Law Commons^™

Easy Victims Of The Law: Protecting The Constitutional Rights Of Juvenile Suspects To Prevent False Confessions, Tayler Klinkbeil

Child and Family Law Journal

The inherently coercive nature of custodial interrogation is the very reason the Supreme Court handed down the famous Miranda v. Arizona decision; the court recognized the increased vulnerability that suspects under questioning are subjected to when placed in a situation designed to elicit incriminating information.¹ Legal scholars and judiciaries alike agree that the likelihood of police questioning resulting in a false admission of guilt or self-incriminating statements is disproportionately more probable if the subject of the questioning is a minor.² The constitutional protections that are afforded to juvenile suspects subjected to custodial interrogations are those set out in …

The Effects Of Adverse Childhood Experiences On The Future Of Our Youth, Patrick Cobb

Child and Family Law Journal

22.3 percent.¹ This is the percentage of the population of the United States under the age of 18. These three words should come to mind: growth, family, and safety. Unfortunately, just because these words come to mind, does not mean these are a reality for our youth. The Adverse Childhood Experience (ACEs) study explores our youth’s mental, emotional, and social well-being across a wide sample with some disturbing results.

As we de-code what exactly ACEs entails, we can learn to predict, diagnose, and ultimately prevent negative environments our youth are involved in. Prioritizing these prevention efforts can eventually lead …

State Criminal Laws Could Be A Light In The Dark For The Hidden Victims Of Forced Marriage, Rebekah Marcarelli

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

“There’s something you need to know about me . . . I am dead,” said Fraidy Reiss, a survivor of an abusive forced marriage, as she stood alone on a stage, speaking to a crowd. “I know what you’re thinking, [I don’t] look particularly dead . . . you might want to tell that to my family [because] they declared me dead almost thirteen years ago.”

Reiss, who founded the organization Unchained at Last to help forced marriage victims like herself, grew up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. Right after finishing high school, Reiss was asked to …

Inheritance Crimes, David Horton, Reid Kress Weisbord

Washington Law Review

The civil justice system has long struggled to resolve disputes over end-of-life transfers. The two most common grounds for challenging the validity of a gift, will, or trust— mental incapacity and undue influence—are vague, hinge on the state of mind of a dead person, and allow factfinders to substitute their own norms and preferences for the donor’s intent. In addition, the slayer doctrine—which prohibits killers from inheriting from their victims—has generated decades of constitutional challenges.

But recently, these controversial rules have migrated into an area where the stakes are significantly higher: the criminal justice system. For example, states have criminalized …

Skinning The Cat: How Mandatory Psychiatric Evaluations For Animal Cruelty Offenders Can Prevent Future Violence, Ashley Kunz

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

In 2017, the Texas legislature amended Texas Penal Code § 42.092, which governs acts of cruelty against non-livestock animals. The statute in its current form makes torturing, killing, or seriously injuring a non-livestock animal a third degree felony, while less serious offenses carry either a state jail felony or a Class A misdemeanor charge.

While a step in the right direction, Texas law is not comprehensive in that it fails to address a significant aspect of animal cruelty offenses: mental illness. For over fifteen years, Texas Family Code § 54.0407 has required psychiatric counseling for juveniles convicted of cruelty to …

How Courts In Criminal Cases Respond To Childhood Trauma, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

Neurobiological and epidemiological research suggests that abuse and adverse events experienced as a child can increase an adult’s risk of brain dysfunction associated with disorders related to criminality and violence. Much of this research is predictive, based on psychological evaluations of children; few studies have focused on whether or how criminal proceedings against adult defendants consider indicators of childhood trauma. This Article analyzes a subset of criminal cases pulled from an 800-case database created as part of an original, large-scale, empirical research project known as the Neuroscience Study. The 266 relevant cases are assessed to determine the extent to which, …

