Law Commons^™

The Importance Of Fraud Detection Techniques From The Enron Case And The T.J. Maxx Data Breach, Luyao Peng

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis examines the issue of fraud detection and its causes and solutions. After a description of two fraudulent cases Enron scandal (internal fraud), and T.J. Maxx Data Breach (external fraud), it discusses the causes of these two fraud cases using Cressey’s “fraud triangle” theory and Albrecht’s three-stage theory. It then describes various fraud detection techniques in internal and external fraud. Finally, the recommendations for the improvements of both internal and external fraud detection systems are explained.

The Portable Sensor Network: Conceptualization And Development Of A Modular, Upgradable, And Reusable Sensor System For The Provision Of Offensive And Defensive Surveillance, Brandon Curtis Sanders

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In the 21st century, law-enforcement, military, border patrol, and private companies all use a wide variety of surveillance equipment that is tailored to their specific needs. This equipment is expensive, typically requires an enormous capital investment, and often fails to live up to expectations; there must be a better way. The primary objective of this thesis is to conceptualize a new and more capable surveillance system, dubbed the Portable Sensor Network (PSN), which can either augment or entirely replace existing systems. The core concept of the PSN demands that it must affordable, portable, modular, and based on existing, commercially available …

Team Policing Revisited: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation In Las Vegas, Nevada, Natalie Nicole Martinez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In 1967, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice recommended team policing, which involves the decentralization of patrol officers and investigators to the same, defined geographical area, as a way to more effectively organize police officers and improve crime control. Despite initial enthusiasm from police officers and administrators, team policing quickly faded from use during the 1970s because its design was incompatible with the centralized model of policing prevalent at that time. However, the implementation of community-oriented policing, which promotes various organizational changes and the use of problem-focused strategies, has changed police departments in recent years and …

Driving Forces: Factors Affecting Police Officer Injuries In Motor Vehicle Incidents In The United States, Carol Servino

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Traffic-related incidents were the leading cause of fatal injuries to officers in 14 of 15 years between 1997 and 2012. Vehicle crashes occur at the individual officer level, but chiefs are responsible for agency performance, creating and implementing police policy, and developing organizational culture. This quantitative survey research study draws from organizational culture theory and asks chiefs in state, county, and city police organizations what they believe are salient factors in crashes causing injuries and death to police officers in the United States. Independent variables include safety belt laws, written driving policies (including communication technology commonly used in police vehicles), …

The Good Cop: Knowing The Difference Between Lawful Or Effective Policing And Rightful Policing — And Why It Matters, Tracey L. Meares

William & Mary Law Review

My Essay will proceed in four parts. First, I will lay out the two often-used metrics of police evaluation, lawfulness and crimefighting effectiveness. Next, I will explain the theoretical foundation underlying the third way, which is what I am calling rightful policing. In the third Section, I will present an overview of empirical work that I have done in collaboration with my colleague, Tom Tyler, and others. This work demonstrates that ordinary people care a great deal about the theoretical precepts underlying rightful policing. In the Essay’s last Section, I will conclude with some implications of both the theory and …

Contracting For Performance: Restructuring The Private Prison Market, Peter H. Kyle

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Safe To Drive? Police Powers Of Search And Seizure In The Vehicular Context, Mark Rucci

Honors College

Since their creation, automobiles have become a central facet of the American culture and psyche. As status symbols and modes of transportation their importance cannot be overstated. Americans love their cars, and the average citizen believes that he or she has legitimate privacy interests in his or her vehicle. But is this the case? For decades, The Court has struggled to balance 4th Amendment privacy rights with effective police procedure, and has thus handed down dozens of rulings on the topic, many of which often seem disparate and contradictory. In the face of such confusion, the Court’s answer has almost …

