Criminal Law Commons^™

The Criminal Defense Lawyer's Reliance On Bias And Prejudice, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is divided into three parts. Part I examines both the many contexts in which criminal defense lawyers and clinical students encounter bias and prejudice,¹² and the commonly-raised objections to its exploitation. Part II looks at the way the tactical use of bias relates to a lawyer's duty of zealous advocacy. Here, the Article focuses on whether existing ethics rules provide guidance for a lawyer's use of bias and whether proposed rules aimed at eliminating such advocacy would improve or diminish justice. This article argues against such efforts because they impinge on legitimate lawyering, and they may distract …

Law, Culture, And Harassment, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Double Jeopardy All Over Again: Dual Sovereignty, Rodney King, And The Aclu, Susan Herman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"Other Crimes" Evidence In Sex Offense Cases, Roger C. Park, David P. Bryden

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sentencing: Capital Punishment, Jodi L. Short, Mark D. Spoto

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fifth Amendment Compelled Statements: Modeling The Contours Of Their Protected Scope, Kate Bloch

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Theories Of Federal Habeas Corpus, Evan Tsen Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Sentencing Guidelines As A Not-So-Model Penal Code, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

We are accustomed to thinking about the criminal law, and the procedures for enforcing it, as divided into two separate stages. The first stage – the subject of penal codes and jury trials – concerns the definition of culpable conduct and the adjudication of guilt. The second stage – sentencing – concerns the consequences of conviction for the offender. Only rarely do we acknowledge that the conventional separation of these stages into compartments is highly misleading.

The articles in this Issue of FSR address, in one way or another, the extent to which the concerns of the substantive criminal law …

Gender, Crime, And The Criminal Law Defenses, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This Article attempts to explain some of the disparity in criminality between males and females by analyzing the results of the “Biosocial Study,” one of this country's largest longitudinal studies of biological, psychological, and sociological predictors of crime. Section II analyzes the literature and research on gender differences in crime. Section III describes the Biosocial Study and its results, noting the gender differences in the prevalence and prediction of crime and the inability of any one factor to be a strong predictor of crime. Section IV considers whether gender differences warrant disparate types of punishment or treatment within the criminal …

Violence Against Lesbians And Gay Men, Suzanne B. Goldberg, Bea Hanson

Faculty Scholarship

Faggot! Dyke! Pervert! Homo!" Just words? Or rhetoric that illuminates and fuels hatred of lesbians and gay men? How often are these words supplemented by the use of a bat, golf clubs, a hammer, a knife, a gun? Studies indicate that lesbians and gay men experience criminal victimization at rates significantly higher than other individuals and are the most frequent victims of bias crime.

Since lesbians and gay men live all across the country – in large cities, small towns, and rural areas – we can be targets of bias crime no matter where we live. From the attacks against …

Categorical And Individualized Rights-Ordering On Federal Habeas Corpus, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

This Article criticizes the Supreme Court's treatment of both individualized and categorical bases of relief on federal habeas corpus. Part I notes the Court's trend toward trimming the process that is due in criminal and prisoner litigation generally. This trend may explain the drop in process on habeas as well, but generally declining process cannot explain which rights, if any, should survive the decline. That would require our weighting, if not reconciling, accuracy and dignitary norms, which is the subject of Part II. In Part II, I examine Withrow v Williams, a case from the Court's 1992 Term, which, for …

What Is Punishment Imposed For?, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The institution of punishment invites a number of philosophical queries. Sometimes the question is: How do we know that inflicting discomfort and disadvantage is indeed punishment? This is a critical question, for example, in cases of deportation or disbarment proceedings. Classifying the sanction as punishment triggers application of the Sixth Amendment and its procedural guarantees. In other situations the question might be: Why do we punish? What is the purpose of making people suffer? In this context, we encounter the familiar debates about the conflicting appeal of retribution, general deterrence, special deterrence, and rehabilitation.

In this article I wish to …

Brutality In Blue: Community, Authority, And The Elusive Promise Of Police Reform, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

In January 1994, President Clinton invited Kevin Jett, a thirtyone-year-old New York City police officer who walks a beat in the northwest Bronx, to attend the State of the Union Address. Jett stood for Congress's applause as the President called for the addition of 100,000 new community police officers to walk beats across the nation. The crime problem faced by Officer Jett and community police officers like him, the President said, has its roots "in the loss of values, the disappearance of work, and the breakdown of our families and communities." According to the Clinton administration, however, the police – …

On The Moral Irrelevance Of Bodily Movements, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

In the mess of confusions called Anglo-American criminal law, writers commonly refer to the "problem of punishing omissions." There is something untoward, they say, about imposing criminal liability on the bystander who could intervene to save a drowning child and fails to do so. Punishing acts in violation of the law is all right, but there is some special difficulty, never completely understood and clarified, about imposing liability for omissions.

The confusion about omissions has suffered unnecessary compounding by the organization of one of the leading casebooks on criminal law. Apparently not quite sure where to locate their cases on …

Taking The Fifth: Reconsidering The Origins Of The Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this essay is to cast doubt on two basic elements of the received historical wisdom concerning the privilege as it applies to British North America and the early United States. First, early American criminal procedure reflected less tenderness toward the silence of the criminal accused than the received wisdom has claimed. The system could more reasonably be said to have depended on self-incrimination than to have eschewed it, and this dependence increased rather than decreased during the provincial period for reasons intimately connected with the economic and social context of the criminal trial in colonial America.

