Law Commons^™

A New Criminal Response Framework: Rejecting The "Four Horsemen Of The Carceral State", George Glass

Indiana Law Journal

Many first-year criminal law courses begin with a discussion of the nineteenth-century English case Regina v. Dudley & Stephens. In this case, a ship was caught in a storm, and while stranded at sea, two men decided to kill and eat a younger man in order to survive. The case considers whether these two men should be punished for killing the third man, and if so, how severe should that punishment be. For many law students, this is one of the rare occasions when they are asked whether punishment is justified. Soon, they will instead be asked which of the …

Library Crime, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

Libraries are often idealized as one of the few remaining safe, public spaces. Beyond providing books and internet access, they are a source of shelter, warmth, restrooms, and a place to stay without a reason for society's most vulnerable. But libraries are also at the core of a network of criminal laws that punish a wide array of library-related conduct. Steal a book? Write in or otherwise damage materials? Fail to return an item? Hide a book in a manner that looks like you are about to steal it? Many states criminalize these activities, often punishing them with potential jail …

When We Need Someone To Blame: Officer Suicide, Justice, And The Felony Murder Rule In The Casey White Case, Mallory Sadler

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Wolf In Sheep’S Attire: How Consent Enfeebles Our Fourth Amendment, Stephen E. Henderson, Guha Krishnamurthi

Faculty Articles

The Fourth Amendment is a mirage. On paper—in the rules studied by law students, analyzed by scholars, and proclaimed by jurists—its limitations are many and, oftentimes, significant. Yet the experience of large numbers of Americans is entirely to the contrary, thanks to the rights-annihilating, under-theorized exception of “consent.” Under its guise, law enforcement officers routinely conduct what would otherwise be constitutionally-restrained searches and seizures, and they do so without meaningful explanation or assent. Fortunately, change—whether legislative or (ideally) constitutional—could be straightforward. Thanks to other sufficient triggers, consent could be replaced by a narrow, rights-protective doctrine under which law enforcement could …

Time And Retribution, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Time is missing from discussions on the theory of retribution. A colossal body of scholarship has been devoted to exploring the theory of retribution, or 'just deserts," but much less has attempted to translate this theory into practice, explaining how to determine an actual offender's desert in real life. The limited scholarship on this topic touches on who might best assess an offender's desert. For example, should a judge, a juror, or the public itself be making these desert decisions? But there is also a temporal aspect to this decision making that has thus far largely eluded exploration: When should …

Reimagining The Inclusive Jury, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, everyday life for many Americans was upended. And yet, the jury trial remained viable — even vital. Faced with an era-defining public health disaster, courts innovated, embracing novel technologies and techniques to reimagine where and how justice might be made. But why did it take a pandemic to spur this kind of institutional creativity? Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, people who were otherwise eligible to participate as jurors were routinely — and uncontroversially — struck or exempted from service due to limited mobility, vision and hearing loss, and caregiving responsibilities. Recent experience …

The Mistaken Law Of Mistakes Of Law: Mistakes Negating Culpability Under The Model Penal Code, Scott England

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the relationship between two core principles of American criminal law. On one hand, ignorance of the law is no excuse. On the other hand, criminal liability requires not just a guilty act but also a guilty mind. As the criminal law has become more complex, criminal offenses have increasingly raised issues about whether they require culpability as to issues of law, often bringing culpability requirements and the ignorance maxim into apparent conflict.

In 1962, the American Law Institute published the Model Penal Code (“MPC” or “the Code”). The MPC changed American criminal law significantly, and the Code’s …

Criminal Law Drafting Manual, Jean Mangan

Books

This textbook was created under a Round 19 Mini-Grant. It is hosted on the Open ALG (Affordable Learning Georgia) Projects platform. 2024 edition.

Debunking Criminal Restitution, Lula Hagos

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Criminal restitution—the money paid by a defendant to a victim—is often overlooked amidst growing scholarly consensus about the adverse impact of criminal court fines and fees. Restitution receives less attention because it is perceived as a fair and unobjectionable sanction with legitimate goals, while fines and fees are now widely condemned as primarily serving as a funding source for local and state governments. Consequently, the animated and extensive discourse around financial punishment largely excludes criminal restitution.