Criminal Law As Family Law, Andrea L. Dennis

Georgia State University Law Review

The criminal justice system has morphed dramatically over the last several decades, achieving more pervasive control over the lives of individuals than ever before. The expansion began with the proliferation of criminal statutes, generating the now well-known concept of over-criminalization. The expansion also encompassed increasing the range of possible sanctions for criminal misbehavior and creating overlapping enforcement regimes. Two more instances of criminal justice expansion include mass surveillance and policies and practices that swept youth out of the juvenile justice system and into the criminal justice system. A product of the expansion has been mass incarceration; more individuals than at …

Criminal Law As Family Law, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

The criminal justice system has expanded dramatically over the last several decades, extending its reach into family life. This expansion has disproportionately and negatively impacted Black communities and social networks, including Black families. Despite these pervasive shifts, legal scholars have virtually ignored the intersection of criminal, family, and racial justice. This Article explores the gap in literature in two respects. First, the Article weaves together criminal law, family law, and racial justice by cataloging ways in which the modern criminal justice state regulates family life, particularly for Black families. Second, the Article examines the depth of criminal justice interference in …

Faultless Guilt: Toward A Relationship Based View Of Criminal Liability, Amy Sepinwall

Amy J. Sepinwall

Fighting Collateral Sanctions One Statute At A Time: Addressing The Inadequacy Of Child Endangerment Statutes And How They Affect The Employment Aspirations Of Criminal Offenders, Sarah Wetzel

Akron Law Review

In an age where one in four adult Americans has a criminal record, post-conviction relief measures and review of criminal statutes is on the rise. This Comment addresses the inadequacy of current child endangerment statutes around the country by providing examples of those which are too broad and result in convictions of well-meaning parents and those which are too narrow and allow other parents to harm their children without repercussion. It then places these statutes in the context of collateral sanctions that are imposed on individuals with child endangerment convictions, particularly those related to employment and professional licensing.

Zero-Tolerance Comes To International Law, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Need To Criminalize Revenge Porn: How A Law Protecting Victims Can Avoid Running Afoul Of The First Amendment, Adrienne N. Kitchen

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Revenge porn occurs when someone posts sexually explicit images of their former paramour on the web, often with contact information for the victim’s work and home. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of victims. Victims lose or quit their jobs; they are harassed by strangers; some change their name or alter their appearance. Some victims resort to suicide; others are stalked, assaulted, or killed. Civil suits fail to remove the images or deter perpetrators. Current criminal laws are insufficient in several common instances. These shortcomings mean there is a need to criminalize revenge porn.

Revenge porn is obscene and …

Panel On Problematizing Assumptions About Gender Violence (Transcript), Rashmi Goel, Tamara Love, Elizabeth Macdowell, Adele Morrison

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Transcript of a Panel session at the CONVERGE! Conference on problematizing assumptions about gender violence.

Constrained Choice: Mothers, The State, And Domestic Violence, Rona Kaufman Kitchen

Rona Kaufman Kitchen

Mothers who are the victims of domestic violence face unique challenges in their quest for safety. The legal response to domestic violence requires that mothers respond to abuse in specific state-sanctioned manners. However, when mothers respond accordingly, such as by reporting abuse and leaving the abusive relationship, their safety and the safety of their children is not guaranteed. Moreover, by responding in state-sanctioned manners, mothers risk a host of negative consequences including increased threat to their immediate and long-term safety, the loss of their children, undesired financial, health, and social consequences, and criminal prosecution. On the other hand, when mothers …

Holistic Pregnancy: Rejecting The Theory Of The Adversarial Mother, Rona Kaufman Kitchen

Rona Kaufman Kitchen

In its zealous effort to protect the lives and health of unborn children, the law frequently views the expecting mother with suspicion. In its most extreme form, the law regards the potential mother as a potential murderess. This perspective does not reflect the nature of pregnancy, it undermines the autonomy of loving mothers, and it is detrimental to children. Regardless of whether there is any conflict between mother and fetus, the State presumes the mother to be a threat to her fetus and subjugates her rights as a result. The State interferes with the mother’s autonomy, bodily integrity, parental rights, …

When Women Kill Newborns: The Rhetoric Of Vulnerability, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores feminist jurisprudence regarding women who commit acts of violence, focusing specifically on questions of agency in neonaticide (killing a newborn). A case study approach illustrates the debate in feminist theory between same-treatment and different-treatment of women as compared to men. While some feminist criminologists urge that women who kill must be viewed the same as men (as having agency and responsibility), other feminists question this approach and point out that women who commit crimes that intersect with family law receive disproportionately harsh treatment and should be treated differently than men.