Second, …

Of Laws And Men: An Essay On Justice Marshall's View Of Criminal Procedure, Daniel C. Richman, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

As a general rule, criminal defendants whose cases made it to the Supreme Court between 1967 and 1991 must have thought that, as long as Justice Thurgood Marshall occupied one of the nine seats, they had one vote for sure. And Justice Marshall rarely disappointed them – certainly not in cases of any broad constitutional significance. From his votes and opinions, particularly his dissents, many were quick to conclude that the Justice was another of those "bleeding heart liberals," hostile to the mission of law enforcement officers and ready to overlook the gravity of the crimes of which the defendants …

Truth And Consequences: The Force Of Blackmail's Central Case, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Blackmail commentary continues to proliferate. One purpose of this paper is to show what we agree on. Its primary tool will be to define what I call the "central case" of blackmail literature, and to supply the connecting links that will allow us to see how various normative theories converge in condemning central case blackmail. Admittedly, the law criminalizes more than my central case. But once we recognize that the central case is neither puzzling nor paradoxical, it may be easier to handle the border cases that arise.

Symposium On Securities Law Enforcement Priorities, Roberta S. Karmel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Uncharged Misconduct Evidence In Sex Crime Cases: Reassessing The Rule Of Exclusion, Roger C. Park, David P. Bryden

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reviewing Departures: The First Circuit's New Rivera Rule, Aaron J. Rappaport

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Guideline Developments In The First Circuit: The Two Faces Of Appellate Review, Aaron J. Rappaport

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Why The Court Loves Batson: Representation-Reinforcement, Colorblindness, And The Jury, Susan Herman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reel Time/Real Justice, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

Like the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings a few months before, the Rodney King beating, the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who "restrained" him and the subsequent civil unrest in Los Angeles flashed Race across the national consciousness and the gaze of American culture momentarily froze there. Pieces of everyday racial dynamics briefly seemed clear, then faded from view, replaced by presidential politics and natural disasters.

This Essay examines in more depth what was exposed during the momentary national focus on Rodney King. Two main events – the acquittal of the police officers who beat King and the civil …

Extending The Guiding Lefthand Of Counsel: The Minnesota Supreme Court Provides Protection Against Uncounseled Waivers Of The Right To Counsel During Interrogations, Edwin J. Butterfoss, Lisa J. Burkett

Faculty Scholarship

It is the thesis of this Article that the cases on which the Minnesota Supreme Court in Lefthand relied and the policy concerns that motivated the court suggest that the rule of Lefthand should apply to any suspect who has asserted her right to counsel, regardless of whether that suspect is in custody, formally charged, or formally represented by counsel. If the court's ruling in Lefthand is carried to its logical scope, law enforcement officers and prosecutors in Minnesota may find that very early in the criminal justice process they are precluded from obtaining waivers of the right to counsel …

Search, Seizure And The Positive Law: Expectations Of Privacy Outside The Fourth Amendment, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is about the misunderstood relationship between the Fourth Amendment and the positive law. It shows how state property law and other expressions of the positive law are more resilient and useful to Fourth Amendment analysis than the Court's decisions of the past three decades recognize.

The Political Economy Of Female Violent Street Crime, Deborah Baskin, Ira Sommers, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Ten years after the U.S. Attorney General's Task Force on Violent Crime considered problems of violence in the United States, and on the heels of a National Academy Sciences report on violence, the nation seems poised to begin a new "war on violence." Past "wars" on crime problems, including the recently stalemated "war on drugs" have focused primarily on males. This one promises to be no different. Violence continues to be viewed as the province of young males in urban areas. According to the Uniform Crime Reports, over 75% of homicide victims in 1990 were males, and over 85% of …

Orders Of Protection In Domestic Violence Cases: An Empirical Assessment Of The Impact Of The Reform Statutes, Kit Kinports, Karla Fischer

Faculty Scholarship

The authors' concern that domestic violence reform statutes might not be having their intended effect sparked their decision to evaluate the protective order statutes empirically. The authors therefore distributed a lengthy survey to 843 domestic violence organizations nationwide that helped battered women obtain protective orders. The survey focused on three issues. The first issue was access to the courts: Is the protective order remedy accessible to battered women? The second issue related to the procedures for obtaining orders of protection: Are judges granting orders in appropriate cases, and are they awarding the full range of remedies contemplated by the reform …

Dna Evidence: Probability, Population Genetics, And The Courts, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

To help meet the challenge of presenting properly performed DNA tests within the post-Daubert legal framework, this article outlines the statistical procedures that have been employed or proposed to provide judges and juries with quantitative measures of probative value, describes more fully how the courts have dealt with these procedures, and evaluates the opinions and the statistical analyses from the standpoint of the law of evidence.

Specifically, the article outlines the procedure used to declare whether two samples of DNA "match," and how shrinking the size of the "match window," as some defendants have urged, will decrease the risk of …

Further Reflections On Libertarian Criminal Defense, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Since David Luban's is the work on legal ethics that I admire and agree with most, there is an element of perversity in my vehement critique of his arguments on criminal defense. I am therefore especially thankful for his gracious and thoughtful response. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that Luban is mistaken in excepting criminal defense from much of the responsibility to substantive justice that we both think appropriate in every other sphere of lawyering.

Lawyers At The Prison Gates: Organizational Structure And Corrections Advocacy, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of the public interest law movement ushered in an era of intense debate over the best way to provide legal representation to those unable to afford private counsel. This debate has involved two related dimensions of public interest representation. First, advocates and observers of public interest practice disagree over the proper role of lawyers acting on behalf of poor and underrepresented clients. They offer competing visions of representation spanning a continuum, from providing equal access to the courts for as many poor people as possible, to attacking the causes and effects of poverty and powerlessness.

The second dimension …