Though criminal restitution may appear to have legitimate penological purposes, it serves to perpetually punish defendants who are poor—the vast majority of those in …

Challenging The Criminalization Of Undocumented Drivers Through A Health-Justice Framework, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

States increasingly use driver’s license laws to further policy objectives unrelated to road safety. This symposium contribution employs a health justice lens to focus on one manifestation of this trend—state schemes that prohibit noncitizen residents from accessing driver’s licenses and then impose criminal sanctions for driving without authorization. Status-based no-license laws not only facilitate legally questionable enforcement of local immigration priorities but also impose structural inequities with long-term health consequences for immigrants and their family members, including US citizen children. Safe, reliable transportation is a significant social determinant of health for individuals, families, and communities. Applying a health justice lens …

Crawford And Criminal Justice, William Ortman

Scholarly Works

This essay reflects on whether Crawford v. Washington, now in its third decade of life, matters to criminal justice. For all the talk of Crawford as “revolutionary,” that is, has it made any real difference to the world of crime and punishment? I’ve confronted the question before. In a 2021 essay, I argued that Crawford probably has modest real-world effects. Crawford articulated a right that criminal defendants can exercise only at trial. In an adjudicatory system bereft of trials, trial rights don’t count for much. They impact plea outcomes only when they confer bargaining power sufficient to offset prosecutors’ …

Going Federal, Staying Stateside: Felons, Firearms, And The "Federalization" Of Crime, Jonathan Abel

American University Law Review

Scholars have long debated the federalization of crime. Proponents assert that federal prosecutions are more likely than state prosecutions to result in convictions and severe punishments, and thus more likely to deter crime. Opponents argue that federalization leads to the arbitrary, and even racist, punishment of a few unlucky defendants plucked from a sea of similarly situated peers. Everyone seems to agree about one thing, though: the federal system outstrips the state system in effectiveness and severity. Yet, no one has obtained the state-court data needed to substantiate these comparisons. This Article fills that gap with an examination of the …

Causing Or Risking Climate Catastrophe, Donald Braman, Aaron Regunberg, David Arkush

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Essay explores the potential criminal liability of major fossil fuel companies (FFCs) under state laws prohibiting reckless conduct that causes or risks catastrophe. Using Pennsylvania's criminal code § 3302 as a case study, we argue that FFCs' decades-long pattern of deceptive conduct regarding climate change—continuing to aggressively market and sell fossil fuels while actively concealing and denying the catastrophic risks their own scientists had identified—constitutes criminal behavior under these statutes. We demonstrate how FFCs' actions satisfy the key elements of these crimes: they created risks of catastrophe through their emissions and disinformation campaigns, acted recklessly in doing so given …

Race, Racial Bias, And Imputed Liability Murder, Perry Moriearty, Kat Albrecht, Caitlin Glass

Faculty Scholarship

Even within the sordid annals of American crime and punishment, the doctrines of felony murder and accomplice liability murder stand out. Because they allow states to impose their harshest punishments on defendants who never intended, anticipated, or even caused death, legal scholars have long questioned their legitimacy. What surprisingly few scholars have addressed, however, is who bears the brunt.

This Article is one of the first to explore the racialized impact of the two most controversial and ubiquitous forms of what we call “imputed liability murder.” An analysis of ten years of murder prosecutions in the state of Minnesota reveals …

Counseling Oppression, Angelo Petrigh

Faculty Scholarship

Critical scholars and public defenders alike have grappled with the contradictions at the heart of counseling clients in a carceral system. Systems of oppression operate within the public defender - client relationship because the defender’s role in translating the law also enforces its inequities. Counseling can obscure the workings of the system, providing an illusion of choice despite privileging certain forms of knowledge and tactics.

