Criminal Law Commons^™

Standards For Organizational Probation: A Proposal To The United States Sentencing Commission, John C. Coffee Jr., Richard Gruner, Christopher D. Stone

Faculty Scholarship

This proposal was prepared by the authors in their capacities as consultants to the United States Sentencing Commission. It has not been adopted or endorsed by the Commission. If adopted, the proposal would constitute Part D(2) of the Sentencing Commission's Organizational Sentencing Guidelines (to be continued in Chapter 8 of the Commission's Guidelines Manual).

The Dual Sovereignty Exception To Double Jeopardy: In The Wake Of Garcia V. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, Evan Tsen Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Unmet Challenge Of Criminal Theory, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The last several decades have witnessed an outpouring of serious articles bringing to bear the methods of analytic philosophy to the issues of substantive criminal law. J. L. Austin, a philosopher and not a lawyer, may have been the first to demonstrate the potential of probing legal concepts such as mistake and accident, justification and excuse, for their philosophical potential. H.L.A. Hart carried forward the literature with several path breaking essays on criminal law. It is only in the last few years, however, that we have encountered an explosion of interest in the basic questions of criminal law. As the …

Rico: The Crime Of Being A Criminal Parts I And Ii, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most controversial statutes in the federal criminal code is that entitled "Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations," known familiarly by its acronym, RICO. Passed in 1970 as title IX of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, RICO has attracted much attention because of its draconian penalties, including innovative forfeiture provisions; its broad draftsmanship, which has left it open to a wide range of applications, not all of which were foreseen or intended by the Congress that enacted it; and the sometimes dramatic prosecutions that have been brought in its name.

RICO's complexity has attracted several efforts to unscramble …

Rico: The Crime Of Being A Criminal Parts Iii And Iv, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

In the first portion of this study, we saw that the Supreme Court in its 1981 Turkette decision endorsed what was already the consensus view of the courts of appeals that a group of individuals associated in fact to pursue entirely illegitimate purposes could constitute a RICO enterprise. Prosecutions of such associations have quickly become the leading use of the statute. It can be reliably estimated that more than forty percent of the reported appellate cases involving RICO indictments concern prosecutions in which the alleged enterprise was such an illicit association. When the cases are classified by the nature of …

Self-Love And The Judicial Power To Appoint A Special Prosecutor Symposium On Special Prosecutions And The Role Of The Independent Counsel, James A. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

Judicial appointment of private attorneys as special prosecutors has occurred and is permitted to occur in a variety of contexts other than when the executive branch is faced with a potential or actual conflict of interest. Until recently, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and, of course, district courts within the Second Circuit, have interpreted Rule 42(b) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to permit judicial appointment of a private attorney to prosecute conduct allegedly violative of a court order as criminal contempt. Courts have been most active in appointing private attorneys as special prosecutors in cases involving counterfeit …

New Frontiers: The Expansion Of International Criminal Law, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Contributions Of Victimization To Delinquency In Inner Cities, Jeffery Fagan, Elizabeth S. Piper, Yu-Teh Cheng

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between victimization and criminality has been widely cited in recent years. Early thinking and public perceptions about crime intuitively presumed that criminals were distinct from their victims. Crime control policies resulted which promoted the physical separation of victims from predatory offenders through "target hardening" and "defensible space." Such distinctions, however, ignored the empirical evidence on the considerable overlap between offender and victim profiles and distorted the reality of events in which persons are labelled as victims or victimizers based only on the consequences of the event. Given the homogeneous relation between victim and offender, theories of crime that …

Constitutional Limitations On Prosecutorial Discovery, Edward A. Tomlinson

Faculty Scholarship

The prosecution has a legitimate interest in discovering all relevant facts to present the strongest possible case at trial and to meet the defendant's case. Despite that interest, in most jurisdictions the prosecution may discover only the evidence which the defendant intends to present at trial. Even such limited discovery has been the subject of sharp constitutional attack. The author argues that far broader prosecutorial discovery is constitutionally permissible. The prosecution should be able to discover all relevant facts useful in testing defense evidence and any documents or tangible things (for example, the murder weapon) which strengthen the prosecution's case …

Do We Need A Calculus Of Weight To Understand Proof Beyond A Reasonable Doubt?, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

The commentary on a paper by L.J. Cohen, prepared for a symposium on probability and inference in the law of evidence, shows that the legal requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt can be understood simply as demanding a sufficiently high probability that the prosecution's narrative or story of the facts, which captures all the elements of the offense, is true. No separate measure of the "weight" of the totality of the evidence is required to understand the burden of persuasion. Any incompleteness in the evidence can be accounted for by a conditional probability that includes the presence of any …

The Bad Faith-Harassment Exception To The Younger Doctrine: Exploring The Empty Universe, C. Keith Wingate

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Crime Talk, Rights Talk, And Double-Talk: Thoughts On Reading Encyclopedia Of Crime And Justice (Review Essay), Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Child Sexual Abuse, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades awareness of child sexual abuse among academics and professionals has grown from several convergent trends: the "discovery" of child abuse in the 1960's, concern by feminists over sexual assault and rape, increasing reports to law enforcement and child protective service workers of sexually abused children, and the general "deprivatization" of the family. More recently, general public awareness of child sexual abuse has followed well-publicized cases of child molestation in day-care centers, nationwide concern over pornography and its subsequent links to teenage prostitution, and runaway youth, delinquency, and family violence among adults.