This chapter contends that the paradox raised …

Closing The Widening Net: The Rights Of Juveniles At Intake, Tamar R. Birckhead

Tamar R Birckhead

Should juveniles have more, fewer, the same or different procedural rights than are accorded to adults? This question, posed by Professor Arnold Loewy for a panel at the 2013 Texas Tech Law Review Symposium on Juveniles and Criminal Law, requires us to examine our goals for the juvenile court system. My primary goal, having practiced in both adult criminal and juvenile delinquency forums for over twenty years, is to ensure that the reach of juvenile court is no wider than necessary, as research indicates that when children are processed through the juvenile court system and adjudicated delinquent, the impact is …

Beyond Family Law, Sarah Abramowicz

Law Faculty Research Publications

Family law has traditionally been treated as an exceptional field, a marginalized and special case in which the usual rules of the legal canon do not apply. This Article argues that the current challenge to family-law exceptionalism has been largely one way, to the detriment of a central concern of family law: the protection of children and of the parent-child relationship. Family-law scholars have focused primarily on whether and how to import the tools and insights of other areas of law into the zone of family relations, while largely overlooking the possibility that the tools and insights of family law …

Criminalizing The Undocumented: Ironic Boundaries Of The Post-September 11th ‘Pale Of Law.’, Daniel Kanstroom

Daniel Kanstroom

The general hypothesis put forth in this Article is that well-accepted historical matrices are increasingly inadequate to address the complex issues raised by various U.S. government practices in the so-called “war on terrorism.” The Article describes certain stresses that have recently built upon two major legal dichotomies: the citizen/non-citizen and criminal/civil lines. Professor Kanstroom reviews the use of the citizen/non-citizen dichotomies as part of the post-September 11th enforcement regime and considers the increasing convergence between the immigration and criminal justice systems. Professor Kanstroom concludes by suggesting the potential emergence of a disturbing new legal system, which contains the worst features …

Reconsidering Spousal Privileges After Crawford, R. Michael Cassidy

R. Michael Cassidy

In this article the author explores how domestic violence prevention efforts have been adversely impacted by the Supreme Court’s new “testimonial” approach to the confrontation clause. Examining the Court’s trilogy of cases from Crawford to Davis and Hammon, the author argues that the introduction of certain forms of hearsay in criminal cases has been drastically limited by the court’s new originalist approach to the Sixth Amendment. The author explains how state spousal privilege statutes often present a significant barrier to obtaining live testimony from victims of domestic violence. The author then argues that state legislatures should reconsider their spousal privilege …

When Family Matters, Alafair Burke

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

In Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties, Dan Markel, Jennifer Collins, and Ethan Leib make an important contribution to the growing literature on criminal law and families by documenting the ways that criminal law advantages and burdens actors based on familial status and identifying the potential harms that are unleashed when criminal law recognizes family status. This Feature seeks to complement that contribution by situating the authors’ observations within the context of two considerations beyond Privilege or Punish’s immediate focus: chronological trends and the practical realities that can shape application of formal law. By distinguishing …

Punishing Family Status , Jennifer M. Collins, Ethan J. Leib, Dan Markel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article focuses upon two basic but under-explored questions: when does, and when should, the state use the criminal justice apparatus to burden individuals on account of their familial status? We address the first question in Part I by revealing a variety of laws permeating the criminal justice system that together form a string of family ties burdens, laws that impose punishment upon individuals on account of their familial status. The seven burdens we train our attention upon are omissions liability for failure to rescue, parental responsibility laws, incest, bigamy, adultery, nonpayment of child support, and nonpayment of parental support. …

