Criminal Law Commons^™

What's Law Got To Do With It?: The Bosnia V. Serbia Decision's Impact On Reconciliation, Sheri P. Rosenberg

Articles

During the twentieth century a particular ideology inspired specific efforts to utilize the power of the law to redress episodes of mass atrocity-in particular genocide. The idea has been that accountability and reparations are necessary for moving beyond a past marred with crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity. Trials are often claimed to aid this process on the grounds that they create an irrefutable historic record, punish the perpetrators for the sake of justice and deterrence, and promote peace and reconciliation. This Article interrogates the stated goals of accountability, in particular the goal of reconciliation, against the impact, within …

The Case Of Weak Will And Wayward Desire., Vera Bergelson

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

In this article, I confront Garvey¡¯s argument that a weak-willed individual deserves partial excuse for trying to resist a strong desire that pushes him toward commission of a criminal act even though in the end he unreasonably abandons his resistance and commits the crime.

I attempt to refute Garvey¡¯s argument on two counts: one, I question whether the law should indeed provide mitigation to such an offender; and two, I argue that, even if it should, this mitigation may not come in the form of a partial defense. Defenses, even partial, are desert based, and there is nothing in Garvey¡¯s …

Summary Of Mitchell V. State, 122 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 107, Aubree Nielsen

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Donald Mitchell appeals his second-degree murder conviction. Mitchell argues that the district court trial contained five procedural errors, the most significant being a violation of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Summary Of Chartier V. State, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 66, Kelly Stout

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

This case is an appeal from a jury conviction in district court on one count of conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon.

Summary Of Fergusen V. State, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 69, Tara Zimmerman

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a judgment of conviction, upon jury verdict, of one count each of burglary, sexual assault, robbery, and first-degree kidnapping.

Summary Of Picetti V. State, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 68, Kristopher Zeppenfeld

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

This appeal arises from a judgment of conviction, pursuant to a guilty plea, of one count of driving under the influence (DUI), which is his third offense within 7 years, a class B felony. Paul Thomas Picetti (“Picetti”) contends that the district court erred by denying his motion to suppress his prior DUI convictions. Moreover, he claims the district court erroneously refused to allow him an opportunity to apply for a treatment program established in NRS 484.379412 for third offense DUI offenders.

Brief Of Amicus Curiae In Support Of Appellants, Quinton Richmond, Et Al., V. The District Court Of Maryland, Et Al., No. 08-54, Brenda Bratton Blom, Robert Rubinson, Phillip J. Closius

Court Briefs

Amici curiae brief filed by 78 faculty members from the University of Maryland School of Law and the University of Baltimore School of Law, on behalf of Appellants Quinton Richmond, et al. Amicus members felt the need to comment on the application and implications of the statutory right to counsel under Maryland law for indigent criminal defendants. The issue before the Court of Appeals was whether the Court’s previous holding in McCarter v. State, 363 Md. 705 (2001), that the plain language of the Maryland Public Defender Act created a right to counsel during all stages of a criminal …

Prosecutions Under The Adam Walsh Act: Is America Keeping Its Promise?, Emily A. White

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Integrating Comparative Criminal Law: Criminal Law And Procedure, At Home And Abroad, Roger Fairfax

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Dna – Intimate Information Or Trash For Public Consumption?, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

“Surreptitious sampling” may be police officers’ trump card in cracking otherwise unsolvable crimes as serious as murder, arson and rape. Law enforcement officers engage in surreptitious sampling when they covertly collect DNAsamples from unsuspecting people, who inadvertently leave behind hair, skin cells, saliva or other biological materials.Surreptitious sampling is a terrific crime-resolution tool. It allows diligent law enforcement officers to collect proof-positive evidence of guilt or innocence without the hassle of obtaining a warrant and absent probable cause or reasonable suspicion to believe that the contributor of the biological evidence committed a crime. Provided an officer has the energy and …

Summary Of Browning V. State Of Nevada, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. Citation 50, Philip Erwin

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

This is an appeal from a sentence of death after remand for a new penalty hearing.

