Criminal Law Commons^™

United States V. Castleman: The Meaning Of Domestic Violence, Emily J. Sack

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Shifting Our Focus From Retribution To Social Justice: An Alternative Vision For The Treatment Of Pregnant Women Who Harm Their Fetuses, April L. Cherry

Journal of Law and Health

The ways in which society responds to pregnant women whose behavior purportedly harms their fetuses can be explored from a variety of legal vantage points. This article argues that the criminal law model currently used is ineffective. The assignment of criminal liability to pregnant women is often rooted in fetal personhood and maternal deviance discourse. Criminal law solutions fail because they fail to take into account the fact that maternal behavior is often the result of a myriad of the social and economic conditions over which pregnant women have little or no control. The criminal law model, therefore, simply punishes …

Ultracrepidarianism In Forensic Science: The Hair Evidence Debacle, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

For over 130 years, scientific sleuths have been inspecting hairs under microscopes. Late in 2012, the FBI, the Innocence Project, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers joined forces to review thousands of microscopic hair comparisons performed by FBI examiners over several of those decades. The results have been astounding. Based on the first few hundred cases in which hairs were said to match, it appears that examiners “exceeded the limits of science” in over 90% of their reports or testimony. The disclosure of this statistic has led to charges that the FBI “faked an entire field of forensic …

"Fuck Your Breath": Black Men And Youth, State Violence, And Human Rights In The 21st Century, Jeremy I. Levitt

Journal Publications

This polemical essay was written at the behest of Black men and youth, and it is dedicated to African American women who relentlessly fight to safeguard the rights and well-being of Black men, even when in the process their maltreatment and welfare are grossly overlooked and forgotten. Bree Newsome's courageous and necessary removal of the confederate flag in the South Carolina State House is a prime example of such fearless activism. Joanne Deborah Chesimard aka Assata Shakur's-a former leader of the revolutionary organization known as the Black Liberation Armyascendency to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list is another tragically intoxicating …

Lawyer Ethics And The Financial Action Task Force: A Call To Action, Jack P. Sahl

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Explaining Inhumanity: The Use Of Crime-Definition Experts At International Criminal Courts, Caroline Davidson

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

International criminal courts must not only decide the guilt or innocence of defendants in immensely serious cases, but also make good law in the process. To help them do so, these courts have turned to experts. This Article identifies a type of expert witness that, thus far, has escaped scholarly attention: the crime-definition expert. Crime-definition experts have provided expert reports and testimony to international criminal courts on the meaning of the very crimes with which defendants are charged, including genocide, forced marriage, and recruitment and use of child soldiers. This Article critically evaluates the risks associated with using crime-definition experts …

Intimate Partner Criminal Harassment Through A Lens Of Responsibilization, Isabel Grant

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Feminist scholars have demonstrated the gendered nature of intimate violence and the tendency to put the responsibility on women to avoid both sexual and physical violence (“responsibilization”). This article applies these insights to the context of intimate partner criminal harassment, which is committed overwhelmingly by men against former female intimate partners. Using criminal harassment decisions over the past decade, this article argues that the elements of the offence—specifically the requirements that the accused cause the complainant to fear for her safety, that this fear be reasonable, and that he intend to harass her—feed into the tendency towards responsibilization. Women are …

Anti-Rape Culture, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Cyberharassment And Workplace Law, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Irrelevance Of Prisoner Fault For Excessively Delayed Executions, Russell L. Christopher

Washington and Lee Law Review

Are decades-long delays between sentencing and execution immune from Eighth Amendment violation because they are self-inflicted by prisoners, or is such prisoner fault for delays simply irrelevant to whether a state-imposed punishment is cruel and unusual? Typically finding delay to be the state’s responsibility, Justices Breyer and Stevens argue that execution following upwards of forty years of death row incarceration is unconstitutional. Nearly every lower court disagrees, reasoning that prisoners have the choice of pursuing appellate and collateral review (with the delay that entails) or crafting the perfect remedy to any delay by submitting, as Justice Thomas has invited complaining …

The Prior Convictions Exception—A Comment, Matthew Engle

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Who Is Best Suited To Combat Sexual Violence On College Campuses?: An Analysis Of H.B. 1785, Susana Bass

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

Virginia House Bill 1785, requiring campus police to notify the Commonwealth’s Attorney of any victim-initiated sexual assault investigations, is a positive step forward in helping to combat sexual assault on Virginia college campuses. Under this legislation, victims of sexual assault are much more likely to receive the protection and justice they deserve.

