Criminal Law Commons^™

"You Are Entering A Gay And Lesbian Free Zone": On The Radical Dissents Of Justice Scalia And Other (Post-) Queers – [Raising Questions About Lawrence, Sex Wars, And The Criminal Law], Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The most renowned substantive criminal law decision of the October 2002 Term, Lawrence v. Texas, will go down in history as a critical turning point in criminal law debates over the proper scope of the penal sanction. For the first time in the history of American criminal law, the United States Supreme Court has declared that a supermajoritarian moral belief does not necessarily provide a rational basis for criminalizing conventionally deviant conduct. The Court's ruling is the coup de grâce to legal moralism administered after a prolonged, brutish, tedious, and debilitating struggle against liberal legalism in its various criminal …

Summary Of Browning V. State, 120 Nev. Adv. Rep. 39, Nevada Law Journal

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a petition for post-conviction relief dismissed by the Eighth Judicial District Court, State of Nevada, finding that Petitioner “received effective assistance of counsel and that his other claims were procedurally barred.”

Summary Of Kaczmarek V. State, 120 Nev. Adv. Rep. 37, James Davis

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a conviction and sentence of death by jury trial in the Eighth Judicial District Court, State of Nevada, finding the Petitioner “guilty of burglary, robbery, first-degree kidnapping, and first degree murder, all committed with the assistance of a child.”

Summary Of Lara V. State, 120 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 20, Hilary Barrett Muckleroy

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a district court order denying a post-conviction petition for a write of habeas corpus.

Summary Of Martinez V. State, Scott Whittemore

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Gina Martinez appealed a district court order denying her motion for return of money deposited as bail.

Summary Of Roberts V. State, Christina H. Wang

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a judgment of conviction, pursuant to a guilty plea, of one count of possession of a controlled substance

Summary Of State V. Catanio, 120 Nev. Adv. Rep. 103, Christopher Carson

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

This case was an appeal by the State from a district court order dismissing charges of lewdness with a minor for failure to meet an essential element of the test laid out in NRS 201.230. Catanio worked as a teacher’s aide and volunteer track coach at a middle school in Reno, Nevada. During the fall of 2002, Catanio befriended three young boys and began giving them gifts on a daily basis. The gifts escalated from candy to more elaborate, personal and inappropriate objects including video game systems, air pistols, pornographic material and condoms. In December 2002, Catanio escalated the relationship …

Summary Of State V. Dist. Ct. (Romano), Christina Wang

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Real party in interest Robert Romano is charged in an indictment with four counts of sexual assault of a minor under fourteen years of age and ten counts of lewdness with a child under fourteen years of age. Romano and his girlfriend are the natural parents of the child victim, born May 5, 1997. In November 2002, the child allegedly told her mother that Romano had engaged in inappropriate activities with her. The mother contacted Nevada Child Protective Services and, at that agency’s request, took the child to Sunrise Hospital for evaluation. A pediatric emergency physician at Sunrise testified before …

True To Character: Honoring The Intellectual Foundations Of The Character Evidence Rule In Domestic Violence Prosecutions, Andrew King-Ries

Faculty Law Review Articles

This article calls for a new character evidence rule allowing the admission of prior acts of abuse within the context of a current domestic violence prosecution. Section II discusses the history of domestic violence in America and explores the three ways that the law has condoned domestic violence, including implicit sanction through the effect of the character evidence rule. Section III examines the intellectual background of the character evidence ban. This section also explores the conflict between the character evidence rule and the law's recognition of domestic violence. Further, Section III demonstrates how the character evidence ban violates its underlying …

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 …

From Rethinking To Internationalizing Criminal Law, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Writing Rethinking Criminal Law ("Rethinking") was a gamble. No one had ever written a serious book on comparative criminal law – in English or in any other language. No one had ever addressed English-speaking readers with the argument that some other system of legal thought – espoused by a nation defeated in a major war just thirty years before – had a superior literature on criminal law and a more refined way of thinking about the structure of criminal offenses. No one had tried to present the system of criminal law as though it were a species of …

Ambivalence About Treason, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Betrayal and disloyalty are grievous moral wrongs, yet today when the disloyal commit treason we seem reluctant to punish them. John Walker Lindh fought for the Taliban with full knowledge that it was engaged in hostilities against the United States. It should not have been so difficult to prove by two witnesses to the overt act, as the Constitution requires, that he adhered to the enemy giving them aid and comfort. Admittedly, there were legal problems about whether the Taliban as an indirect enemy in an undeclared war could qualify as the enemy in the constitutional sense. But there was …

Be Careful What You Wish For: Legal Sanctions And Public Safety Among Adolescent Offenders In Juvenile And Criminal Court, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik, Akiva Liberman

Faculty Scholarship

Three decades of legislative activism have resulted in a broad expansion of states' authority to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. At the same time that legislatures have broadened the range of statutes and lowered the age thresholds for eligibility for transfer, states also have reallocated discretion away from judges and instituted simplified procedures that permit prosecutors to elect whether adolescents are prosecuted and sentenced in juvenile or criminal court. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that relatively lenient or attenuated punishment in juvenile court violates proportionality principles for serious crimes committed by adolescents, and is …