Summary Of Hill V. State, 124 Nev., Advance 52, Meredith Holmes

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Defendant-Appellant argued that the district court improperly denied his motion to dismiss the grand jury indictment and pretrial petition for writ of habeas corpus based on the State’s failure to report grand jury bias.

Summary Of State V. Dist. Ct. (Pullin), 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 54, Katie Maw

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

This case came to the Court on a petition for a writ of mandamus challenging a district court’s order sentencing the real party in interest pursuant to NRS 193.165 amendments, which were made affective after the crimes in question were committed.

Consent To Harm, Vera Bergelson

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This article continues conversation about consent to physical harm started in Vera Bergelson, The Right to Be Hurt: Testing the Boundaries of Consent, 75 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 165 (2007).

Intentionally injuring or killing another person is presumptively wrong. To overcome this presumption, the perpetrator must establish a defense of justification. Consent of the victim may serve as one of the grounds for such a defense. This article puts forward criteria for the defense of consent.

One element of the proposed defense is essential to both its complete and partial forms ¨C that consent of the victim be rational and …

The Grand Jury Legal Advisor: Resurrecting The Grand Jury’S Shield, Thaddeus A. Hoffmeister

School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article advocates for the creation of a Grand Jury Legal Advisor (GJLA) to resurrect the historical autonomy of grand juries. The Article draws upon Hawaii's experiences with the GJLA, and incorporates survey responses from a representative sample of former GJLAs.

The Article begins with a general and historical overview of the grand jury process. This portion of the Article demonstrates how all three branches of government have contributed to the diminishment of the powers of grand jurors. Part IV of this Article discusses the important policy rationales underlying the need for grand jury autonomy; Part V recommends the implementation …

Straddling The Civil-Criminal Divide: A Bifurcated Approach To Understanding The Nature Of Immigration Removal Proceedings, Peter L. Markowitz

Articles

The article advocates for reclassifying immigration removal proceedings, distinguishing between exclusion and expulsion. It argues that while exclusion should remain a civil process, expulsion, particularly for lawful permanent residents, should be treated as a criminal matter due to its punitive nature and severe consequences. This bifurcated approach aims to align legal procedures with the reality of the impact on individuals and ensure constitutional protections.

People V. Coughlin And Criticisms Of The Criminal Jury In Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago, Elizabeth Dale

UF Law Faculty Publications

The last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century are typically characterized as the era in which the criminal jury trial came to an end. Although criminal juries did not completely disappear, their role became smaller and smaller across that time frame. Most studies of this phenomenon attribute that decline to the rise of plea bargains in that same period. Specifically, these studies lead to the conclusion that institutional factors, such as case loads and the political pressure on elected prosecutors to be "tough on crime," made plea bargains an increasingly attractive option for …

"The Mother Of All Balancing Tests": State V. Ariegwe And Montana's Revised Speedy Trial Analysis, Myles Braccio, Jessie Lundberg

Montana Law Review

Right to Speedy Trial

Eyewitness Identification Reform In Massachusetts, Stanley Z. Fisher

Faculty Scholarship

This article traces the impact of the new scientific learning upon police eyewitness identification procedures in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Over the past 25 years, experimental psychologists have devised more reliable techniques for gathering eyewitness identification evidence than have been traditionally used by police. Massachusetts has over 350 autonomous municipal police departments, plus approximately 39 college campus police departments, the state police, and the MBTA (transit) Police Department. The decision how to investigate crime rests principally with the police chief responsible for each department. How does such a system of policing absorb new, scientifically superior methods of investigation?

Summary Of Haney V. State Of Nevada, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 40, Tyler James Watson

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a district court order denying appellant’s motion to correct an illegal sentence.

Summary Of Diomampo V. State Of Nevada, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 41, Tyler James Watson

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a judgment of conviction, upon jury verdict, of one count of mid-level trafficking in a controlled substance.

