Criminal Law Commons^™

The Botched Hanging Of William Williams: How Too Much Rope And Minnesota’S Newspapers Brought An End To The Death Penalty In Minnesota, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This article describes Minnesota's last state-sanctioned execution: that of William Williams, who was hanged in 1906 in the basement of the Ramsey County Jail. Convicted of killing a teenage boy, Williams was tried on murder charges in 1905 and was put to death in February of the following year. Because the county sheriff miscalculated the length of the rope, the hanging was botched, with Williams hitting the floor when the trap door was opened. Three deputies, standing on the scaffold, thereafter seized the rope and forcibly pulled it up until Williams - fourteen and half minutes later - died by …

Recent Case, Ex Parte Hodges, Lauren D. Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In Ring v. Arizona,' the Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find beyond a reasonable doubt the aggravating circumstances necessary for imposition of the death penalty. The Court's narrow opinion emphasized that the jury must do all of the "factfinding necessary to put [a] defendant] to death," and it therefore appeared to leave intact the "hybrid" sentencing schemes of four states, which permitted the trial judge to impose the death penalty by overriding the jury's recommendation of a lesser sentence. Recently, in Ex parte Hodges, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed a sentence …

'Lesser Evils' In The War On Terrorism, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

The Adjudication Of Minor Offenses In New York City, Ian Weinstein

Fordham Urban Law Journal

American criminal justice is founded on overcriminalization and discretion. Our legislatures have long criminalized much more conduct than can be effectively sanctioned. American police and prosecutors have been granted virtually unreviewable authority (discretion) to allocate investigative and prosecutorial resources. Minor crimes absorb the bulk of our ordinary, local enforcement efforts and there is an endless supply of minor crime, which may be pursued. With minor offenses, discretion is critical at all phases. This article argues that criminal courts, where ninety percent of all cases are heard, could benefit from reform. The author argues for the development of the record so …

Implementing Blakely, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

By declaring that sentence-enhancing facts must be proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, the Supreme Court in Blakely v. Washington has raised a number of questions about the future of guided sentencing. One of these questions - only beginning to be explored - is what procedures would be needed in a system that both implements Blakely and preserves sentencing guidelines. What factors would be submitted to the jury and what instructions would be given? Would sentencing issues be presented to the jury in a separate hearing, distinct from trial? If so, what evidentiary rules would apply?

This paper …

Righting Victim Wrongs: Responding To Philosophical Criticisms Of The Nonspecific Victim Liability Defense, Aya Gruber

Publications

Modern criminal law is intensely one-sided in its treatment of victims and defendants. Crime victims and criminal defendants do not enter the trial process on an equal moral footing. Rather, from the beginning victims are assumed blameless, truthful, and even beyond doubt, while defendants are guilty, not worthy of credence, and immoral. This one-sided view of victims, however, is a fiction. As any other people, victims differ in their characterizations. Some are indeed trustworthy, truthful, blameless and ultimately innocent. Others, however, are bad actors themselves, have memory failures, falsely identify, provoke, and even lie. Some victims are in fact, and …

International Human Rights Standards In International Organizations: The Case Of International Criminal Courts, Kenneth S. Gallant

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law, Marla Graff Decker, Stephen R. Mccullough

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Defenders And Community Justice: The Drug Court Example, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The Community Justice idea and its core institution – the Community Court – is an ambitious innovation intended to generate new solutions and practices. It thus inevitably calls for adaptation of the established roles associated with the court system, and especially the criminal justice system. It asks practitioners to learn new skills, to accept new conventions, and to participate in the elaboration of a rapidly evolving experiment.

It is thus not surprising that many lawyers are anxious about the system. It remains an interesting question, however, whether their anxiety represents something more than the discomfort that change and challenge typically …

Revising The Model Penal Code: Keeping It Real, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of this talk can be simply stated: In any serious discussion of revising the Model Penal Code (MPC), the object of the game cannot be revising the MPC itself. Rather, the object of any revision of the Code is to promote the reform of the nation's actual criminal codes, as adopted by the state legislatures and Congress.

