Law Commons^™

Camera-Enforced Streets: Creating An Anti-Racist System Of Traffic Enforcement, Katie O'Brien

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

On July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland was pulled over while driving in Prairie View, Texas, for failure to signal a lane change after moving to allow a trooper’s vehicle to pass her car. As the stop progressed, the trooper ordered Bland to get out of her car. When she refused, the trooper threatened to “yank [Bland] out” of her car and “light [her] up” with his taser. After Bland left her vehicle, Trooper Encinia handcuffed her, wrestled her to the ground, and kneeled on her. He later falsely claimed that Bland assaulted him. Three days later, police found Bland …

Falling Away Into Disease: Disability-Deviance Narratives In American Crime Control, Matt Saleh

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Who in society is predisposed to crime? Many of us are familiar with cultural narratives that trace criminal behavior to some cognitive defect in the perpetrator. For instance, we might recall the persistent media allusions to Adam Lanza’s Asperger Syndrome after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, despite evidence that individuals on the autism spectrum are, on average, not more likely, and are quite possibly less likely, to commit serious crime in their lifetime. Similarly, popular narratives about the relationship between “mental illness” and violence are pervasive, despite the broad meaning of the terminology and a deeply-misunderstood …

Race, Class, And Second Chances: The Impact Of Multiple Identities On Reentry And Reintegration, S. David Mitchell

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Race, class, and other identities directly impact the process of reentry and the successful reintegration back into society for individuals who have had prior involvement in the criminal justice system. Collectively, persons convicted of a crime face numerous legal barriers that interfere with or prevent successful reentry and reintegration back into society, such as being prevented from securing housing and obtaining employment among other collateral consequences. For many, the process of reentry and reintegration is made even more difficult because of prior discriminatory policies and practices that were based solely on demographic factors, some of which are innate or …

You Have The Right To Remain Powerless: Deprivation Of Agency By Law Enforcement And The Legal And Carceral Systems, Marco Maldonado, Michael Onah, Jennifer Merrigan

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The charges against Philadelphia Police Officer Phillip Nordo read like an episode of The Shield. The grand jury presentment, should you have the stomach for it, is closer to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. For over twenty years, Officer Nordo groomed, sexually assaulted, and used crime reward funds to pay off vulnerable men in Philadelphia. Whether in his transport van, prison visiting rooms, or police interrogation rooms, he regularly exploited his unfettered access to and absolute control over vulnerable individuals. Though he was not convicted until 2022, the communities he stalked and preyed upon knew exactly …

Categorically Caged: The Case For Extending Early Release Eligibility To Inmates With Violent Offense Convictions, Jenna M. Codignotto

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Susan Farrell faced both physical and sexual abuse from her husband before he was killed in 1989. Although Ms. Farrell maintained her innocence and urged that it was her son who killed her husband, she was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy charges, resulting in a life sentence without parole. After serving thirty years of her sentence at the Michigan Department of Corrections, Ms. Farrell’s tragic life met a no less tragic end. In April 2020, one month after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Ms. Farrell seized in her cell for forty-five minutes before dying from the virus. She …

Save A Friend's Life Or Risk Your Freedom: The Dilemma Too Many People Face When Witnessing An Overdose, Jennie M. Miller

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

You are a Chicago, Illinois resident, walking your dog when you trip over a crack in the pavement and break your arm. You need surgery. After surgery, your doctor gives you a one-month prescription of opioids. Just one little pill has the ability to make all of your pain magically disappear and allow you to function as though you had never even fallen. Near the end of your limited prescription, the pain fails to disappear as easily, and the high does not last quite as long as it once did. There are zero refills remaining. Suddenly, you find yourself …

Righting The Wrongfully Convicted: How Kansas's New Exoneree Compensation Statute Sets A Standard For The United States, Scott Connolly

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Part I of this Note will document the increasing prevalence of exonerations and provide a perspective on how significantly the landscape of postconviction justice has developed since the late 1980s. Such developments include DNA testing, greater awareness of false confessions, and a more thorough understanding of the unreliability of eyewitnesses. Part II will demonstrate the devastating impact that wrongful imprisonment has on exonerees. Finally, Part III of this Note will provide a snapshot of the current landscape of exoneree compensation laws. It will highlight the fact that many of the laws that exist do not provide sufficient resources and …

Stingray Cell-Site Simulator Surveillance And The Fourth Amendment In The Twenty-First Century: A Review Of The Fourth Amendment In An Age Of Surveillance, And Unwarranted, Harvey Gee

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Review discusses two timely and insightful books examining the changing relationship between privacy and the Fourth Amendment in the digital era. Part I discusses the tensions between the need to protect privacy rights and the slowly evolving legal landscape during a time of rapidly changing technology, to introduce David Gray’s The Fourth Amendment in an Age of Surveillance. His book explains how the Fourth Amendment, though embattled, can have a prominent role in twenty-first century discussions of privacy, technology, and surveillance. Gray’s analysis is engaged to broaden the conversation about Stingray technology. This section analyzes a sampling of …

To Knock Or Not To Knock? No-Knock Warrants And Confrontational Policing, Brian Dolan

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Note proceeds in three parts. Part I begins by explaining what no-knock warrants are and why they are used. Part I then addresses recent state legislative efforts to reform no-knock warrant use and argues that these efforts, however well-intentioned, are insufficient. Part I will also provide a brief history of how no-knock warrant use developed and gives an overview of the current status of state law regarding no-knock warrants. Part II argues that, contrary to the arguments of no-knock proponents, elimination of no-knock warrants and strict adherence to the knock-and-announce requirement is a more effective way to ensure …

Locked Up, Shut Up: Why Speech In Prison Matters, Evan Bianchi, David Shapiro

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Article proceeds in three Parts. Part I describes the deferential Turner standard that governs First Amendment claims brought by prisoners. Virtually every word uttered or written to a prisoner and virtually every word uttered or written by a prisoner receives extremely limited legal protection. Largely as a result of this legal regime, senseless censorship is all too common in American prisons. Jailers and prison officials seem to have received the message that they can ban speech with impunity.