``No One Does That Anymore": On Tushnet, Constitutions, And Others, Penelope J. Pether

Working Paper Series

In this contribution to the Quinnipiac Law Review’s annual symposium edition, this year devoted to the work of Mark Tushnet, I read his antijuridification scholarship “against the grain,” concluding both that Tushnet’s later scholarship is neo-Realist rather than critical in its orientation, and that both his early scholarship on slavery and his post-9/11 constitutional work reveal an ambivalence about the claim that we learn from history to circumscribe our excesses, which anchors his popular constitutionalist rhetoric.

The likeness of Tushnet’s scholarship to the work of the Realists lies in this: while the Realists’ search for a science that would satisfy …

Summary Of Hidalgo V. District Court, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. 33, Barbra E. Zess

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Petitioner Luis Hidalgo III, awaiting a capital murder trial, successfully made a petition for a writ of mandamus or prohibition challenging the alleged aggravating circumstances (solicitation to commit murder) as not being “a felony involving the use or threat of violence to the person of another” as required by NRS 200.033(2)(b). Although the court found the other aggravating circumstance, murder to receive money, to be in violation of SCR 250(4)(c) requirements, the court decided to allow the State amend its notice of intent to seek the death penalty to cure the deficiency.

Retrying The Acquitted In England Part Ii: The Exception To The Rule Against Double Jeopardy For Tainted Acquittals, David S. Rudstein

San Diego International Law Journal

Parliament enacted a statute in 1996 intended to limit the double jeopardy bar in some situations in which the defendant obtained an acquittal through improper means, thereby permitting the government to retry the person for the same offense of which he previously was tried and acquitted. The statute, part of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996, allows a retrial when an individual's acquittal was tainted, which, under the statute, means an acquittal resulting from interference with, or intimidation of, a juror, witness, or potential witness. In allowing a retrial in such circumstances, the statute creates an exception to the …

Victims And Promise Of Remedies: International Law Fairytale Gone Bad, Sanja Djajic

San Diego International Law Journal

The aim of this Article is to examine such developments and the current availability of remedies for human rights violations in general. The Author will also examine the appropriateness of such remedies and opportunities to pursue them. The Article starts by identifying remedies in international law. This is followed by a case study and analysis of attempts by several national judiciaries to grapple with remedies prescribed by international law, against the background of international and national remedies. In the course of examining the reasons for an inadequate remedial structure, the Article will focus on several national cases. They will illustrate …

The Bounds Of Necessity, Jens David Ohlin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The current controversy surrounding the legality of torture can only be understood through an analysis of the distinction between justified necessity and excused necessity. Although there may be strong prudential reasons for international criminal courts to declare torture unlawful under any circumstance, this would not necessarily prevent a court from recognizing that an excuse may apply. However, the hallmark of the necessity excuse should not be understood, as it is in German law, as an exception that only applies when a defendant breaks the law to save someone close to him. Rather, the basic principle of the excuse ought to …

Detecting Lies Using Demeanor, Bias, And Context, Max Minzner

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Summary Of Mclellan V. State, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 25, Tyler Ure

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appellant appeals conviction on 22 counts of sexual assault of a minor under 14 years of age and 20 counts of lewdness with a child under 14 years of age. Appellant argues the district court should not have entered telephone conversation recorded in California into evidence. Appellant also argues that evidence regarding uncharged acts should not have been admitted.

Summary Of Brooks V. State Of Nevada, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. Citation 19, Nevada Law Journal

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

This is an appeal from a judgment of conviction of conspiracy to commit robbery and robbery with the use of a deadly weapon

A Return To The Grand Jury To Promote A Zen Zeal In Prosecutors, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

DNA evidence has freed at least 209 convicted people. Sometimes DNA evidence exonerates a person. Other times, it does not. When it does not exonerate, a prosecutor must decide whether to persist in further prosecution of the defendant. I propose a fresh, but simple, solution for prosecutors who face such choices. To protect the interests of defendants and victims, and to assuage society’s need for fair and accurate outcomes, prosecutors should represent these cases to a grand jury. The grand jury is an easily convened neutral party that can dispassionately evaluate the evidence, old and new, and determine whether a …