Part II of this comment outlines current federal law that intends to ad- dress sexual assault on college campus and whether these laws have been effective in preventing sexual assault. Part III details Virginia House Bill 1785 introduced in the 2015 Virginia General Assembly Session to address sexual …

Wrongful Confictions And Due Process Violations, Cheryl Page

Journal Publications

This analytical essay looks at the myriad of ways innocent people are wrongfully convicted and how the criminal justice system fails to truly reach a fair and equitable result. The article looks at how at the initial stages of a criminal proceeding, a defendant can be prejudiced to the point of sufficient harm to his chances at being given a fair and impartial judicial proceeding. This article examines how fatal mistakes can be made and reveals that there can be flaws in the science of DNA testing, including fraud, criminologist bias, improper laboratory procedures, and human error. This article seeks …

Rejustifying Retributive Punishment On Utilitarian Grounds In Light Of Neuroscientific Discoveries More Than Philosophical Calisthenics! , Robert B. Mccaleb

Cleveland State Law Review

Each of these unique features [of the Rotten Social Background (RSB) defense] is skeptically received by the classical criminal law mainly because of its fundamentally non-scientific, folk-psychological position on free will. However, discoveries in contemporary neuroscience strongly support each of these features. While chemical, causal, and deterministic brain events indisputably play a central role, RSB is virtually ignored as a frightening intrusion by materialism into the dualist sanctuary of the law. Yet RSB, as an indicator species for the health of the criminal law’s philosophic ecosystem, cannot be discounted out of hand any longer. In fact, the reconciliation of law …

The Financial Action Task Force And The Legal Profession, Duncan E. Osborne

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Lawyers In Combating Money Laundering And Terrorist Financing: Lessons From The English Approach, John A. Terrill Ii, Michael A. Breslow

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

U.S. Legal Profession Efforts To Combat Money Laundering And Terrorist Financing, Laurel S. Terry

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Compliance Convergence In Fatf Rulemaking: The Conflict Between Agency Capture And Soft Law, Dr. Saby Ghoshray

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Paying The Piper: The Cost Of Compliance With The Federal Sex Offender Registration And Notification Act, Jennifer N. Wang

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Racial Profiling In The War On Drugs Meets The Immigration Removal Process: The Case Of Moncrieffe V. Holder, Kevin R. Johnson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In Moncrieffe v. Holder, the Supreme Court held that the Board of Immigration Appeals could not remove a long-term lawful permanent resident from the United States based on a single misdemeanor conviction for possession of a small amount of marijuana. The decision clarified the meaning of an “aggravated felony” for purposes of removal, an important question under the U.S. immigration laws. In the removal proceedings, Adrian Moncrieffe, a black immigrant from Jamaica, did not challenge his arrest and drug conviction. Consequently, the Supreme Court did not review the facts surrounding, or the lawfulness of, the criminal prosecution. Nonetheless, the traffic …

Who Is Best Suited To Combat Sexual Violence On College Campuses?: An Analysis Of H.B. 1785, Susana Bass

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

Virginia House Bill 1785, requiring campus police to notify the Commonwealth’s Attorney of any victim-initiated sexual assault investigations, is a positive step forward in helping to combat sexual assault on Virginia college campuses. Under this legislation, victims of sexual assault are much more likely to receive the protection and justice they deserve.

Part II of this comment outlines current federal law that intends to ad- dress sexual assault on college campus and whether these laws have been effective in preventing sexual assault. Part III details Virginia House Bill 1785 introduced in the 2015 Virginia General Assembly Session to address sexual …

Unwrapping The Box The Supreme Court Justices Have Gotten Themselves Into: Internal Confrontations Over Confronting The Confrontation Clause, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Williams v. Illinois, handed down in 2012, is the latest in a new and revolutionary line of U.S. Supreme Court cases beginning with the 2004 decision of Crawford v. Washington which radically altered the Court's former approach to the Constitutional Confrontation Clause. That clause generally requires persons who make written or oral statements outside the trial, that may constitute evidence against a criminal defendant, to take the witness stand for cross-examination rather than those statements being presented at the trial only by the writing or by another person who heard the statement.

