Law Commons^™

Coercion's Common Threads: Addressing Vagueness In The Federal Criminal Prohibitions On Torture By Looking To State Domestic Violence Laws, Sarah H. St. Vincent

Michigan Law Review

Under international law, the United States is obligated to criminalize acts of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. However, the federal criminal torture laws employ several terms whose meanings are so indeterminate that they inhibit the statutes' effectiveness and fail to provide adequate guidance regarding precisely which forms of mistreatment may result in prosecution. These ambiguous terms have given rise to serious and prolonged controversies within the executive branch regarding what torture is-controversies that confirm, and may further compound, the uncertainty of liability under the laws in question.

In order to solve this problem of vagueness and provide definitive …

Prosecuting The Informant Culture, Andrew E. Taslitz

Michigan Law Review

Alexandra Natapoff, in her outstanding new book, Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, makes a compelling case for reform of the system by which we regulate police use of criminal informants. Indeed, as other writers have discussed, law enforcement's overreliance on such informants has led to a "snitching culture" in which informant snitching replaces other forms of law enforcement investigation (pp. 12, 31, 88-89). Yet snitches, especially jailhouse snitches, are notoriously unreliable.