But the counseling site is also where defenders become exposed to client’s lived experiences, encounter collectivist tactics, and critically examine the tension of their role in the system. Likewise, through counseling defenders can pull back …

Criminal Law's Hidden Consensus, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

American criminal law is facing a crisis of meaning. On one hand, the “traditional school” invokes the archetype of the violent criminal—a murderer, rapist, or thief—who must be prosecuted and punished. On the other hand, the “critical school” invokes the archetype of the low-level drug offender, sentenced to a draconian prison term for mere possession of low levels of marijuana. On this account, the criminal legal system is itself systemically pathological, perhaps even warranting abolition. Like ships passing in the night, the two schools appear irreconcilable. This Article helps break this impasse and builds toward a justification for criminal law …

A Critical Perspective On Testimonial Injustice: Interrogating Witnesses' Credibility Excess In Criminal Trials, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers a critical race theory perspective on the testimonial injustice experienced by racially minoritized criminal defendants in evidential practice. It builds off Federico Picinali’s paper, inter alia, substantiating how minoritized criminal defendants experience testimonial harm through credibility deficit, by exploring epistemic injustice to the same when prosecutorial witnesses receive identity-based credibility excess. It argues that in an adversarial criminal legal system, the testimonial injustice of credibility excess afforded racial in-group prosecutorial witnesses should be considered in tandem with the testimonial injustice of credibility deficit imposed on racial out-group defendants. Only then can the epistemic harm and resultant …

Afreeist Legal Theory And The Problem Of Innocence, Stephen G. Marks

Faculty Scholarship

Afreeism refers to the lack of the assumption that human beings have free will. Rather, it assumes that humans are subject to the same laws of physics, chemistry, biology, etc., that govern all other phenomena. Afreeist Legal Theory in turn is a legal theory that forgoes the assumption of free will. By foregoing the notion of free will, we also forgo notions of desert, blame, and moral responsibility. Human beings are causally or stochastically deterministic beings. As such, they can never do other than what they do. And because they never possess the ability to do otherwise, they are at …

Constitutional Right To A Fair Trial And Social Justice Influence, Kaitlyn Marchant

Pace Law Review

This article evaluates the challenges that have arisen from the growth of social media and its influence on the right to the fair trial process in high-profile cases. Pretrial publicity through media exposure can bias potential jurors, potentially leading to decisions based on outside information rather than courtroom evidence. The article highlights the risks associated with jurors being exposed to external information through various media sources, which can significantly impact their objectivity and ability to make impartial judgments. It scrutinizes the limitations of the existing legal framework in addressing these challenges, including the reliance on jurors’ assurances of impartiality and …

Criminal Justice Interventions For Individuals With Mental Health Disabilities: A Systematic Literature Review, Fidelis Azeke, Nassrine Noureddine

Pacific Journal of Health

In the criminal law, with few exceptions, for a finding of guilt, the physical act and the state of mind to commit the offense must be present at the time of the commission of the offense. People with mental disabilities often lack the state of mind required to commit the offense for which they are eventually charged for and or convicted. This paper examines the effectiveness of some past and present criminal justice system interventions that addresses the mental health disabilities of criminal offenders pre-adjudicative proceedings. A systematic review of the literature was used to examine past and present criminal …

Preventing Undeserved Punishment, Marah Stith Mcleod

Notre Dame Law Review

Defendants should not be punished more than they deserve. Sentencing scholars describe this precept against undeserved punishment as a consensus norm in American law and culture. Yet America faces a plague of mass incarceration, and many sanctions seem clearly undeserved, often far exceeding an offender’s culpability or the seriousness of an offense. How can a society committed to desert as a limitation on legitimate sanctions allow such undeserved punishments?

Critics argue increasingly that our focus on what offenders deserve is itself part of the problem. They claim that the notion of desert is too amorphous, malleable, and arbitrary to limit …

The Conferred Jurisdiction Of The International Criminal Court, Leila Nadya Sadat

Notre Dame Law Review

After twenty years of operation, we know that the International Criminal Court (ICC) works in practice. But does it work in theory? A debate rages regarding the proper conceptualization of the Court’s jurisdiction. Some have argued that the ICC’s jurisdiction is little more than a delegation by states of a subset of their own criminal jurisdiction. They contend that when states ratify the Rome Statute, they transfer some of their own prescriptive or adjudicative criminal jurisdiction to the Court, meaning that the Court cannot do more than the state itself could have done. Moreover, they argue that these constraints are …

Criminal Law In Myanmar, Wing Cheong Chan, Mark Mcbride, Neil Morgan, Stanley Yeo

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

A commentary on the Myanmar Penal Code that describes and critically evaluates the general principles of criminal responsibility contained in the Code. This book was originally published in English in 2016. It was republished in Burmese in 2023.

