Criminal Law Commons^™

Yet Another Elected Power: A Case For Randomly Selected Forepersons, Cj Miller

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Most United States courts require the jury to elect their own foreperson, a role that has amplified influence on the jury’s verdict. In practice, the election process is done quickly and without discussion. As a result, the foreperson is demographically biased toward older men of high socioeconomic status. This paper uses psychological literature to argue that the current selection system produces suboptimal forepersons. Instead, it proposes a system of random selection, including an opt-out procedure for those who do not feel capable of holding the position.

Minimal Rationality And The Law Of Evidence, Ronald J. Allen, Michael S. Pardo, William J. Lawrence, Christopher K. Smiciklas

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

For more than a century, one of the pillars upon which the law of evidence was thought to rest is that the primary (although by no means exclusive) objective of the law of evidence is to further accurate fact-finding by maximizing the rationality of the evidentiary process. The crux of this pillar is that the law of evidence increases rationality (and thereby increases accuracy) through admissibility rules that (1) require reliable evidence, and (2) behave paternalistically toward jurors and their cognitive abilities. This Article aims to supplant this pillar by showing that the law of evidence pursues minimal, not maximal, …

Justice Ginsburg's Criminal Justice Legacy: Fair Tribunals, Fair Punishment, Sandra Guerra Thompson, Samantha Medlin

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Scholars have written much about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legacy in many areas of law, but her criminal justice legacy has yet to be fully articulated, likely because she penned few important opinions in this field. This article argues that Justice Ginsburg had an enormous impact across a large area of criminal justice cases decided by the slimmest majority. We explore these close cases and, in so doing, we show her to have played a crucial role in a remarkable number of landmark cases that extended important constitutional protections to criminal defendants. Specifically, she joined the majorities in …

Crimes Without Law: Administrative Crimes And The Nondelegation Doctrine, Nicolas Elliott-Smith

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The future of the nondelegation doctrine is clouded with uncertainty. Despite the Supreme Court’s insistence that the nondelegation doctrine is an axiom of constitutional law, the doctrine remains an illusory constraint on Congress. Indeed, almost a century has passed since the Court invalidated a congressional delegation under the nondelegation doctrine. But several Justices appear eager—or at least willing—to revive the nondelegation doctrine.

This Comment charts an originalist path forward. It primarily argues that the original meaning of legislative power restrains Congress from delegating legislative authority to write criminal law. The constitutional enactors believed that core private rights—to life, liberty, and …

Towards A Federalism(S) Framework Of Punishment, Sheldon A. Evans

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Federalism and its impact on criminal punishment is foundational to understanding the failures of mass incarceration. Scholars studying the negotiation of power between the federal and state governments have highlighted the increase of cooperative agreements that allow these levels of government to accomplish mutually beneficial outcomes for their overlapping constituencies. In the context of criminal punishment, however, such cooperation has devolved into a race to the bottom in a bipartisan push to punish. Consequently, the modern cooperative era of federalism has facilitated mass incarceration in many respects as a policy vehicle to accomplish a national tough-on-crime agenda.

This Article argues …

Military Justice: The Forgotten Jurisdiction In Capital Punishment, Erica C. Medley

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The military capital punishment scheme for murder in peacetime is unconstitutional. It does not meet the Eighth Amendment’s requirement of heightened reliability for capital cases because it fails to include a trial by jury. The Supreme Court identified concerns about court-martial panels compared to juries in Reid v. Covert and United States ex rel. Toth v. Quarles. These concerns are exacerbated by the research from the Capital Jury Project regarding how the race and gender of jurors can affect capital sentencing determinations. Specifically, as the number of white males increases on a jury, the likelihood of a death sentence increases. …

Sentencing Insurrection, Kevin Lapp

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

On January 6, 2021, an estimated two thousand people broke police lines and breached the U.S. Capitol building in an effort to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election results. Over one thousand people have been charged with various crimes for their actions that day, from misdemeanor trespassing charges to felony assault with a weapon and seditious conspiracy. Relying on publicly available sources, this Article presents results from an analysis of the first 514 people to have been sentenced in federal court for crimes committed on January 6. The result is a snapshot of the insurrectionists, the charges they …

