Criminal Law Commons^™

Birthing “Cla”: Critical Legal Activism, The Ip Wars And Forking The Law, Victoria Smith Ekstrand, Andrew Famiglietti, Suzanne V.L. Berg

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Real Women, Real Rape, Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Intuition Versus Algorithm: The Case Of Forensic Authorship Attribution, Lawrence Solan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Genealogy Detectives: A Constitutional Analysis Of 'Familial Searching', David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

“Familial searching” in law enforcement DNA databases has been pilloried as a step “towards eugenics and corruption of blood” and “lifelong genetic surveillance” that is “inconsistent with a basic pillar of American political thought.” Courts have yet to address the issue fully, but several commentators contend that the practice is unwise, unjust, or unconstitutional. This Article examines the more significant constitutional claims. It concludes that although kinship matching should not be implemented simply because it is technologically seductive, neither should it be removed from the realm of permissible law enforcement information gathering on constitutional grounds. In reaching this conclusion, the …

A Fourth Amendment Theory For Arrestee Dna And Other Biometric Databases, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

Routine DNA sampling following a custodial arrest process is now the norm in many jurisdictions, but is it consistent with the Fourth Amendment? The few courts that have addressed the question have disagreed on the answer, but all of them seem to agree on two points: (1) the reasonableness of the practice turns on a direct form of balancing of individual and governmental interests; and (2) individuals who are convicted — and even those who are merely arrested — have a greatly diminished expectation of privacy in their identities. This Article disputes these propositions and offers an improved framework for …

Maryland V. King: Per Se Unreasonableness, The Golden Rule, And The Future Of Dna Databases, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

In Maryland v. King, the Supreme Court applied a balancing test to uphold a Maryland statute mandating preconviction collection and analysis of DNA from individuals charged with certain crimes. The DNA profiles are limited to an inherited set of DNA sequences that are not known to be functional and that are tokens of individual identity. This invited online essay examines two aspects of an article on the case by Professor Erin Murphy. I question the claim that the case is pivotal in a conceivable abandonment of the per se rule that warrantless, suspicionless searches are unconstitutional unless they fall …

Protecting The Innocent - The Need To Adapt Federal Asset Forfeiture Laws To Protect The Interests Of Third Parties In Digital Asset Seizures, Elizabeth Friedler

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

De-Naturalizing Criminal Law: Of Public Perceptions And Procedural Protections, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In this essay, I examine and challenge the rhetorical trope of the guilty going free by emphasizing the institutional and political intricacies that comprise the criminal justice system and necessarily under-gird a determination of “guilt”. My goal, at its essence, is to de-naturalize the criminal law and discussions of the criminal justice system in the context of this symposium. I aim to emphasize that a guilty verdict is the result of a series of (politically-inflected) decisions about how to draft criminal statutes, how to structure a trial, and how to select a jury. De-naturalizing criminal law is, of course, a …

What's Law Got To Do With It?: Why We Should Mediate, Rather Than Litigate, Cases Of Wrongful Life, Shawna Benston

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

In light of the legal and societal disfavor toward wrongful life suits, this Note examines the cultural, (bio)ethical, legal, and philosophical background of the wrongful life tort. While the disability rights movement and the pro-life strains of the abortion debate hope to silence proponents of wrongful life suits, the evolution of a legal right to die underscores the importance of autonomy and privacy for the individual. Philosophical exploration of prospective children-including the nonidentity problem, claim-rights and corresponding duties, and the subjunctive-threshold notion of harmhelps explain the confusion and moral conundrum that pervade the very notion of "wrongful life" and that …

Panel Ii: Critical Legal Activism And Netroots Movements, Victoria Smith Ekstrand, Brett Frischmann, John Tehranian, Siva Vaidhyanathan

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Caught In A Bind: Reassuring Judicial Authority To Bind Non-Party Search Engines Under Rule 65 In Counterfeit Goods Cases, Courtney Brown

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Case Against The Case Against The Death Penalty, Chad W. Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

Despite the continuing belief by a majority of Americans that the death penalty is morally permissible, the death penalty has few academic defenders. This lack of academic defenders is puzzling because of the strong philosophical justification the death penalty finds in traditional theories of punishment. The three major theories of punishment (the deterrent, the retributive, and the rehabilitative), far from showing that the death penalty is not justified, tend to provide good reasons to favor the death penalty. Indeed, every attempt to show that the major theories of punishment rule out the death penalty either involves smuggling in other assumptions …

