Law Commons^™

Reckless Accomplices, Ben A. Mcjunkin

Northwestern University Law Review

In recent years, criminal prosecutors have pursued homicide charges against the parents of teenaged school shooters. Two high-profile cases—one from Michigan and one from Georgia—provide paradigmatic examples. In each case, the parents provided their children with weapons and ammunition despite obvious signs of each child’s dangerousness and instability. Criminal liability for such reckless conduct is appropriate. But homicide charges are not. This Article critiques this new trend in prosecutions as distorting the substantive criminal law to obtain an outcome that is otherwise unavailable without criminal code reform.

It is a long-held criminal law tenet that intentional wrongful conduct by one …

More Than A Call: Why The Martha Wright-Reed Act Falls Short In Reforming Prison Communication, Carrington Wilkes

Georgia Criminal Law Review

In response to widespread criticism of exploitative prison communication costs, Congress enacted the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022 (the “Act”). This legislation tasked the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) with establishing fair rates for phone and video calls made by inmates in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers. While the Act marks a critical step in reducing financial burdens on incarcerated individuals and their families, it does not cover other widely used communication methods, such as electronic messaging, emails, and tablet-based platforms. These newer services remain largely unregulated, enabling private companies to impose excessive fees due to …

Manipulation Leading To Criminalization: The Need To Expand Georgia’S Survivors First Act, Taylor Hoying

Georgia Criminal Law Review

Nicole was seventeen when she met Juan, and they began a romantic relationship. “He was gorgeous and he had charm. I just wanted someone in my life to show me attention . . . .” He suggested that she start seeing other dates for money and sent her out onto the streets. Seven months later, when Nicole was raped by a john, Juan beat her, pepper-sprayed her, and put her in a cold shower for three and a half hours. If Nicole had been told to see another john the next day and was arrested for prostitution, would the arrest …

Sit, Stay, Overturn: How New Canine Science Is Challenging Courtroom Convictions, Kerolls Gadelrab

Georgia Criminal Law Review

Courts increasingly rely on cadaver dog evidence in criminal trials, treating canine alerts as a reliable form of forensic evidence. This naive acceptance of cadaver dog evidence, coupled with courts’ continued application of out-dated admissibility standards, threatens to perpetuate wrongful convictions in an era of rapidly advancing scientific understanding. This Article argues that courts must develop a new framework for evaluating cadaver dog evidence that incorporates modern scientific research on ca-nine olfaction and scent detection capabilities. While scholars have extensively analyzed various forensic evidence standards post-Daubert, the literature has largely over-looked how recent scientific advances in understanding ca-nine olfaction should …

Officer-Created Jeopardy In Corrections: Rethinking Use-Of-Force Review After Barnes V. Felix, Dr. Hayden Smith

Georgia Criminal Law Review

Courts typically evaluate correctional uses of force by zooming in on the last seconds before impact, asking what an officer reasonably perceived at the “moment of threat.” That frame obscures a basic feature of jail and prison operations: officers’ pre-force tactical choices often create or sharply heighten the risks that force is later used to manage. Building on Barnes v. Felix’s rejection of a rigid moment-of-threat rule and the broader state-created-danger line, this Article argues that officer-created jeopardy should be treated as a central component of constitutional and institutional review in corrections. It shows how Barnes, read alongside DeShaney, Kingsley, …

Deepfakes, Deep Trouble: Navigating Legal Boundaries For Child Pornography Prosecution In The Age Of Ai, Alexandra Hoffman

Georgia Criminal Law Review

This Comment explores the evolving legal landscape of child pornography law as it pertains to “nudify” apps and other AI-generated content. It examines foundational cases in child pornography law that allowed child pornography materials to bypass First Amendment constraints, the “lascivious exhibition” standard, and recent precedents allowing courts to prosecute morphed images. This Comment analyzes the viability of prosecuting “nudify” images, arguing that a holistic approach focusing on the child’s overall harm is the best analytical framework rather than one that solely focuses on the sexual nature of the image. In doing so, it emphasizes that the identifiability of the …

The Legal Status Of Civil Servants In Criminal And Private Law, Mohamed El Kichbor

Revue Marocaine de Droit, d'Economie et de Gestion (Moroccan Journal of Law, Economics and Management)

This contribution examines the legal status of civil servants in Morocco under criminal and private law. The author reflects on the thirtieth anniversary of the Public Service Act, enacted by Dahir of February 24, 1958. This statute represented a milestone in consolidating Morocco's sovereignty and reinforcing its political independence following 1954. It established a legal framework governing the relationship between the newly established Moroccan administration and its civil servants, who replaced French protectorate officials. The Public Service Act is a cornerstone of Moroccan administrative law, regulating relations between public authorities and employees working to serve the public interest and manage …