The Middle Class Fourth Amendment, Craig M. Bradley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Mental Health And Incarceration: What A Bad Combination, Olinda Moyd

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The District of Columbia has one of the highest per capita incarceration and criminal justice supervision rates in the United States1 and among the highest in the world. The local prison population has risen dramatically over the past decade for a variety of reasons including increased rates of re-incarceration for parole violations and the imposition of longer sentences for drug offenses. Recent acts of Congress have seriously impacted the sentencing laws in the District including determination of where persons sentenced for violating local D.C. laws will serve such sentences. On August 5, 1997, President Clinton signed into law The National …

Screening Versus Plea Bargaining: Exactly What Are We Trading Off?, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

I was delighted to be invited to comment on Ronald Wright and Marc Miller's important and instructive article, The Screening/Bargaining Tradeoff. Those familiar with the authors' work, including their original and fascinating criminal procedure casebook, will be unsurprised by many of the article's virtues, including a focus on empirical examination of real-world practice and (perhaps a special case of that more general virtue) attention to practices at the state and local level, where most criminal law enforcement actually occurs. Wright and Miller develop some interesting insights into the potential for changes in plea bargaining practices that have frequently been …

Unpatriotic Acts: An Introduction, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

John Walker Lindh. Zacarias Moussaoui. Jose Padilla. Richard Reid. Who reading these lines does not instantly recognize the names of these men? Or at least their assigned noms de guerre: American Taliban, 20th hijacker, dirty bomber, shoe bomber. For two and a half years these names and others have flitted through our daily copies of The New York Times like shadow characters in a play, along with black-and-white photographs underneath which black-and-white text tells us of their alleged (and sometimes proven) wrongdoing and the latest developments in their tribulations (and sometimes trials) with our government. But the men themselves are …

Criminal Law And Procedure, Julie E. Mcconnell, Gregory Franklin, Craig Winston Stallard

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Uncommon Law: Insanity, Executions, And Oklahoma Criminal Procedure, Bryan Lester Dupler

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

I Want A Black Lawyer To Represent Me: Addressing A Black Defendant's Concerns With Being Assigned A White Court-Appointed Lawyer, Kenneth P. Troccoli

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

"I want a Black lawyer to represent me." These are the first words you hear after you introduce yourself to your new client. You have been appointed to represent this man on a criminal charge. You are white. He is Black. You answer that you are an experienced criminal lawyer and will represent him to the best of your ability, regardless of his or your race. He responds that he too is experienced with the criminal justice system-a system that targets Black men, like himself, for prosecution far more than whites, that sentences Black men to prison more frequently and …

Opting For Real Death Penalty Reform, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

The capital punishment system in the United States is broken. Studies reveal growing delays nationwide between death sentences and executions and inexcusably high rates of reversals and retrials of capital verdicts. The current system persistently malfuinctions because it rewards trial actors, such as police, prosecutors, and trial judges, for imposing death sentences, but it does not force them either to avoid making mistakes or to bear the cost of mistakes that are made during the process. Nor is there any adversarial discipline imposed at the trial level because capital defendants usually receive appointed counsel who either do not have experience …

Glittery Promise Vs. Dismal Reality: The Role Of A Criminal Lawyer In The People's Republic Of China After The 1996 Revision Of The Criminal Procedure Law, Ping Yu

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In this Article, the Author examines the recent revisions to the Chinese Criminal Procedure Law. The Author maintains that while the revisions were intended to promote a more equitable criminal justice system, the political climate in fact has rendered the revisions a step down for both defense attorneys and defendants. The Author analyzes different aspects of the revised law in order to support this point. In his conclusion, the Author suggests some changes to the criminal procedure law that may help to bring the Chinese defense system up to international standards.

The International And Comparative Criminal Trial Project, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The International Criminal Trial Project (ICTP) has been in operation within the Centre for Legal Research (CLR), Nottingham Law school since January 2000. To date the project has succeeded in establishing a global network of scholars researching international and comparative criminal justice. The ICTP examines and compares trial processes and practice in a variety of local, regional and global contexts. The research incorporates particular evaluations of issues and relationships essential to the operation of trial process in different jurisdictions and stages of development. From the focus on the trial the project is producing knowledge about international and comparative criminal justice. …

Innocence Protection Act: Death Penalty Reform On The Horizon, Ronald Weich

All Faculty Scholarship

The criminal justice pendulum may be swinging back in the direction of fairness. The Innocence Protection Act of 2001, introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives earlier this year, promises meaningful reforms in the administration of capital punishment in the United States.