The Unknowns Of The Knowledge Requirement: Revisiting The Deliberate Indifference Standard In Prisoner Healthcare, Malina J. Simard-Halm

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

In the 1976 decision Estelle v. Gamble, the Supreme Court held that “deliberate indifference” to significant health needs of prisoners violated the Eighth Amendment. The standard’s knowledge requirement, however, ensured that prisoners were not guaranteed healthcare under the constitutional standard; rather, the constitutionality of healthcare in prisons would be tethered to the mental state of prison officials. This Article seeks to demonstrate that correctional standards of healthcare occupy an incoherent space in constitutional law. By analyzing the legal standard and the application of the knowledge requirement, this Article exposes the theoretical inconsistency and inadequacy of the deliberate indifference standard—and …

Proof Beyond A Reasonable Doubt Doesn't Exist: Except As An Emergent Property Of A Complex Adaptive System, Ronald J. Allen, Nicolas Elliott-Smith

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The pursuit of knowledge is undergoing a transformation. Scientists and scholars are rejecting standard reductionist efforts, popularly captured by “the scientific method” and embracing the framework of complexity theory and complex adaptive systems. That framework is invaluable to understand both the law of evidence and the nature of Anglo-American legal systems. It also has significant implications for the ongoing debate over the concept of law. This Article demonstrates how “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” (BARD) does not exist in any knowable form, except as an emergent property of a complex adaptive system—the criminal process. First, what constitutes BARD will vary …

Probation Without A Home: How Probation Maintains Barriers To Successful Completion While Homeless, Olivia K. Babin

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, national attention is being brought to discussions about the criminalization of homelessness and the experiences of homeless people in the criminal legal system. Community supervision (probation and parole) is an oft-forgotten portion of the criminal justice system, despite there being nearly triple the number of people on parole or probation than the number of people incarcerated in the United States. Probation specifically is seen as an alternative to incarceration. Some view it as a more humane punishment than incarceration; others believe probation is far too lenient and sentenced too often. …

Institutional Structures Of Penal Inequality, Alexandra Natapoff

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The U.S. penal apparatus is a bundle of wildly divergent practices. Police in some cities use more force than others. Prosecutors in some jurisdictions file charges automatically while others screen carefully. Public defenders in some counties lack zeal while others provide high quality representation. Offices that share the same name and perform the same basic legal functions—“police,” “prosecutor,” “public defender,” “criminal court”—actually operate according to highly disparate legal, professional, and normative standards. These differences give rise to a stratified criminal process in which a minority of defendants and cases are handled lawfully with attention and care, while a much larger …

Prurient Interests: The Law Of Sexual Desire, Lawrence M. Friedman

FIU Law Review

A recent book by George Fisher tries to explain the history of drug and alcohol laws in terms of social and legal norms against whatever can rob people of rational thinking; this article extends the analysis to laws about sexual behavior in the last two centuries, their rise and fall.

Absent Words, Absent Consent: Gisèle Pélicot And The Limits Of French Rape Law, Victoria Baez

FIU Law Review

France's force-based definition of rape, which centers on violence, coercion, threat, or surprise, fails to adequately protect victims who are unconscious, incapacitated, or otherwise unable to resist. This deficiency was highlighted by the Mazan case, where structural gaps in French law made prosecuting mass sexual assaults involving an unconscious victim unusually complex. Under this framework, the legal requirements to establish rape distort the understanding of consent and perpetuate longstanding rape myths, including the presumption that silence implies agreement. Although convictions were ultimately secured in the Mazan case, they occurred despite the structure of the law. Without reform, France's current rape …

Contested Criminalization, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

How does the U.S. government decide to deploy criminal justice abroad? From the Syrian civil war to the Israel-Gaza conflict, Russia-Ukraine War, and U.S.-China relations, criminal law sits at the heart of contemporary U.S. foreign relations. And yet legal scholarship has never precisely explained how the U.S. government deploys or supports criminal prosecutions abroad, often defaulting to simplistic labels of the United States as exceptionalist, carceral, or isolationist. This Article rectifies this by introducing a theory of contested criminalization, piercing the veil of U.S. government decisionmaking in its use of criminal law in foreign policy. According to this process, …