Betschart V. Oregon: A Seven-Day Standard For Maine, Henry Gates

Maine Law Review

Maine lacks a clear standard for ensuring the right to counsel for indigent defendants. The State’s public defense system is struggling to meet Maine’s constitutional mandate: To provide indigent defense services in rural areas and across the state. An aging bar with few new attorneys working in rural areas—where there are often higher relative prosecution rates and a corresponding increased need for legal services—is contributing to the problem. This has resulted in a legal system that negatively impacts rural communities and indigent defendants to the point that one court concluded the state is violating the Sixth Amendment. Following the Ninth …

The Death Penalty Between Its Supporters And Opponents, Ihssan Hindi

Revue Marocaine de Droit, d'Economie et de Gestion (Moroccan Journal of Law, Economics and Management)

This article examines the controversy surrounding the death penalty by presenting the main arguments advanced by both its supporters and opponents. It situates capital punishment within the history of penal sanctions and discusses its legal, moral, religious, and social justifications. The article analyzes the four traditional objectives invoked in favor of the death penalty—expiation, deterrence, retribution, and social protection—while also considering abolitionist arguments based on human dignity, judicial error, the evolution of penal policy, and the limits of state power. It offers a balanced legal reflection on whether the death penalty can still be justified in modern criminal justice systems.

Cardozo Law Announces Three New Faculty Appointments, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Archive

Cardozo School of Law announced the appointments of three new faculty members: Assistant Professor of Law Mridula Raman, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Civil Rights Clinic Stefen R. Short, and Harold A. Stevens Visiting Assistant Professor of Law Fregine Sheehy. Their expertise spans criminal law, civil rights, disability justice, critical race theory, evidence, and human rights law.

Revocation Reconsidered: Probation Advocacy Through A Litigation Lens, Shira M. Diner

Faculty Scholarship

Being found in violation of probation has dire consequences. The person found in violation can be imprisoned, upending them from their job, family, and community. Unlike incarceration after a criminal trial, a sentence after a violation of probation is not the result of a legal process characterized by robust due process protections. It is also often not the result of a forceful and thorough defense. It is instead the consequence of a hearing where lawyers with the fixed mindset of an inevitable finding of a violation don’t engage in the same preparation that they would if it was a trial. …

Aquinas, Wilson, And Continuity On Crime And Punishment, Brian M. Murray

Catholic University Law Review

This Article compares the legal thought of James Wilson, a leading jurisprudential figure during the American Founding, and Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the most well-known medieval philosopher, on crime and punishment. It argues their theories are closer than the historical gulf between them suggests would be the case. Both limit the definition of crime to morally culpable acts involving public harm. Each considers redressing the public disorder crime causes as the primary justification for punishment. While Wilson defers to the English common law to emphasize protecting certain natural rights and to prevent crime, Aquinas points to his understanding of natural law …

Glossip’S Road Map To Nowhere, Vida Johnson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Glossip v. Oklahoma was heralded as a victory for the defense. This essay argues that the 2025 Glossip decision does little to fix the myriad problems that led to Mr. Glossip’s wrongful conviction. While ultimately the Supreme Court reached the correct outcome this time, the ordinary judicial process and its purported safeguards were not what saved Mr. Glossip’s life. Rather, it was random chance that came to Mr. Glossip’s aid.

Ten years earlier, the Supreme Court, with many of the same Justices on the bench now, paved the way for Mr. Glossip’s execution. The …

Verdict Format On Trial: Experimental Tests Of The Criminal Law’S Orthodoxy, Avani Mehta Sood

Vanderbilt Law Review

For centuries, American criminal courts have overwhelmingly favored “general” verdicts over “special” verdicts, without giving the latter a fair trial. A general verdict requires criminal jurors to deliver only an ultimate judgment of “guilty” or “not guilty” on a charged offense. In contrast, a special verdict would require jurors to answer a sequence of questions about whether each legal element of the charged offense has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt before they deliver a final judgment. The criminal law’s conventional wisdom holds that special verdicts will disadvantage defendants by constraining jurors’ latitude to temper or nullify the law, thereby …

Weaponized Bureaucracy At The Criminal Immigration Divide, Dorien Ediger-Seto

Washington Law Review

Despite deportation being entrenched as a civil consequence rather than a punishment over 100 years ago, today’s immigration enforcement and deportation scheme relies heavily on state-level criminal arrests, convictions, and data sharing systems. And immigration-based crimes have accounted for between twenty-five and fifty percent of all federal criminal charges over the past decade. But the fact that the systems are bureaucratically and doctrinally separate from each other has practical impacts that go beyond these formalized intersections. Not only do federal law enforcement actors often have dual mandates to investigate and prosecute federal crimes alongside related civil removal cases, but criminal …

