Law Commons^™

Comparing The Violent Crime Trends In Select States To The National Trends To Determine Differences Between Crimes, States, And Regions, Alexandra N. Kremer

The Downtown Review

Violent crimes include crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and assault. The FBI in the UCR breaks these down into Type I, crimes against the person, and Type II, property crimes, offenses. The FBI also divides the country into four regions: West, South, Northeast, and Midwest. Each of these regions are examined, through the use of two states from each, here. Their overall violent crime rates and trends, and their specific Type I offensive rates and trends, are examined against the national data and against each other. Several theories are used to explain the potential causes of the differences in …

Ensuring Victims’ Rights And Inspiring Hope Through Community Collaboration, Evelyn Rodriguez Martinez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Numerous crime victims who qualify for Victim Witness Assistance Program services through the San Benito County District Attorney's office are not accessing the resources. Research done to support this project revealed that countless crime victims did not utilize the services offered by the program during the time of their victimization. The project conducted was an outreach presentation, which included all the services provided by the Victim Witness Assistance Program, victims’ legal rights, and the qualifications for the California Victim Compensation Board. The outreach presentation was developed to increase awareness of victims’ rights and the Victim Witness Assistance Program to community …

"When The President Does It": Why Congress Should Take The Lead In Investigations Of Executive Wrongdoing, Andrew B. Pardue

William & Mary Law Review

Asked by British journalist David Frost whether the President of the United States has the ability to authorize illegal acts when he believes such action is justified, Richard Nixon infamously replied: “Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” A majority of Americans disagreed with the former President’s assessment. But the question remains: If the President is theoretically capable of breaking the law while in office, what is the best way to determine whether a crime has actually been committed? This question has forced lawmakers to attempt to reconcile various investigatory mechanisms—all differing in their independence …

Is Emerging Adulthood Influencing Moffitt’S Developmental Taxonomy? Adding The “Prolonged” Adolescent Offender, Christopher Salvatore, Travis A. Taniguchi, Wayne Welsh

Christopher Salvatore

The study of offender trajectories has been a prolific area of criminological research. However, few studies have incorporated the influence of emerging adulthood, a recently identified stage of the life course, on offending trajectories. The present study addressed this shortcoming by introducing the "prolonged adolescent" offender, a low-level offender between the ages of 18 and 25 that has failed to successfully transition into adult social roles. A theoretical background based on prior research in life-course criminology and emerging adulthood is presented. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health analyses examined the relationship between indicators of traditional turning …

Law School News: Rwu Law Student Has Posted Over 100 Motivational Post-It Notes On Student Lockers 10-30-2019, Xaviea Brown

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Stranded Behind Bars: The Failure Of Retributive Justice (Research Materials), Holy Cross Libraries

Library Resources for Campus Events

A bibliography of resources available through the Holy Cross Libraries which provide additional information related to "Stranded Behind Bars: The Failure of Retributive Justice," a lecture by Erin Kelly, professor of philosophy at Tufts University and author of “The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility” (Harvard University Press, 2018), who explains how retributive justice exaggerates the moral meaning of criminal guilt, normalizes excessive punishment, and distracts from shared responsibility for social injustice.

The lecture was sponsored by the Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J. Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture, and was held at the College of the Holy Cross …

Bitcoin: Order Without Law In The Digital Age, John O. Mcginnis, Kyle Roche

Indiana Law Journal

Modern law makes currency a creature of the state and ultimately the value of its currency depends on the public’s trust in that state. While some nations are more capable than others at instilling public trust in the stability of their monetary institutions, it is nonetheless impossible for any legal system to make the pre-commitments necessary to completely isolate the governance of its money supply from political pressure. This proposition is true not only today, where nearly all government institutions manage their money supply in the form of central banking, but also true of past private banking regimes circulating their …

Do Criminal Minds Cause Crime? Neuroscience And The Physicalism Dilemma, John A. Humbach