Part II argues that the combination of Turner deference and mass incarceration divests prisoners of expressive power, thereby distorting public …

Searching For The Parental Causes Of The School-To-Prison Pipeline Problem: A Critical, Conceptual Essay, Reginald Leamon Robinson

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Abstract)

In this critical, conceptual essay, the author argues that the School-to-Prison Pipeline (“STPP”) simply does not exist. Long before Columbine and the enactment of zero tolerance, caregivers have been wrongly harming their children, something causing them toxic stress that triggers their stress-response system, and making it nigh impossible for children easily ensnared by suspensions, expulsions, referrals to alternative schools, and SRO arrests to have the best developmental start and cognitive abilities to succeed in public schools. Further, teachers and administrators who are pressured to report great educational metrics, and for their own childhood reasons have a near inflexible need …

Examining The School-To-Prison Pipeline: Sending Students To Prison Instead Of School, Fatema Ghasletwala

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Juvenile delinquents are often thought of as intrinsically evil. These youths are blamed for their own plight, believed to be a result of innate character flaws. However, such an obtuse perception is problematic. In many cases, these juvenile delinquents were made delinquents by a faulty system, namely, the School-to-Prison Pipeline. The School-to-Prison Pipeline is a troubling phenomenon in which students are suspended, expelled or even arrested for minor offenses instead of being sent simply to an administrator’s office. Often, these students have backgrounds of poverty, abuse, neglect, and may even have learning disabilities. Instead of being offered counseling, “unruly” …

Incarcerating The Accused: Reforming Bail For The Pretrial Detention Of Juveniles And Youths Aged Eighteen To Twenty-One, Leigha A. Weiss

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

This note addresses the injustice of pretrial detention on juveniles, minors, and youths aged eighteen to twenty-one, in New York State. This note will address juveniles, aged eighteen to twenty-one, who are subject to criminal proceedings in adult criminal court and incarceration in adult criminal facilities as well as juveniles or minors below the age of criminal responsibility who are subject to juvenile delinquency proceedings and incarceration in juvenile detention facilities. So many youths are in unnecessary detentions under horrific conditions in adults and juvenile correctional facilities across the country. Serious bail reform is long overdue to provide humane …

Fragmenting The Community: Immigration Enforcement And The Unintended Consequences Of Local Police Non-Cooperation Policies, Natashia Tidwell

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Part I traces the historical roots of the relationship between local police and federal immigration authorities, beginning with the changes in enforcement strategy precipitated by the September 11, 2001 attacks and leading up to the launch of S-Comm. The federal government's increased reliance on local police to supplement its internal enforcement efforts has raised several Tenth Amendment concerns as the states struggle to define the proper scope of their "inherent authority" to act in immigration matters, with officials in some so-called sanctuary cities insisting that their inherent authority to enforce federal immigration law is commensurate with the sovereign right …

Against Theories Of Punishment: The Thought Of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This paper reflects critically on what is the near-universal contemporary method of conceptualizing the tasks of the scholar of criminal punishment. It does so by the unusual route of considering the thought of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a towering figure in English law and political theory, one of its foremost historians of criminal law, and a prominent public intellectual of the late Victorian period. Notwithstanding Stephen's stature, there has as yet been no sustained effort to understand his views of criminal punishment. This article attempts to remedy this deficit. But its aims are not exclusively historical. Indeed, understanding Stephen's ideas …

Dispute Resolution Lessons Gleaned From The Arrest Of Professor Gates And "The Beer Summit", Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

America's fantasy of a post-racial society was shattered on July 16,2009, when a white police officer arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, a well-respected African-American academic, in his own home. Our historical racial fissure was widened. Once again, our thoughts were plagued with tortured images of our system of racialized law enforcement: the torture of Abner Louima, the beating of Rodney King, the killing of Amadou Diallo. Predictably, Americans became further polarized, as they simultaneously blamed and defended responses to racism.

In what was perceived by some as a dramatic and unanticipated turn of events, and perceived by others as …

The New Religious Prisons And Their Retributivist Commitments, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The rise of the religious, or "faith-based," prison at the turn of the twenty-first century bears witness to the remarkable resilience of religion in shaping the philosophy of punishment. In the last decade, prisons that incorporate religion in various ways have sprouted around the country and there are some indications, though preliminary, inconclusive, and hotly contested, that inmates who participate in religious instruction and “programming” recidivate at lower rates than those who do not. The early success of these programs (and, some say, the preferential treatment accorded to participants in them) has resulted in high demand and long waiting lists. …

The Challenge Of Motive In The Criminal Law, Elaine M. Chiu

Faculty Publications

The purchase of illegal drugs by an undercover police officer is commonly known as a “buy and bust” operation. In the twenty-first century, the stakes in the longstanding war on drugs are high as law enforcement and national security agencies join forces to confront the disturbing ties between terrorism and illegal narcotics. In addition to being a weapon in the arsenal of law enforcement, the buy and bust operation also tells an interesting story about motive in the criminal law. This article uses the simple street sale to demonstrate how the criminal law suffers from its ambivalent attitude towards the …