Against Proportional Punishment, Adam J. Kolber

Vanderbilt Law Review

Many criminal defendants are held in detention while they await trial. Though conditions in pretrial detention are much like those in prison, detention is technically not punishment. Since detainees are merely accused of crimes, they are presumed innocent.' Their detention is not intended to punish them, and so, the Supreme Court has said, it is not punishment at all. Rather, detention is a means of promoting public safety, reducing witness intimidation, and preventing people accused of crimes from fleeing before trial. Nevertheless, defendants who are convicted generally receive credit at sentencing for time served in pretrial detention. An offender who …

Not-So-Sweet Sixteen: When Minor Convictions Have Major Consequences Under Career Offender Guidelines, Andrew Tunnard

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Note looks beyond the circuit split to the larger juvenile justice issues implicated by these sentencing practices. Part II provides a brief overview of the juvenile justice system, juvenile transfer statutes, and the Guidelines. Part III explores the interpretive issues that have led to this circuit split. Part IV explains why resolving this circuit split requires more than choosing one side, and expands the discussion by analyzing the impact of recent judicial and scientific trends on the treatment of juvenile offenders in the adult system. Part V proposes that convictions occurring before the age of eighteen should not be …

An Analysis Of Firearms Training Performance Among Active Law Enforcement Officers, John Thomasson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Firearms proficiency is an implicit expectation, held by the public of police officers, due to presumption that the required firearm training is an adequate preparation for a deadly force encounter. However, anecdotal evidence and available data on police shootings suggest that conventional, unrealistic training methods are wholly inadequate. To present stress into firearms training, some departments have opted for exercises such as physical exertion and shoot-house training as a substitute for realistic simulation of force-on-force confrontations.

To determine whether such exercises are comparable, an observation of performance and heart rate levels was conducted on a group of eight police officers, …

Law-Enforcement Officers And Self-Help Repossession: A State-Action Approach, Aaron Loterstein

Michigan Law Review

Repossession of secured collateral is a fundamental component of the consumer credit industry. The Uniform Commercial Code authorizes a secured party to engage in self-help repossession of secured collateral under section 9-609, so long as the repossession takes place without "breach of the peace." While that term is undefined, several courts have adopted a counterintuitive rule, holding that a law-enforcement officer's presence during a self-help repossession - regardless of purpose or level of involvement - creates a breach of the peace. The Official Comments to the Code have seemingly endorsed this position as well. This Note rejects the primary justifications …

This Alj Said Too Much: Prison Hearing Officer Charges Michigan Department Of Corrections With First Amendment Violations And Race Discrimination, Carolyn Amadon

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

The Visit, Jiordan Castle

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

I will be reading a creative essay constructed for Professor Ryan Van Meter's spring 2012 workshop in nonfiction. English Department Chair Dean Rader assisted me in getting my paper chosen for presentation (with a Q&A session) at the upcoming Sigma Tau Delta International Convention this month. The essay is about visiting my father in prison as a teenager and relates to race relations and our justice system in a personal, yet unsentimental way.

Reply Brief For Appellant, Ramirez V. Nietzel, Melissa N. Henke

Law Faculty Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Kosilik V. Spencer: Gender Identity Disorder In Prison: What Constitututes An Eighth Amendment Violation When It Come To Medical And Mental Heath Treatment Of Inmates, Andrea Chiz Plyler

North Carolina Central University Science & Intellectual Property Law Review

No abstract provided.

What The Sentencing Commission Ought To Be Doing Reducing Mass Incarceration, Lynn Adelman

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Beginning in the 1970s, the United States embarked on a shift in its penal policies, tripling the percentage of convicted felons sentenced to confinement and doubling the length of their sentences. This shift included a dramatic increase in the prosecution and incarceration of drug offenders. As a result of its move toward long prison sentences, the United States now incarcerates so many people that it has become an outlier; this is not just among developed democracies, but among all nations, including highly punitive states such as Russia and South Africa, and also in comparison to the United States' own long-standing …

Lake View – A Roadmap For Asserting The Rights Of The Jailed Mentally Ill, Bettina Brownstein

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Demystifying “Pornography”: Tailoring Special Release Conditions Concerning Pornography And Sexually Oriented Expression, Laura A. Napoli