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The idea that mental states cause actions is a basic premise of criminal law. Blame and responsibility presuppose that criminal acts are products of the defendant's mind. Yet, the assumption that mental causation exists is at odds with physicalism, the widely shared worldview that “everything is physical.” Outside of law, there is probably no field of secular study in which one can seriously assert that unseen nonmaterial forces can cause physical events. But if physicalism is true then a fundamental premise of modern criminal justice must be false, namely, that criminals deserve punishment because their crimes are the products of …

Protecting The Expecting: A Proposal To Include Pregnancy As An Aggravating Circumstance, Nicole Atlak

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

This Note brings attention to the New York Legislature’s failure to consider the unique vulnerability and harms of pregnant victims of domestic violence and proposes a statutory amendment. This Note proposes that Section 827(a)(vii) of New York’s Family Court Act be amended to include an additional aggravating circumstance with language to the effect of “any physical injury or psychological, emotional or sexual abuse to a pregnant woman.” This addition is necessary to ensure the list of aggravating circumstances is thorough, and more complete in encompassing all serious and heinous domestic abuse.

Part II of this Note will offer a …

Contempt Of Congress, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

No abstract provided.

The Transnational Legal Ordering Of The Death Penalty, Stefanie Neumeier, Wayne Sandholtz

UC Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law

A transnational legal order (TLO) authoritatively shapes “the

understanding and practice of law” in a specific area of social activity,

involving both state and civil society actors, and linking national, regional,

and international levels. We argue that a TLO has emerged and settled

since 1945 around capital punishment. Our analysis of the death penalty

TLO treats “bottom-up” and “top-down” effects as interconnected,

addresses the creation of legal order at both national and international levels,

and emphasizes the recursivity linking developments at both levels. We trace

the development of death penalty abolition from its origins in the immediate

aftermath of World …

De-Policing, Stephen Rushin, Griffin Sims Edwards

Stephen Rushin

Critics have long claimed that when the law regulates police behavior it inadvertently reduces officer aggressiveness, thereby increasing crime. This hypothesis has taken on new significance in recent years as prominent politicians and law enforcement leaders have argued that increased oversight of police officers in the wake of the events in Ferguson, Missouri has led to an increase in national crime rates. Using a panel of American law enforcement agencies and difference-in-difference regression analyses, this Article tests whether the introduction of public scrutiny or external regulation is associated with changes in crime rates. To do this, this Article relies on …

Legal Instruments Of State Practice And International Initiatives Undertaken To Fight Corruption In The Banking And Financial Sector, N. D. Nodirxonova

International Relations: Politics, Economics, Law

In this article we analyze the legal aspects of leading international experience in countering corruption in bank and financial sectors. It must be noted that these issues have gained even more importance given the universal character of corruption related criminal activities. The trans-boundary character of this kind of crimes makes it significant to properly study and learn foreign expertise in the sphere. Having analyzed experience of various countries we have come up with relevant conclusions, regarding institutional base, legal tools, involvement of civil society actors, significance of transparency and etc.

Machine Learning With Multi-Class Regression And Neural Networks: Analysis And Visualization Of Crime Data In Seattle, Erkin David George

Honors Projects

This article examines the implications of machine learning algorithms and models, and the significance of their construction when investigating criminal data. It uses machine learning models and tools to store, clean and analyze data that is fed into a machine learning model. This model is then compared to another model to test for accuracy, biases and patterns that are detected in between the experiments. The data was collected from data.seattle.gov and was published by the City of Seattle Data Portal and was accessed on September 17, 2018. This research will be looking into how machine learning models can be used …

Dividing Bail Reform, Shima Baughman

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

There are few issues in criminal law with greater momentum than bail reform. In the last three years, states have passed hundreds of new pretrial release laws, and there are now over 200 bills pending throughout the states. These efforts are rooted in important concerns: Bail reform lies at the heart of broader recent debates about equitable treatment in the criminal justice system. Done right, bail keeps dangerous individuals off the streets; done wrong, it keeps those with less economic means in jail longer. Some jurisdictions are eliminating money bail. Others are adopting risk assessments to determine who to release. …

Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime Redux: Charging Trends, Aggravating Factors, And Individual Outcome Data For 2005-2014, David M. Uhlmann

Law & Economics Working Papers

In a 2014 article entitled “Prosecutorial Discretion and Environmental Crime,” I presented empirical data developed by student researchers participating in the Environmental Crimes Project at the University of Michigan Law School. My 2014 article reported that 96 percent of defendants investigated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and charged with federal environmental crimes from 2005 through 2010 engaged in conduct that involved at least one of the aggravating factors identified in my previous scholarship, namely significant harm, deceptive or misleading conduct, operating outside the regulatory system, and repetitive violations. On that basis, I concluded that prosecutors charged violations that …

Law, Responsibility, And The Brain, Owen D. Jones, Hakwan C. Lau, Dean Mobbs, Christopher D. Frith

Owen Jones

This article addresses new developments in neuroscience, and their implications for law. It explores, for example, the relationships between brain injury and violence, as well as the connections between mental disorders and criminal behaviors. It discusses a variety of issues surrounding brain fingerprinting, the use of brain scans for lie detection, and concerns about free will. It considers the possible uses for, and legal implications of, brain-imaging technology. And it also identifies six essential limits on the use of brain imaging in courtroom procedures.

Intuitions Of Punishment, Owen D. Jones, Robert Kurzban

Owen Jones

Recent work reveals, contrary to wide-spread assumptions, remarkably high levels of agreement about how to rank order, by blameworthiness, wrongs that involve physical harms, takings of property, or deception in exchanges. In The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=952726) we proposed a new explanation for these unexpectedly high levels of agreement.

Elsewhere in this issue, Professors Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman offer a critique of our views, to which we reply here. Our reply clarifies a number of important issues, such as the interconnected roles that culture, variation, and evolutionary processes play in generating intuitions of punishment.

Behavioral Genetics And Crime, In Context, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

This Article provides an introduction to some of the key issues at the intersection of behavioral genetics and crime.

It provides, among other things, an overview of the emerging points of consensus, scientifically, on what behavioral genetics can and cannot tell us about criminal behavior. It also discusses a variety of important implications (as well as complexities) of attempting to use insights of behavioral genetics in legal contexts.

The 16th Annual Diversity Symposium Dinner, April 4, 2019, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Crime And Punishment In Gold Country : A Historical Case-Study, Shih-Chun Steven Chien, Lawrence M. Friedman

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Rural life, small town life, is not and has never been idyllic. It has always had its share of pathology, sometimes deep pathology. Small town life is not necessarily traditional life, close-knit family life, neighborly life. That kind of life certainly exists; but America was never a traditional society in that sense. Its small towns were full of strangers. The population of El Dorado County, small as it was, had been growing rapidly. Like America in general, El Dorado County had its share of anomie; rootless men (and women), without strong relationships: ships without anchors, driftwood on the sea of …

The Influence Of Religion On The Criminal Behavior Of Emerging Adults, Christopher Salvatore, Gabriel Rubin

Gabriel Rubin

Recent generations of young adults are experiencing a new life course stage: emerging adulthood. During this ‘new’ stage of the life course, traditional social bonds and turning points may not be present, may be delayed, or may not operate in the same manner as they have for prior generations. One such bond, religion, is examined here. Focusing on the United States, emerging adulthood is investigated as a distinct stage of the life course. The criminality of emerging adults is presented, a theoretical examination of the relationship between religion and crime is provided, the role of religion in emerging adults’ lives …

Nowhere To Run, Nowhere To Hide.* Applying The Fourth Amendment To Connected Cars In The Internet-Of-Things Era, Gregory C. Brown, Jr.