Rights Without Remedies: How The Illinois Post-Conviction Hearing Act’S Standing Requirement Has Failed Defendants, Nate Nieman

Northern Illinois University Law Review

The Illinois Post-Conviction Act is a procedural mechanism that allows a criminal defendant to assert that his federal or state constitutional rights were substantially violated during trial or at sentencing. The passage of the Act expanded a defendant’s ability to challenge his conviction and sentences collaterally, where before the Act, he had only been able to raise these challenges on direct appeal. However, the Act’s strict standing requirement precludes defendants from relief once they have completed their sentence, ignoring the fact that many important, life-altering civil consequences resulting from criminal convictions occur after a sentence has concluded.

This Article argues …

Models And Limits Of Federal Rule Of Evidence 609 Reform, Anna Roberts

Vanderbilt Law Review

A Symposium focusing on Reimagining the Rules of Evidence at 50 makes one turn to the federal rule that governs one's designated topic--prior conviction impeachment--and think about how that rule could be altered. Part I of this Article does just that, drawing inspiration from state models to propose ways in which the multiple criticisms of the existing federal rule might be addressed. But recent scholarship by Alice Ristroph, focusing on ways in which criminal law scholars talk to their students about "the rules," gives one pause. Ristroph identifies a pedagogical tendency to erase the many humans who turn rules into …

Preliminary-Hearing Waivers And The Contract To Negotiate, Michael D. Cicchini

Pepperdine Law Review

Plea bargaining often begins very early in a criminal case—sometimes before the preliminary hearing, or “prelim,” is held. Be-cause of the time, effort, and risk involved in holding a prelim, the prosecutor may make the defendant a prelim waiver offer. That is, if the defendant agrees to waive the prelim, the prosecutor will hold a particular plea offer open for the defendant’s future consideration. Such prelim waiver offers may be skeletal, at best, but will often include the promise of “future negotiations” to fill in the details. When the prosecutor obtains the defendant’s prelim waiver for the promise of future …

After The Criminal Justice System, Benjamin Levin

Washington Law Review

Since the 1960s, the “criminal justice system” has operated as the common label for a vast web of actors and institutions. But as critiques of mass incarceration have entered the mainstream, academics, activists, and advocates increasingly have stopped referring to the “criminal justice system.” Instead, they have opted for critical labels—the “criminal legal system,” the “criminal punishment system,” the “prison industrial complex,” and so on. What does this re-labeling accomplish? Does this change in language matter to broader efforts at criminal justice reform or abolition? Or does an emphasis on labels and language distract from substantive engagement with the injustices …

The Ever-Shifting Ground Of Pretrial Detention Reform, Jenny E. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

In the past six decades, pretrial detention systems have undergone waves of reform. Despite these efforts, pretrial jail populations across the country continue to swell. The causes of such growth in jail populations are difficult to pinpoint, but some are more readily apparent: Fear over rising crime rates, judicial reluctance to release accused persons, and monetary burdens associated with release have all contributed to increased detention pretrial across criminal legal systems in the United States. This article examines various pretrial detention reform efforts and highlights the need for greater research in the area.

The Mob Lawyer's Constitution, Sara Mayeux

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article reconstructs the constitutional rhetoric of mob lawyers, as well as drug lawyers and other icons of the high-priced criminal defense bar, from the 1970s through the 1990s-the heyday of federal organized crime prosecutions and thus, of the lawyers who defended against them. Drawing upon pop-culture sources including archival television footage, magazine features, newspaper coverage, and ghost-written mass-market memoirs, the article pieces together the constellation of soundbites through which mob lawyers disseminated their views. As the subjects of frequent media coverage, these lawyers advanced a coherent and distinctive (if crude) set of ideas about the proper relationship between individuals, …

Sexual Orientation At The Crossroads, Johan D. Van Der Vyver

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County that sexual orientation is included in the concept of “sex” in the non-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is historically indefensible. The Civil Rights Act was initiated by President John F. Kennedy to combat racial discrimination in the workplace and the word “sex” was included in the Act by a “claque of Southern Congressmen” as part of a filibuster attempt to prevent its enactment. It was accepted by proponents of the Act on the instructions of President Johnson merely to avoid the …