Report On Usa, Stephen C. Thaman

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter in the book on transnational inquiries and the protection of fundamental rights in criminal proceedings takes into account the particular, and perhaps unique situation in the United States (US) following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. It explores the laws regulating inquiries by foreign governments who seek evidence in the US to use in criminal proceedings overseas, but primarily the protections recognized by US statutes and jurisprudence when US officials gather evidence abroad. In this respect, the chapter focuses on protections during interrogations, searches, interceptions of confidential communications, and examinations of witnesses and explores when the protection …

The Virtues Of Thinking Small, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Professor Lain argues that, in efforts to determine how close American states are to abolishing the death penalty, scholars should "think small," examining the ground level issues that affect its imposition. Among the issues she explores are exonerations of defendants, the legality and obtainability of lethal injection drugs, and the high costs of seeking and imposing capital punishment.

Report On Usa, Stephen C. Thaman

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter in the book on transnational inquiries and the protection of fundamental rights in criminal proceedings takes into account the particular, and perhaps unique situation in the United States (US) following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. It explores the laws regulating inquiries by foreign governments who seek evidence in the US to use in criminal proceedings overseas, but primarily the protections recognized by US statutes and jurisprudence when US officials gather evidence abroad. In this respect, the chapter focuses on protections during interrogations, searches, interceptions of confidential communications, and examinations of witnesses and explores when the protection …

Plea Bargaining, Sentence Modifications, And The Real World, Julian A. Cook

Scholarly Works

This article examines the 2011 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Freeman. At issue was whether defendants, such as Freeman, who enter a guilty plea pursuant to a binding plea agreement, are entitled to seek a modification of their sentence when the guideline range applicable to their offense has subsequently been lowered by the United States Sentencing Commission. By a five-to-four vote, the Court found that Freeman was eligible to seek a sentence reduction. However, as the article explains, the concurring and controlling opinion of Justice Sotomayor may ultimately prove to be problematic for criminal defendants generally and for …

A Snitch In Time: An Historical Sketch Of Black Informing During Slavery, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

This article sketches the socio-legal creation, use, and regulation of informants in the Black community during slavery and the Black community’s response at that time. Despite potentially creating benefits such as crime control and sentence reduction, some Blacks today are convinced that cooperation with government investigations and prosecutions should be avoided. One factor contributing to this perspective is America’s reliance on Black informants to police and socially control Blacks during slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Wars on Drugs, Crime and Gangs. Notwithstanding this historical justification for non-cooperation, only a few informant law and policy scholars have examined closely …

Prioritizing Abortion Access Over Abortion Safety In Pennsylvania, Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

This conference was prompted by the prosecution of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who ran an abortion clinic in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Gosnell was convicted in May of 2013 of charges arising from the killing of viable infants born in his clinic, the negligent death of an adult patient, and the systematic disregard of regulations governing the performance of abortions in Pennsylvania. One question proposed for our consideration is whether Dr. Gosnell is an “outlier,” a description offered by the National Abortion Federation following Gosnell’s indictment.

Presumably, one might want to know whether Gosnell was typical of abortion providers because it could …

Does Criminal Diversion Contribute To The Vanishing Civil Trial?, John B. Meixner Jr., Shari Seidman Diamond

Scholarly Works

Through his seminal work on the vanishing trial, Professor Marc Galanter has had a profound impact on public and scholarly discourse about the role of the trial in litigation, documenting the sharp reductions in the rate of civil cases since the mid-twentieth century. While there is little remaining doubt that the American civil trial is an increasingly scarce commodity, there is still much debate as to what has caused the decline.

In this Article, we seek to explore the extent to which the federal criminal docket may be contributing to the rapid disappearance of the civil trial by taking priority …

Due Process In Islamic Criminal Law, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

Rules and principles of due process in criminal law--how to, and how not to, investigate crime and criminal suspects, prosecute the accused, adjudicate criminal cases, and punish the convicted--appear in the traditional sources of Islamic law: the Quran, the Sunna, and classical jurisprudence. But few of these rules and principles are followed in the modern-day practice of Islamic criminal law. Rather, states that claim to practice Islamic criminal law today mostly follow laws and practices of criminal procedure that were adopted from European nations in the twentieth century, without reference to the constraints and protections of Islamic law itself. To …

Sections 9, 10 And 11 Of The Canadian Charter, Steve Coughlan, Robert Currie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Section 9 of the Charter guarantees freedom from arbitrary detention, section 10 provides certain rights on arrest, and section 11 guarantees various rights to those charged with an offence. In this chapter the authors consider the aspects of these rights which have been authoritatively determined, as well as pointing to the areas which remain unsettled and discussing the areas of lingering controversy.

