articles

International law prohibits slavery and the slave trade as peremptory norms, customary international law prohibitions and crimes, humanitarian law prohibitions, and non-derogable human rights. Human rights bodies, however, focus on human trafficking, even when slavery and the slave trade—and not human trafficking—are enumerated within their mandates. International human rights law has conflated human trafficking with slavery and the slave trade. Consequently, human trafficking has subsumed the slave trade and, at times, slavery prohibitions, increasing perpetrator impunity for slavery and the slave trade abuses and denying full expressive justice to survivors.

This Article disaggregates slavery from the slave trade and slavery …

Fraudulent Malattributed Comments In Agency Rulemaking, Michael Herz

Articles

A specter is haunting notice-and-comment rulemaking—the specter of fraudulent comments. The stand-out example—the apotheosis—was the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) net neutrality rulemaking in 2017. Well over twenty million comments were submitted, but millions of those were highly suspect. It turns out only about 800,000 of those comments were unique—that is, not written by a computer and not a pre-written form letter or variation thereof. And of the rest, perhaps half were submitted by computers (bots) using fictitious names or the names of real people, living and dead, who had no connection to the comment.

Strategies For Emergency Release Of Incarcerated People During Covid-19 Outbreak, Sara Alvarez, Andrew Kopke, Mariel Stein, Meg Tiley

Articles

Students in Cardozo's Criminal Defense Clinic partnered with the Office of the Appellate Defender to outline legal strategies to advocate for the release of incarcerated people who are vulnerable to harm from COVID-19.

Prosecutorial Declination Statements, Jessica A. Roth

Articles

This Article examines how prosecutors convey to various audiences their decisions not to charge in discrete cases. Although prosecutors regularly issue public statements about their declinations—and anecdotal evidence suggests that declination statements are on the rise—there is an absence of literature discussing the interests that such statements serve, the risks that they pose, and how such statements are consistent with the prosecutorial function. Prosecutors also operate in this space without clear ground rules set by law, policies, or professional standards. This Article attempts to fill that void. First, it theorizes the interests potentially advanced by such statements—characterized as signaling, accountability, …

Taking Data, Michael Pollack

Articles

Technological development has created new forms of information, altered expectations of privacy, and given law enforcement more tools to examine that information and intrude on that privacy. One crucial facet of these changes involves internet service providers (ISPs): as people expose more of their lives to their ISPs—all the websites they visit, people they communicate with, emails they send, files they store, and more—law enforcement efforts to access that data become more and more common. But scholars and policymakers alike recognize that the existing statutory frameworks governing those efforts are based on obsolete technology and strike balances that are difficult …

Alternative Elements, Jessica A. Roth

Articles

The U.S. Constitution provides a criminal defendant with a right to trial by jury, and most states and the federal government require criminal juries to agree unanimously before a defendant may be convicted. But what exactly must a jury agree upon unanimously? Well-established doctrine, pursuant to In re Winship, provides that the jury must agree that the prosecution has proven every element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet what the elements of any given offense are is not as clear as one might expect. Frequently, criminal statutes—especially federal statutes—describe an array of prohibited conduct, leaving ambiguous whether …

Towards Neutral Principles In The Administration Of Criminal Justice: A Critique Of Supreme Court Decisions Sanctioning The Plea Bargaining Process, Malvina Halberstam

Articles

This article compares the Court's reasoning in plea bargaining cases with its reasoning in non-plea-bargaining cases that involve the same legal principles. It analyzes the Court's arguments for sustaining guilty pleas induced by fear of the death penalty or by promises of leniency, and for sanctioning the imposition of harsher penalties on those who reject prosecutional offers to plead and insist on a trial. Finally, it briefly addresses the contention that the system for the administration of criminal justice in the United States could not function if use of a sentencing differential to induce guilty pleas were prohibited.

Testimonial Immunity And The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination: A Study In Isomorphism, Peter Lushing

Articles

This Article accepts and will develop the Court's isomorphic theory of immunity and privilege, and will show why Portash is nonetheless correct in result. A case for a broadened view of the privilege, partially because of the availability of testimonial immunity, will be made. Apftlbaum will be shown to be incorrect in result. This Article will also analyze the problem of immunized testimony and perjury by inconsistent statement, a problem faced once by the Court but left unresolved. Finally, this Article will discuss the constitutional requirements of an immunity statute, and consider an immunity case presently pending before the Supreme …

Faces Without Features: The Surface Validity Of Criminal Inferences, Peter Lushing

Articles

This article will offer nonempirical grounds to show that instructed inferences operate as the dissenters believe, at least when the instruction does not explicitly refer to the evidence at trial, but to occurrences in general.