Previous to Crawford, under Ohio v. …

Arrests As Regulation, Eisha Jain

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For some arrested individuals, the most important consequences of their arrest arise outside the criminal justice system. Arrests alone—regardless of whether they result in conviction—can lead to a range of consequences, including deportation, eviction, license suspension, custody disruption, or adverse employment actions. But even as courts, scholars, and others have drawn needed attention to the civil consequences of criminal convictions, they have paid relatively little attention to the consequences of arrests in their own right. This article aims to fill that gap by providing an account of how arrests are systemically used outside the criminal justice system. Noncriminal justice actors …

Modifying Unjust Sentences, E. Lea Johnston

Georgia Law Review

Judicial sentence modification offers a means to address the phenomenon of over-incarcerationas well as the harsh prison conditions that threaten unjust punishment. Indeed, some legislatures have framed states' early release provisions as fulfilling goals of proportionality and just punishment. This Article explores whether the tools available to judges at sentence modification hearings are adequate to respond to the unjust punishment experienced by prisoners. In examining this question, the Article focuses on one population particularly likely to experience disproportionate or inhumane punishment: inmates with serious mental disorders. A deep literature suggests that individuals with serious mental illnesses are especially likely to …

Modifying Unjust Sentences, E. Lea Johnston

UF Law Faculty Publications

The United States is in the midst of an incarceration crisis. Over-incarceration is depleting state budgets and decimating communities. It has also led to the overfilling of prisons, which has degraded conditions of confinement, increased violence, and reduced access to needed medical and mental health care. Judicial sentence modification offers a means to address both the phenomenon of over-incarceration and harsh prison conditions that threaten unjust punishment. Indeed, some legislatures have framed states’ early release provisions as fulfilling goals of proportionality and just punishment. Proportionality is also an express purpose of the proposed Model Penal Code provisions on judicial sentence …

Leniency In Chinese Criminal Law? Everyday Justice In Henan, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines one year of publicly available criminal judgments from a basic-level rural county court and an intermediate court in Henan Province in order to better understand trends in routine criminal adjudication in China. I present an account of ordinary criminal justice in China that is both familiar and striking: a system that treats serious crimes, in particular those affecting State interests, harshly, while at the same time acting leniently in routine cases. Most significantly, examination of more than five hundred court decisions shows the vital role that settlement plays in criminal cases in China today. Defendants who agree …

Predictive Due Process And The International Criminal Court, Samuel C. Birnbaum

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The International Criminal Court (ICC) operates under a regime of complementarity: a domestic state prosecution of a defendant charged before the ICC bars the Court from hearing the case unless the state is unable or unwilling to prosecute the accused. For years, scholars have debated the role of due process considerations in complementarity. Can a state that has failed to provide the accused with adequate due process protections nonetheless bar a parallel ICC prosecution? One popular view, first expressed by Professor Kevin Jon Heller, holds that due process considerations do not factor into complementarity and the ICC could be forced …

The Death Penalty On The Streets: What The Eighth Amendment Can Teach About Regulating Police Use Of Force, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The use of force by police officers has traditionally been analyzed through the lens of Fourth Amendment reasonableness. The Supreme Court has decided that the proper question regarding the excessiveness of police force is whether the police officer acted as a reasonable law enforcement officer. When that police force is fatal — what this Article deems the death penalty on the streets — the legal question is the same, leaving us with an analysis that requires a heavy reliance on the officer's version of events and a host of disagreement on what constitutes appropriate police action. Reasonable minds can, …

Arendt On The Crime Of Crimes, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Genocide–-the intentional destruction of groups “as such”–-is sometimes called the “crime of crimes,” but explaining what makes it the crime of crimes is no easy task. Why are groups important over and above the individuals who make them up? Hannah Arendt tried to explain the uniqueness of genocide, but the claim of this paper is that she failed. The claim is simple, but the reasons cut deep.

Genocide, in Arendt’s view, “is an attack upon human diversity as such.” So far so good; but it is hard to square with Arendt’s highly individualistic conception of human diversity, which in her …

Prison Abolition And Grounded Justice, Allegra M. Mcleod

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article introduces to legal scholarship the first sustained discussion of prison abolition and what I will call a “prison abolitionist ethic.” Prisons and punitive policing produce tremendous brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair, and waste. Meanwhile, incarceration and prison-backed policing neither redress nor repair the very sorts of harms they are supposed to address—interpersonal violence, addiction, mental illness, and sexual abuse, among others. Yet despite persistent and increasing recognition of the deep problems that attend U.S. incarceration and prison-backed policing, criminal law scholarship has largely failed to consider how the goals of criminal law—principally deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and …