Imagining Success For A Restorative Approach To Justice: Implications For Measurement And Evaluation, Jennifer Llewellyn, Bruce Archibald, Donald Clairmont, Diane Crocker

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Whether restorative justice is “successful,” or not, is a complex question. Attempts to answer this question by practitioners, professionals, and scholars have often been bounded by common notions of success in standard criminal justice terms. The authors of this paper suggest that if restorative justice is properly understood in terms of its focus on relationship, success should be measured on new and different dimensions. This paper seeks to bring a relational imagination to the scholarly effort of capturing the essence of restorative justice and figuring out how to assess its successes and failures. The authors offer a foundation and agenda …

Telus: Asking The Right Questions About General Warrants, Steve Coughlan

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The general warrant provisions in the Criminal Code have often been interpreted by lower courts in a way which threatens to make that power quite open-ended, and to make those warrants available as a way of making an "end run" around the requirements of other provisions. This note argues that the Supreme Court of Canada is correct, in Telus,to adopt a "substantive equivalence" approach to general warrants, thereby limiting the circumstances in which they can be used. Lower courts have sometimes taken the view that a general warrant is only unavailable if the proposed technique would fall squarely within some …

The Rise And Fall Of Duress (Or How Duress Changed Necessity Before Being Excluded By Self-Defence), Steve Coughlan

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Ryan significantly reshaped both the common law and statutory defenses of duress, harmonizing them and, in the case of the common law defense, fully articulating it for the first time. The decision is admirable for that reason. This paper argues that two further results can also be seen. First, the defense of necessity is a common law one which is conceptually similar to duress. The Court's reasoning at a policy level about duress ought therefore to be applicable to necessity: this paper traces the ways in which that latter defense ought …

Restorative Justice And The Rule Of Law: Rethinking Due Process Through A Relational Theory Of Rights, Bruce P. Archibald

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Restorative approaches to criminal justice can be reconciled with fundamental notions of the rule of law through a relational understanding of rights. Firstly, the paper demonstrates how theories of rights have evolved from a liberal understanding in representative democracies, where individual rights holders can trump the interests of others, to a relational theory where rights embody values which structure appropriate relationships among citizens. Second, the paper shows that relational theory can explain how formal criminal justice and restorative justice in a deliberate democracy interrelate, while embodying different, though compatible, rights, duties and remedies among wrongdoers, victims, communities and justice system …

Maritime Piracy: A Sustainable Global Solution, Paul Williams, Lowry Pressly

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Maritime piracy is a complex transnational security concern characterized by emerging international finance operations and organization, an oversupply of labor, and a low cost of market entry. This article provides a realistic picture of the driving forces behind maritime piracy in areas such as Southeast Asia, the Gulf of Aden, and the Gulf of Guinea. By examining some of the assumptions and proposed solutions in counter-piracy literature and policy, this article exposes some piracy illusions and proposes a sustainable, global response that addresses the persistent threat of modern maritime piracy. Today's manifold piracy challenges call for a multifaceted approach. Accordingly, …

International Law Weekend, American Branch Of The International Law Association Perspectives On Crimes Of Sexual Violence In International Law, Susana Sacouto

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Hamdan V. United States: A Death Knell For Military Commissions?, Jennifer Daskal

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In October 2012, a panel of the D.C. Circuit dealt a blow to the United States’ post- September 11, 2001 decade-long experiment with military commissions as a forum for trying Guantanamo Bay detainees. Specifically, the court concluded that prior to the 2006 statutory reforms, military commission jurisdiction was limited to violations of internationally-recognized war crimes; that providing material support to terrorism was not an internationally-recognized war crime; and that the military commission conviction of Salim Hamdan for material support charges based on pre-2006 conduct was therefore invalid. Three months later, a panel of the D.C. Circuit reached the same conclusion …

Perspectives On Crimes Of Sexual Violence In International Law, Susana Sacouto

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) during conflict and periods of repression has been a problem in every region of the globe.' Historically, these crimes were rarely prosecuted, particularly when government leaders were responsible for tolerating, encouraging, or orchestrating these crimes. However, the last two decades have seen an incredible transformation in the treatment of SGBV under international law. Great strides have been made in the investigation and prosecution of sexual and gender-based crimes, particular by the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone This essay examines the way …

"I Am Ronald Cotton": Teaching Wrongful Convictions In A Criminal Law Class, Cynthia E. Jones

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.