Disentangling Safety And Accountability In Criminal Justice Policy, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In this Article, I argue that the U.S. criminal system and debates about criminal justice reform reflect an elision of two largely distinct social functions: ensuring public safety and imposing accountability for harmful conduct. Despite deep disagreement about the specifics, most commentators seem to accept that these are both important social functions. Abolitionists claim that the criminal system doesn’t keep people safe and provide accountability. Instead, it harms—and perhaps is meant to harm—people from marginalized communities and protects the interest of socially dominant groups. Reformers contend that the criminal system can and should serve the safety and/or accountability interests, but …

Abolish What?, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

From leading academic journals to popular press outlets, abolitionist activism and scholarship have earned airtime in national debates about criminal justice reform. But what is "abolition?" When scholars, lawyers, and activists talk about abolition, they seem to mean very different, even conflicting, things. In this Essay, I focus on a core question that might divide different abolitionists-and different critics of abolition: what is to be abolished? Abolitionists argue that it's critically important to abolish something, while critics of abolition insist that something is necessary to a well-functioning society. Yet, it's not always clear what that something is-both for abolitionists and …

Ten Years And Ten Miles: Reflecting On "Ferguson", Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Essay serves as the introduction to a symposium on the ten-year anniversary of Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri and the subsequent protests and uprisings across the country. The authors look back on the past decade—their own experiences and our experiences as a nation—to consider the impacts of the Ferguson uprisings and the landscape of criminal justice and racial justice advocacy, scholarship, and teaching today. In this Essay, I provide a brief introduction to the Volume and essays that follow. In Part I, I situate the Ferguson uprisings in the broader context of activism responsive to racial injustice in …

The Mass Murder Epidemic Of The United States: Policy, Reflections, And The Way Through, Isaiah Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

This work is an in-depth look at American culture and how the culture has shaped gun policies in the U.S. I also examine various policies that could be used to mitigate mass shootings in the United States, as well as some of the reasons these incidents have become so prevalent.

Intoxicated Scootering: Rethinking Electric Scooter Liability In Washington, David Goodwin

Washington Law Review

The widespread acceptance of electric scooters has transformed the landscape of urban transportation. Yet, the emerging phenomenon of intoxicated scootering poses unanswered questions of liability and accountability. New research indicates that a third of traumatic electric scooter injuries are associated with intoxicated scootering. This statistic is particularly alarming given that there are over fifty million scooter trips per year in the United States.

In Washington State, the State Legislature has not enacted a state-wide policy against intoxicated scootering. Instead, the Legislature delegates the authority to regulate the operation of electric scooters to local governments. Due to the ambiguity of whether …

Shocking Sentences, John B. Meixner Jr.

Scholarly Works

Harsh recidivist sentencing penalties, like three-strikes laws, have been criticized heavily among both academics and practitioners on a number of different grounds. Most arguments focus on how sentences arising from these penalties are disproportionate—that there is no sensible relationship between the wrong committed and the sentence imposed. Those critiques are valid, but there’s another important problem with recidivist sentencing penalties that has been overlooked: they lead to sentences that are totally unexpected—indeed, shocking—to the defendants who face them. Many recidivist sentencing penalties cause large leaps in sentencing exposure that amount to exponential growth when compared with a defendant’s prior sentences. …

Criminalizing Ecocide, Rebecca Hamilton

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Amid widespread acknowledgment that we live on a planet in peril, the term “ecocide” packs a powerful rhetorical punch. Extant regulatory approaches to environmental protection feel insufficient in the face of the triple threat of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. International criminal prosecution for ecocide, by contrast, promises to meet the moment, and a recent proposal to introduce ecocide into the canon of core international crimes is gaining traction. Assuming the push to criminalize ecocide continues to gain momentum, this Article argues that the primary (and perhaps, sole) benefit that international criminal law can offer in this context is …

Deconstructing Burglary, Ira P. Robbins

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The law of burglary has long played a vital role in protecting hearth and home. Because of the violation of one’s personal space, few crimes engender more fear than burglary; thus, the law should provide necessary safety and security against that fear. Among other things, current statutes aim to deter trespassers from committing additional crimes by punishing them more severely based on their criminal intent before they execute their schemes. Burglary law even protects domestic violence victims against abusers who attempt to invade their lives and terrorize them.