Conflicts-Of-Interest Disqualification In Medical Malpractice Litigation, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Less than two decades ago it was thought sufficient to say, "When a practitioner is in doubt on an ethical question, the best answer is usually No." A more recent commentator has suggested, however, that "[s]uch platitudes have become increasingly inadequate to guide the attorney facing conflicts of interests in the private practice of law." Because of the general vagueness of the American Bar Association's Model Code of Professional Responsibility, and of state codes based on it, courts have begun to fashion a vast "common law" of conflicts of interest A particularly controversial entry to this body of common law …

The Reluctant Witness For The Prosecution: Grand Jury Subpoenas To Defense Counsel, Stacy Caplow

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Insanity Defense In Fact And Fiction: A Review Essay Of Norval Morris's Madness And The Criminal Law, Susan Herman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Kidnapping: A Modern Definition, John L. Diamond

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Executive Targeting Of Congressmen As A Violation Of The Arrest Clause, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Transaction Theory Of Crime?, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The most difficult questions are foundational. It is no surprise then that one of the most puzzling questions in criminal law frames the whole inquiry: what is the nature of crime? Positivists dispose of the question easily. If the law is whatever the legislature and courts say it is, then crime is whatever these authoritative agencies designate as crime. The question becomes more interesting, however, if we regard crime as a prepositive concept, a concept that exists logically prior to the positive law. It is not that conduct is criminal because the legislature speaks; rather the legislature speaks because conduct …

The "Discovery" Of Sexual Abuse: Experts' Role In Legal Policy Formulation, D. Kelly Weisberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sexual Abuse Of Children: Recent Developments In The Law Of Evidence, D. Kelly Weisberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Children Of The Night: The Adequacy Of Statutory Treatment Of Juvenile Prostitution, D. Kelly Weisberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Some Unwise Reflections About Discretion, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

In listening to discussions about discretion in the criminal process, one has the sense of sharply cut distinctions slipping toward a black hole in our language. All decisions by police, prosecutors, judges and jury are routinely called discretionary. This usage pervades respectable, basically sound papers. In a recent article in the Yale Law Journal, Goldstein and Marcus seek to demonstrate that discretion pervades the decisions of French, German and Italian prosecutors. They write: "Claims that prosecutorial discretion has been eliminated, or is supervised closely, are exaggerated. Discretion is exercised in each of the systems [French, German and Italian] for …

Timing Under A Unified Wealth Transfer Tax, Theodore S. Sims

Faculty Scholarship

The United States taxes gifts made while an individual is living more leniently than it taxes wealth transfers at death. Although in some measure this disparity has existed since the enactment of the modern estate and gift taxes in 1916 and 1932, it was significantly narrowed by the Tax Reform Act of 1976 (the 1976 Act). That statute replaced the separate gift and estate taxes with a regime that taxes the cumulative total of an individual's lifetime taxable gifts and his taxable estate at death, under a single (or "unified") graduated table of rates. Nevertheless, there remains a signficant difference …

The Perplexing Borders Of Justification And Excuse, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This Article's central theme is that Anglo-American criminal law should not attempt to distinguish between justification and excuse in a fully systematic way. I explore three possible bases for drawing the distinction: (1) a distinction between warranted and wrongful conduct; (2) a division between general and individual claims; and (3) a distinction based on the rights of others. I show why none of these bases yields a clear and simple criterion for categorization. The difficulty rests largely on the conceptual fuzziness of the terms ''justification" and "excuse" in ordinary usage and on the uneasy quality of many of the moral …

Miranda Revisited: Broadening The Right To Counsel During Custodial Interrogation--Commonwealth V. Sherman, Beth Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

The judicially created Miranda protections require law enforcement officials to inform criminal suspects of their right to counsel prior to proceeding with custodial interrogation. In Commonwealth v. Sherman, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts considered whether a criminal defendant validly waived his right to counsel when a police officer failed to inform him that an attorney, appointed to represent him in an unrelated case, had requested to be present during his interrogation. Concluding that, under the peculiar circumstances of the case, the defendant did not voluntarily waive his right to counsel, the court suppressed the defendant's in-custody statements to police. …

The Right Of Property And The Law Of Theft, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Criminal Coercion And Freedom Of Speech, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This essay about constitutional limits on criminal coercion concerns a piece of a larger puzzle; how freedom of expression impinges on crimes that involve communication. The essay has two interrelated purposes. One is to reach some rather specific conclusions about the kinds of coercive threats that enjoy constitutional protection and to suggest how legislative formulations of criminal coercion can minimize coverage of such threats. The second purpose, more general and theoretical, is to show how the boundaries of freedom of expression can be understood and how courts can employ those boundaries to arrive at specific tests of constitutional protection. The …

Meaningful Reform Of Plea Bargaining: The Control Of Prosecutorial Discretion, Donald G. Gifford

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Institutional Litigation In The Post-Chapman World, Susan Herman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.