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “This article examines the design of special release conditions and the problems that arise when such conditions do not comport with constitutional standards. Part I provides a general overview of the First Amendment issues that often arise with respect to special release conditions. Part II discusses the current state of the law and classifies the types of bans defendants have encountered in supervised release conditions. Part III explains the factors that are frequently considered in assessing the validity of special release conditions, and Part IV suggests a new approach for evaluating the constitutionality of special release conditions. The article …

Banning The Hijab In Prisons: Violations Of Incarcerated Muslim Women's Right To Free Exercise Of Religion, Ali Ammoura

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Muslim American women who wear the hijab, or Islamic headscarf, face religious discrimination in nearly every aspect of their public life. They even face it during arrest or incarceration. Law enforcement officials often force Muslim women to remove their hijab while in custody, which both degrades and humiliates them in the process. But prison policies that prohibit incarcerated Muslim women from wearing the hijab violate their right to free exercise of religion. Penal institutions should not prevent incarcerated Muslim women from wearing a hijab without compelling reasons, especially when such policies often arise out of religious discrimination. Courts must …

Federal Incarceration By Contract In A Post-Minneci World: Legislation To Equalize The Constitutional Rights Of Prisoners, Allison L. Waks

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In the 2012 case Minneci v. Pollard, the United States Supreme Court held that federal prisoners assigned to privately-run prisons may not bring actions for violations of their Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment and may instead bring actions sounding only in state tort law. A consequence of this decision is that the arbitrary assignment of some federal prisoners to privately-run prisons deprives them of an equal opportunity to vindicate this federal constitutional right and pursue a federal remedy. Yet all federal prisoners should be entitled to the same protection under the United States Constitution-regardless of the type …

Isolated Confinement In Michigan: Mapping The Circles Of Hell, Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Streeter

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

For the past twelve months, there has been a burgeoning campaign to abolish, or greatly reduce, the use of segregated confinement in prisons. Advocates for the campaign call such classifications "solitary confinement" despite the fact that in some states, like New York, prisoners in these cells are often double-celled. The Michigan Department of Corrections, as well as other prison systems, uses labels such as "segregation," "special management," "special housing," and "observation" for these classifications. Prisoners ordinarily use traditional terms, such as "the hole." In this Essay we will refer to such restrictive classifications as "segregation" or "segregated confinement." Our perspective …

The Federal Bureau Of Prisons: Willfully Ignorant Or Maliciously Unlawful?, Deborah Golden

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Federal Bureau of Prisons ("BOP") and the larger U.S. government either purposely ignore the plight of men with serious mental illness in the federal prison system or maliciously act in violation of the law. I have no way of knowing which it is. In a complex system comprising many individual actors, motivations are most likely complex and contradictory. Either way, uncontrovertibly, the BOP and the U.S. government, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, continuously assert that there are no men with serious mental illnesses housed in the federal supermax prison, the Administrative Maximum facility in Florence, Colorado, also known …

Criminal Justice, Local Democracy, And Constitutional Rights, Stephen J. Schulhofer

Michigan Law Review

Universally admired, and viewed with great affection, even love, by all who knew him, Harvard law professor Bill Stuntz died in March 2011 at the age of fifty-two, after a long, courageous battle with debilitating back pain and then insurmountable cancer. In a career that deserved to be much longer, Stuntz produced dozens of major articles on criminal law and procedure. He was a leader in carrying forward the work of scholars who had analyzed criminal justice through the lens of economic analysis, and he added his own distinctive dimension by insisting on the importance of political incentives, with their …

Waylaid By A Metaphor: A Deeply Problematic Account Of Prison Growth, John F. Pfaff

Michigan Law Review

The incarceration rate in the United States has undergone an unprecedented surge since the 1970s. Between 1925 and 1975, the U.S. incarceration rate hovered around 100 per 100,000. Since then, that rate soared to 504 in 2009, dropping only slightly to 500 in 2010. In absolute numbers, the U.S. prison population grew from 241,000 in 1975 to 1.55 million in 2010. Not just exceptional by historical standards, this boom is unparalleled globally: the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Despite having just 5 percent of the world's population, it houses nearly 25 percent of the world's …