However, the law of burglary has expanded and caused so many problems …

A Model State Compensation Law For The Wrongfully Convicted, Jacqueline Kamel

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of Spencer Headworth’S Rules Of The Road: The Automobile And The Transformation Of American Criminal Justice, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Categorical Declinations & Democracy, Brenner M. Fissell

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The most contentious action taken by reform prosecutors has been the issuance of categorical declination policies. Opponents decry this as bureaucratic nullification of democratically enacted offenses, while the prosecutors themselves counter that they are responding to the will of their local electorate. Democracy claims, it appears, have taken center stage in this debate, and they are deployed by both sides. How should we think about democracy and categorical declinations? The most comprehensive scholarly work on this subject is a 2021 article by Professor Kerrel Murray. In this essay, I hope to continue the work begun by Murray, offering additional insights …

Evidence Of Unfairness: New York's 2020 Discovery Statute Reduced Fairness For Defendants, Victims, And Society, Hannah E. Meyers

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

To ensure fairness and safety for all citizens, it is crucial to evaluate the impact of criminal justice reforms. In this article, I argue that some recent statewide criminal justice reforms legislated with the avowed goal of making the criminal justice system fairer have had the opposite result. As a case study of this phenomenon, I focus on New York State’s discovery statute, which went into effect in January 2020. I detail specifically what the law changed and explain the profound impact of those changes on the functioning of local district attorneys’ offices.

I then analyze data showing a substantial …

Legislatures And Localized Resentencing, Ronald F. Wright, Kay L. Levine

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Recent legislation, exemplified in statutes from California and Washington, creates new methods for resentencing defendants in old cases. These laws place controlling authority for resentencing in the hands of local officials, especially local prosecutors, and invite variation at the county level.

While some new procedural channels for reducing the sentences of people convicted of past crimes are mandatory, in that they entitle certain defendants to resentencing if they were convicted of certain crimes or were subject to certain penalty enhancements that are no longer valid, other statutes create discretionary resentencing channels. In the discretionary channels, the chief local prosecutor has …

Second Look Myopia: State Sentencing Reform And The Local Prosecutorial Response, Alexandra Harrington

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This Article advises caution against over-reliance on local prosecutors’ offices to effect second-look reforms and to filter cases worthy of review. Using the lens of New York’s recent second-look law, the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA), I analyze the ways in which the local prosecutor can serve as a functional barrier to statewide implementation of sentencing reform. The New York State Legislature enacted the DVSJA—after advocacy from hundreds of directly impacted individuals, stakeholders, and organizations and after significant opposition from only the District Attorneys’ Association—to change the way the State sentences survivors of domestic violence. The DVSJA also allows …

County Prosecution And State Preemption: The Confusing Politics Of Criminal Legal Reform And Backlash, John Pfaff

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Urban reform prosecutors, who are generally elected at the county level, find themselves in a tricky political spot. On the one hand. most urban counties are in many ways “too big” for reformers: they include large numbers of suburban voters who generally dislike reform, in no small part because they are relatively unaffected by the decisions prosecutors make. On the other hand, these counties are also often “too small”: they lack the political power to resist efforts by conservative state legislatures and governors to rein in, if not outright remove, reformers. This Article examines both vulnerabilities. It first maps out …

The Slow Drip Of Decarceration: Reversing The Flood Of Mass Incarceration And Its Racist Impact, Olinda Moyd

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

For the last four decades, the flood of African Americans pouring into our jails and prisons can be likened to a watershed where someone turned on a faucet full force and opened the floodgates to all the prison doors. Despite the multitudinous efforts to secure the release of people unwittingly swept up in this flood, most spending decades behind bars, their releases have been mediocre and only a few have slowly dripped towards freedom. Racism seeps into every facet of American life and nowhere is it more prevalent than in our criminal legal system and the crisis of mass incarceration. …