Unlike previous slabs at reform, the Innocence Protection Act (lPA) has a real chance to become law because it commands unusually broad bipartisan support. The Senate bill (S. 486) is sponsored by Democrat Pat Leahy of Vermont and Republican Gordon Smith of Oregon. The House bill (H.R. 912) is sponsored by Democrat Bill Delahunt of …

Voluntariness With A Vengeance: Miranda And A Modern Alternative, Jonathan B. Zeitlin

St. Thomas Law Review

One of the most famous opinions in American jurisprudence is that of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Miranda v. Arizona. The Court's prophylactic rule in Miranda has been followed in both state and federal courts with little derogation for over thirty years. On February 8, 1999, in Dickerson v. United States, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ignored Miranda, turning instead to 18 U.S.C. § 3501, a relatively obscure federal statute enacted in 1968 in response to the Court's decision in Miranda. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari and heard oral …

Sentencing Eddie, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

The mandatory minimum sentences attached to federal narcotics violations have come in for plenty of criticism. The United States Sentencing Commission in 1991 submitted a lengthy report critical of the mandatory minimum provisions. A political protest organization, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, has been formed, and has gotten some media attention. Newspaper columnists,professional commentators, judges, and academics, have criticized the statutes. Amidst the controversy over President Clinton's last-minute pardons of various offenders, his pardons of a number of marginal defendants sentenced to lengthy terms under these statutes have drawn little or no objection. Even Chief Justice Rehnquist, a strong voice for …

Two Fallacies About Dna Data Banks For Law Enforcement, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

This commentary on the article Legal and Policy Issues in Expanding the Scope of Law Enforcement DNA Data Banks, 67 Brook. L. Rev. 127 (2001), by Mark Rothstein and Sandra Carnahan, argues that the case for confining law enforcement DNA databases to noncoding loci and to samples from individuals convicted of violent crimes is quite weak.

It describes alternative approaches, including the possibility of a population-wide database; the privacy implications of the loci now used in forensic identification; the law governing DNA dragnets; and the limits on DNA databases imposed by recent cases on searches and seizures. It notes the …

"Apprendi" And Plea Bargaining, Nancy J. King, Susan Riva Klein

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Before "Apprendi", prosecutors using recidivism as a club could, and did, regularly insist that defendants admit aggravating facts as part of the plea or face additional time. When the prosecutor's threats of added time were not persuasive and the proof of aggravating facts weak, the defendant prior to "Apprendi" could refuse to admit to the aggravating fact, and plead guilty only to the offense without the aggravating fact. Nothing about "Apprendi" gives additional leverage to the prosecutor in this situation. A defendant who, prior to "Apprendi", decided to risk trial rather than face the aggravated sentence will make the same …

Justice Blackmun's Mark On Criminal Law And Procedure, Kit Kinports

Faculty Scholarship

When Justice Blackmun was nominated to the Court in 1970, Americans were consumed with the idea of crime control. In the 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon had called the Supreme Court "soft on crime" and had promised to "put 'law and order' judges on the Court." While sitting on the Eighth Circuit, the Justice had "seldom struck down searches, seizures, arrests or confessions," and most of his opinions in criminal cases had "affirmed guilty verdicts and sentences." Thus, according to one commentator, Justice Blackmun seemed to be "exactly what Nixon was looking for: a judge who believed in judicial restraint, …

Is Miranda Dead, Was It Overruled, Or Is It Irrelevant, Alfredo Garcia

St. Thomas Law Review

This Article will proceed in three stages. Part I will provide the historical, social, and political backdrop to the Miranda opinion. It will discuss the pragmatic basis for the path that the Court chose to follow in Miranda. Part II will underscore the attempts to overrule Miranda and the Court's almost instant departure from its doctrinal foundation. In doing so, the argument is that the Court's retreat can be viewed in large measure as a reaction to the negative response the opinion engendered, both politically and socially. It also can be viewed as the logical outcome of the Court's need …

Towards A Model Penal Code, Second (Federal?): The Challenge Of The Special Part, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

The Model Penal Code is among the most successful academic law reform projects ever attempted. In the first two decades after its completion in 1962, more than two-thirds of the states undertook to enact new codifications of their criminal law, and virtually all of those used the Model Penal Code as a starting point. The Model Penal Code was influential in a variety of different ways. First, the very notion of a systematic codification of criminal law received a dramatic boost from the Model Penal Code. Apart from the degree to which any particular state recodification resembled the Model Penal …

Co-Opting Compassion: The Federal Victim's Rights Amendment, Lynne N. Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

An American Prosecutor's View Of Romanian Criminal Justice, James A. Goldston

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.