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Part I of this Note will briefly discuss the key components of a Connected Car, identify who collects the data from the Car, and examine the various uses for the data. Part I also explores whether Car owners consent to the collection of their Car’s data. Part II-A will trace the historical development of the automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment, which generally permits law-enforcement officers to conduct a warrantless search of a vehicle. Part II-B will discuss how the Supreme Court has applied the Fourth Amendment to pre-Internet technologies. Part II-C will discuss two recent Fourth Amendment Supreme …

Law Library Blog (March 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Protecting Due Process During Terrorism Adjudications: Redefining "Crimes Against Humanity" And Eliminating The Doctrine Of Complimentary Jurisdiction In Favor Of The International Criminal Court, Daniel N. Clay

Arkansas Law Review

“When we sit in judgment we are holding ourselves out as people—as the kind of a community—that are worthy of this task. It is the seriousness, the gravity, of the act of judgment which gives rise to our legitimate and laudable emphasis on procedural fairness and substantive accuracy in criminal procedure. But these things focus on the defendant—the one judged. I am concerned about us who would presume to sit in judgment. Who are we that we should do this? Whether we intend to do so or not, we answer this question in part through the way we conduct our …

The Thirteenth Amendment, Prison Labor Wages, And Interrupting The Intergenerational Cycle Of Subjugation, Josh Halladay

Seattle University Law Review

This Comment argues that meager or no compensation for prisoners, who are disproportionately black and other persons of color, entraps them and their children in a cycle of subjugation that dates back to the days of slavery, and this Comment proposes to interrupt this cycle by setting a minimum wage for prisoners and creating college savings accounts for their children. As part of the cycle, when people enter prisons and the doors behind them close, so do their families’ bank accounts and the doors to their children’s schools. At the same time, the cells next to them open, ready to …

Safe Streets, Inc. : The 'Hustle' To End Black Gang Violence In Philadelphia, 1969-1976, Menika Dirkson

Arlen Specter Center Research Fellowship

From 1962 to 1968, gang stabbings and murders in Philadelphia drastically increased, inspiring Philadelphia District Attorney Arlen Specter (from 1965-1973) to establish Safe Streets, Inc. in August 1969 as a non-profit, anti-gang program designed to reduce gang violence, end turf wars between rival gangs, and provide social services like job training and academic tutoring to juveniles. Since the program came into existence amidst the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968), numerous cases of police brutality, and over 200 race riots in post-industrial cities, the yearly Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) grant from the federal government offered to cities under the Omnibus Crime …

‘It’S Kinda Punishment’: Tandem Logics And Penultimate Power In The Penal Voluntary Sector For Canadian Youth, Abigail Salole

Publications and Scholarship

This paper draws on original empirical research in Ontario, Canada which analyses penal voluntary sector practice with youth in conflict with the law. I illustrate how youth penal voluntary sector practice (YPVS) operates alongside, or in tandem with the statutory criminal justice system. I argue that examining the PVS and the statutory criminal justice system simultaneously, or in tandem, provides fuller understandings of PVS inclusionary (and exclusionary) control practices (Tomczak and Thompson 2017). I introduce the concept of penultimate power, which demonstrates the ability of PVS workers to trigger criminal justice system response toward a young person in conflict …

Social Media Crime In Canada: Annotated Criminal Code, R.S.C., 1985, C. C-46, 2nd Ed., Benjamin Perrin

All Faculty Publications

Over 80% of Canadians use the Internet and approximately 20 million Canadians are active on social media networks. It is not surprising that criminal activity is taking place in these global digital communities and this is raising challenges for criminal law and the criminal justice system. The Supreme Court of Canada recently recognized in R. v. K.R.J. that “[t]he rate of technological change over the past decade has fundamentally altered the social context” in which certain crimes are occurring and social media networks have given “unprecedented access to potential victims and avenues” for offending.

This annotated Criminal Code aims to …

Decarceration’S Blindspots, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

For over a decade, my research has focused on trying to answer one simple question: how did the United States, home to about 5% of the world’s population, come to house nearly 25% of its prisoners?1 We were not always the world’s largest jailer; as recently as the 1970s, our incarceration rate was largely indistinguishable from those in other liberal democracies. Yet starting in the mid-1970s, as Figure 1 shows, that rate started to slowly—but steadily and relentlessly—grow, until by the late 2000s it rivaled and then surpassed even the rates seen in autocratic countries like Cuba and Belarus and …