Punishing Family Status, Jennifer M. Collins, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article focuses upon two basic but under-explored questions: when does, and when should, the state use the criminal justice apparatus to burden individuals on account of their familial status? We address the first question in Part I by revealing a variety of laws permeating the criminal justice system that together form a string of family ties burdens, laws that impose punishment upon individuals on account of their familial status. The seven burdens we train our attention upon are omissions liability for failure to rescue, parental responsibility laws, incest, bigamy, adultery, nonpayment of child support, and nonpayment of parental support. …

Introduction: The Challenge Of Lionel Tate, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

Legal reforms over the past generation have transformed juvenile crime regulation from a system that viewed most youth crime as the product of immaturity into one that is ready to hold many youths to the standard of accountability imposed on adults. Supporters of these reforms argue that they are simply a response to the inability of the traditional juvenile court to deal adequately with violent youth crime, but the legal changes that have transformed the system have often been undertaken in an atmosphere of moral panic, with little deliberation about consequences and costs.

In this book we argue that a …

Criminal Justice And The Challenge Of Family Ties, Dan Markel, Jennifer M. Collins, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article asks two basic questions: When does, and when should, the state use the criminal justice apparatus to accommodate family ties, responsibilities, and interests? We address these questions by first revealing a variety of laws that together form a string of family ties subsidies and benefits pervading the criminal justice system. Notwithstanding our recognition of the important role family plays in securing the conditions for human flourishing, we then explain the basis for erecting a Spartan presumption against these family ties subsidies and benefits within the criminal justice system. We delineate the scope and rationale for the presumption and …

Criminalizing Marital Rape: A Comparison Of Judicial And Legislative Approaches, Theresa Fus

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Even though many countries still permit husbands to rape their wives with little or no consequence, there is a growing trend that marital exemption is unjust and has no place in a civilized society. Recognition of the inappropriateness of marital exemption is, however, only the first step towards its elimination. To effectively equalize treatment of marital and non-marital rape, legislatures and judiciaries must take action. Several countries have already been host to the abolition of marital immunity, but their approaches may not be the most effective. This Note examines the experiences of England and Canada as examples of judicial and …

Post-Crawford: Time To Liberalize The Substantive Admissibility Of A Testifying Witness's Prior Consistent Statements, Lynn Mclain

All Faculty Scholarship

The United States Supreme Court's 1995 decision in Tome v. United States has read Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(1)(B) to prevent the prosecution's offering a child abuse victim's prior consistent statements as substantive evidence. As a result of that decision, the statements will also be inadmissible even for the limited purpose of helping to evaluate the credibility of a child, if there is a serious risk that the out-of-court statements would be used on the issue of guilt or innocence.

Moreover, after the Court's March 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington, which redesigned the landscape of Confrontation Clause analysis, other …

Domestic Terror (The Sniper Suspect's Divorce Records Show Patterns Of Power And Control And Missed Opportunities By The System To Intervene.), Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the past few months, we have learned much about the violent, troubled life of sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad. Whether or not he pulled the trigger - some recent reports have pointed to his 17-year-old companion Lee Boyd Malvo as the main shooter - there is no doubt in the minds of domestic-violence experts that this adult is responsible for these deaths.

While many pundits conclude that we will never know what motivated the sniper suspect, to domestic violence experts his is an all-too-familiar story of a man whose relationships with the women and children - possibly including Malvo …

Legal Images Of Motherhood: Conflicting Definitions From Welfare "Reform," Family And Criminal Law, Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this Article explores the traditional idealized view of motherhood that child placement statutes and court decisions reflect. These laws include statutes and case law in custody disputes between parents and in child protection proceedings under civil and criminal laws where the dispute is between the parent and the state. Part II contrasts the legal construct of motherhood that child placement laws embody with the legal image of mothers in child support and welfare law.

Part III examines the impact of these conflicting images of motherhood on a particular group of mothers -- battered women. Battered women illuminate …

A Case Of Clothing And Smell Obsession In A Bisexual Adult Woman, Marianne Wesson

Publications

No abstract provided.