Every Road You Take: Where Federal Doctrine Stalls, State Law Can Pick Up In The Fight Over Persistent Surveillance, David A. Lord

Hofstra Law Review

In recent years, automated license plate reader (“ALPR”) systems have transformed criminal investigation by providing law enforcement with extensive information about suspects’ movements. Prosecutors have defended this practice as firmly grounded in the Supreme Court’s traditional Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Privacy advocates have responded by arguing that certain Supreme Court cases dealing with new technology show an emerging interest in modifying those doctrines to enhance individual liberty. But to date, with a few isolated exceptions, both state and federal courts have declined to require law enforcement to obtain search warrants before using evidence from ALPRs. This Article explores ALPR evidence in …

Beyond Redemption?: Examining The Sixth Circuit’S Dangerousness Approach For As-Applied Challenges To The Felon-In-Possession Ban, Jack Baker

Vanderbilt Law Review

The federal felon-in-possession statute permanently bans felons from possessing firearms, regardless of the severity of the predicate felony conviction. Both a murder conviction and a mail-fraud conviction equally satisfy the statute's elements. Critics thus argue that the statute is too expansive. Despite the criticism, the felon-in-possession ban has generally survived Second Amendment challenges. But the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen opened a new angle for constitutional challenges to the felon-in-possession ban. In Bruen, the Supreme Court established a history-and-tradition test for Second Amendment cases. Courts must now find historically analogous gun …

Evidence And Assessing Verbatim Transcription Quality Of Black English And Standard American English, L. Alexander Walker Iii

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores the accuracy of private transcription services when transcribing Black English and Standard American English. Courts and lawyers in the US regularly rely on transcripts from such services, but third-party verification of their accuracy, especially with respect to their quality when faced with nonstandard language varieties, is lacking. This study draws on experimental methods to contrast the quality of transcription services offered by transcribers and AI route. The quantitative results show that transcription by humans and AI resulted in more mistakes when transcribing Black English than when transcribing Standard American English. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis reveals that these …

Proportionality And Theft, Christopher T. Wonnell

San Diego Law Review

Criminal law can serve a variety of utilitarian purposes including deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.  Nevertheless, there is broad agreement among criminal justice scholars that the pursuit of these purposes should be constrained by a requirement that punishment not be disproportionately severe relative to the offense charged.  The proportionality constraint is likely to be especially important when considering the less heinous predatory crimes such as nonviolent thefts.  Recent years have seen experiments by progressive prosecutors who deemphasize theft offenses as well as statutory schemes that treat many thefts as misdemeanors.  With some empirical support, critics charge that these experiments have increased …

Passive Choice And The Fourth Amendment, A. Shea Daley Burdette

San Diego Law Review

Does the Constitution allow waiver of Fourth Amendment rights through passive choice? What about through the choice of others? Based on current Supreme Court precedent, the answer is frustratingly unclear. For example, a copious amount of information is constantly disclosed to phone companies. The Supreme Court has recognized that having a cell phone is an inescapable choice today and that disclosing one’s location information to the cell phone company is automatic in nature. Each fact is considered relevant to determining whether an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information disclosed to third parties—which then affects whether the …

Criminal Caselaw Notebook 2026, Hon. Ronald Kessler

Washington State Books

This publication from King County Superior Court judge Ronald Kessler is updated semi-annually and is distributed free of charge. It includes citations to Washington state case law on a variety of criminal law topics.

Interrogating The Facts Of The Case, Anna Roberts

Indiana Law Journal

Buried within many criminal judicial opinions is the origin of their “facts”—the interrogation room. Criminal law pedagogy should expose this origin. If we treat the alleged product of interrogation as “what happened,” as criminal cases (and professors) sometimes do, we obscure the ways in which interrogators are trained to incriminate and to co-create confessions. We also risk obscuring subsequent layers of reporting by police, prosecutors, or judges.

Recent scholarly literature urges criminal law professors to teach differently, warning that we distort, sanitize, and bolster the carceral state when we erase governmental agents and bypass procedure. Treating the “facts of the …

Restorative Restitution, Lula Hagos

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

How to best meet the needs of crime victims while also furthering the imperative of decarceration has long vexed advocates and scholars alike. This dilemma comes into sharp focus when one examines two developments in criminal procedure that, until now, have been analyzed separately: victim restitution and restorative justice.