An Exploration Of Drug Trafficking Among Female Offenders In The Caribbean, Dianne Berger-Hill

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This thesis is an exploratory study examining drug trafficking among female offenders under the custodial care of the Trinidad and Tobago Prison Service. The female offenders were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide that inquired into how they were recruited, why they decided to traffic drugs, did they join in with friends, were family members or relatives involved in the activity, or did they initiate it on their own, and if their childhood experiences influenced them into getting involved with drug trafficking. Themes were identified during the course of the data analysis. More than half of the female offenders were …

A Phenomenological Exploration Of Black Male Law Enforcement Officers' Perspectives Of Racial Profiling And Their Law Enforcement Career Exploration And Commitment, Gregory A. Salters

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This phenomenological study explored Black male law enforcement officers’ perspectives of how racial profiling shaped their decisions to explore and commit to a law enforcement career. Criterion and snow ball sampling was used to obtain the 17 participants for this study. Super’s (1990) archway model was used as the theoretical framework. The archway model “is designed to bring out the segmented but unified and developmental nature of career development, to highlight the segments, and to make their origin clear” (Super, 1990, p. 201).

Interview data were analyzed using inductive, deductive, and comparative analyses. Three themes emerged from the inductive analysis …

Full Disclosure: Cognitive Science, Informants, And Search Warrant Scrutiny, Mary Bowman

Mary N. Bowman

Full Disclosure: Cognitive Science, Informants, and Search Warrant Scrutiny

By Mary Nicol Bowman

This article posits that cognitive biases play a significant role in the gap between the rhetoric regarding Fourth Amendment protection and actual practices regarding search warrant scrutiny, particularly for search warrants based on informants’ tips. Specifically, this article examines the ways in which implicit bias, tunnel vision, priming, and hindsight bias can affect search warrants. These biases can affect each stage of the search warrant process, including targeting decisions, the drafting process, the magistrate’s decision whether to grant the warrant, and post-search review by trial and appellate …

Incarceration American-Style, Sharon Dolovich

Sharon Dolovich

In the United States today, incarceration is more than just a mode of criminal punishment. It is a distinct cultural practice with its own aesthetic and technique, a practice that has emerged in recent decades as a catch-all mechanism for managing social ills. In this essay, I argue that this emergent carceral system has become self-generating—that American-style incarceration, through the conditions it inflicts, produces the very conduct society claims to abhor and thereby guarantees a steady supply of offenders whose incarceration the public will continue to demand. I argue, moreover, that this reproductive process works to create a class of …

Cruelty, Prison Conditions, And The Eighth Amendment, Sharon Dolovich

Sharon Dolovich

The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, but its normative force derives chiefly from its use of the word cruel. For this prohibition to be meaningful in a society where incarceration is the primary mode of criminal punishment, it is necessary to determine when prison conditions are cruel. Yet the Supreme Court has thus far avoided this question, instead holding in Farmer v. Brennan that unless some prison official actually knew of and disregarded a substantial risk of serious harm to prisoners, prison conditions are not “punishment” within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment. Farmer’s reasoning, however, does not …

Two Models Of The Prison: Accidental Humanity And Hypermasculinity In The L.A. County Jail, Sharon Dolovich

Sharon Dolovich

This Article considers what can be learned about humanizing the modern American prison from studying a small and unorthodox unit inside L.A. County’s Men’s Central Jail. This unit, known as K6G, has an inmate culture that contrasts dramatically with that of the Jail’s general population (GP) units. Most notably, whereas life in the Jail’s GP is governed by rules created and violently enforced by powerful inmate gangs, K6G is wholly free of gang politics and the threat of violence gang control brings. In addition, unlike residents of GP, who must take care in most instances to perform a hypermasculine identity …