Criminal restitution, the monetary payments ordered from defendants to victims, often fails both groups. Because most defendants are indigent, restitution obligations lengthen defendants’ involvement with the criminal legal system without delivering meaningful compensation to victims, making restitution more symbolic than restorative. At the same time, interest in restorative justice has surged …

A Terrorist In Death Only: How The Death Penalty Fills The Gap In Federal Terrorism Law, Caroline Alden Mcbride

Law Student Publications

In the absence of a federal statute criminalizing domestic terrorism, the United States turned to an unlikely proxy: the death penalty. This Comment argues that capital punishment is used to define domestic terrorism, particularly when statutory tools cannot capture white supremacist attacks. Although former President Biden commuted most federal death sentences to life imprisonment without parole, three individuals whose attacks met the legal definition of domestic terrorism were excluded from clemency. Examining several cases from Timothy McVeigh to Luigi Mangione reveals a trend of defendants whose crimes meet the legal definition of domestic terrorism receiving the death penalty, even when …

Prisoners And Choice Democracy, Eileen Prescott, Michelle Theer

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

This Article considers how eliminating meaningful choices inside prisons harms individuals and obstructs reintegration efforts. While any individual restrictions on incarcerated people may seem minor—such as limitations on the food available in the commissary— they accumulate to a point where people adopt passive, compliant behaviors and attitudes that are adaptive inside yet maladaptive outside the prison walls. Thus, we argue that even modest improvements in prisoner autonomy could reduce recidivism and achieve the public safety goals of incarceration.

From Victim To Defendant: Battered Woman Syndrome In Support Of Duress, Samantha Casimiro

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

Section I of this article will discuss the origin and phases of BWS as well as its designation as a subcategory of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (hereinafter PTSD) and discuss the prevalence of domestic violence in our society. Section II will layout the elements of a duress defense and analyze the objective reasonableness standard as compared to the subjective reasonableness standard used in other defenses, such as self-defense, explaining that there is a level of subjectiveness that must be considered regardless of the applicable approach. Section III will analyze cases and opinions of the federal circuit courts that support the admission …

From Victim To Villain: How Gendered Narratives Shape Drug Courier Trials, Serafina C. Russo

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

This article examines how gendered stereotypes, coercive trafficking dynamics, and permissive evidentiary practices create systemic bias in criminal prosecutions of women, particularly in drug trafficking cases. It highlights how courts often allow expert testimony and generalized narratives that blur neutral analysis with character judgment, inviting jurors to rely on cultural assumptions rather than objective facts. The “blind mule” phenomenon demonstrates the human cost, disproportionately affecting women from marginalized backgrounds, and reflects violations of due process and the presumption of innocence. The article argues for judicial and legislative reforms, including rigorous enforcement and clarification of Rule 704(b), to prevent stereotypes from …

Justified: Reasonable Beliefs, True Beliefs, And Self-Defense, Michael D. Cicchini

Marquette Law Review

A defendant is charged with criminal battery and asserts self-defense at trial. The defense calls witnesses who would testify that, about ten minutes before the fight, the alleged victim said he was going to “find” the defendant and “end him.” But the trial judge excludes the testimony because the threat, while heard by several witnesses, was not communicated to the defendant. Therefore, the judge says, the threat cannot be relevant in determining whether the defendant “reasonably believed” he was in imminent danger at that time.

This Article explores the theoretical foundation for this common ruling and demonstrates why it is …

Crypto Exchanges In Market Regulation, Yesha Yadav

Vanderbilt Law Review

The cryptocurrency market has proven notoriously challenging to regulate despite a decade during which it has gained in economic size, sophistication, and cultural impact. Even as repeated crises have left ordinary savers wiped out, regulation has shown itself to be woefully absent as a means of mitigating risks ex ante or helping cover the cost of damage ex post. This Article looks to break this deadlock by proposing a tried-and-tested solution: It argues that regulators should task crypto exchanges with providing oversight as self-regulatory organizations of the crypto market in which they play an anchoring role. It offers three supporting …

Informed Applicants: Anti-Discrimination Enforcement Based On The Use Of Criminal Records, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

Navigating the labor market with a criminal record is treacherous. Countless job applicants will be turned down immediately after a potential employer learns they have had contact with the criminal legal system. Criminal records reflect and exacerbate long-standing racial and economic inequalities in the United States. Thus, the use of records in employment decisions will often implicate anti-discrimination laws. However, successfully enforcing these protections requires job applicants to, at minimum, understand why they were not hired. Many applicants never learn why they were not hired and thus will never be able to protect their rights. This Article argues that understanding …