Obstructing Justice: The Rise And Fall Of The Aedpa

San Diego Law Review

From 1994 through as late as August 2001, the United States intelligence community1

received information that terrorists had seriously contemplated using airplanes as instruments for carrying out international terrorist attacks.2

This method of attack was clearly “discussed in terrorist circles,” yet community analysts demonstrated little effort to strategically counter such terrorist groups. Moreover, in 1998, U.S. intelligence received specific information that “a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center.” In July 2001, senior government officials were warned of “a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in …

Hierarchies Of Harm In Canadian Criminal Law: The Marijuana Trilogy And The Forcible 'Correction' Of Children, Janine Benedet

All Faculty Publications

The author examines the seemingly contradictory Supreme Court of Canada decisions which upheld the prohibition on possession of marijuana (R. v. Malmo-Levine), yet allowed the defence of “reasonable correction” for parents and teachers charged with assaulting a child (Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law v. Canada (Attorney General)). She argues that these two decisions speak to the limits of the criminal law and the role that section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms plays in setting those limits. These decisions are also linked by the attempt by some members of the Court to establish a …

Aedpa's "Adjudication On The Merits" Requirement: Collateral Review, Federalism, And Comity, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

The modern law of federal habeas corpus is a labyrinth of counterfactuals and arcane procedural hurdles that few state petitioners manage to navigate-as Justice Blackmun once wrote less charitably in dissent, "a Byzantine morass of arbitrary, unnecessary, and unjustifiable impediments to the vindication of federal rights." The convoluted inquiries required arise from the need to reconcile three developments of the past four decades that remain in tension with one another: first, the Warren Court's expansion of federal habeas relief, identified with Fay v. Noia and its progeny; second, the Burger and Rehnquist Courts' curtailment of that expansion, identified with Wainwright …

Due Process Denied: Judicial Coercion In The Plea Bargaining Process, Richard Klein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche In Law's Cathedral: Beyond Reason And Postmodernism, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

Nietzsche had very little to say about law and what he did say is fragmentary and sporadic. Nietzsche's philosophy, however, offers a basis for theorizing about law. I use Nietzsche's important works to interpret two major movements in legal thought. The first part of the paper examines how Nietzsche's philosophy augments our understanding of deontological theories about the law. Nietzsche produced a substantial ethical theory. The second part of the paper examines how Nietzsche's philosophy helps us to understand law and economics. Nietzsche had a great deal to say about the intellectual predecessor to law and economics, utilitarianism, and his …

Lawyers Should Be Lawyers, But What Does That Mean?: A Response To Aiken & Wizner And Smith, Katherine R. Kruse

Scholarly Works

Lawyers should be more like social workers. That is the message of Law as Social Work, the provocative essay by Jane Aiken and Stephen Wizner (Aiken & Wizner) in the Washington University Journal of Law & Policy volume, which preceded the conference on Promoting Justice Through Interdisciplinary Teaching, Practice, and Scholarship, hosted by Washington University School of Law in March 2003. Almost as if in reply, Abbe Smith's contribution to the same pre-conference volume reasserts the importance of lawyers as zealous and partisan advocates, using the realities of the criminal defense context to argue for the value of the lawyer's …

Federalism And The Federal Criminal Law, Craig M. Bradley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

O Say, Can You See: Free Expression By The Light Of Fiery Crosses, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article presents a comprehensive, context-based theory which both places cross burning in its proper doctrinal framework and recognizes the history of cross burning as one of Ku Klux Klan-inspired terrorism directed at African Americans. The author prefaces critical commentary on the Supreme Court's decision in Virginia v. Black with analysis of the full landscape of cross burning cases including another issue to which others have paid little attention - the ways in which state courts have negotiated First Amendment challenges to cross burning statutes. Thoroughly examining cross burning from each of these perspectives, the Article argues that cross burning …

Section 2254(D) Of The Federal Habeas Statute: Is It Beyond Reason?, Evan Tsen Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Lost History Of Apprendi And The Blakely Petition For Rehearing, Rory K. Little, Teresa Chen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Prisons As Progressive Punishment? The State Of Corrective Services, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In the early days of his third term as Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr challenged his government to move away from current law and order politics and to come up with a more progressive approach to punishment. Central to this would be a reconsideration of the place of the prison in criminal justice. Prisons, by their nature and the communities they house, suffer more acutely from the factors of social exclusion that characterise the underprivileged sectors of Australian society. Without the exacerbation of a custodial experience, these characteristics alone militate against the successful reintegration of prisoners back into …

Prosecuting Martha: Federal Prosecutorial Power And The Need For A Law Of Counts, Michael L. Seigel, Christopher Slobogin

UF Law Faculty Publications

Martha Stewart's case illustrates a wide variety of prosecutorial decision-making. We have defended the U.S. Attorney's decision to investigate and prosecute Stewart, but called into question the further decision to charge her with five counts. As a way of curtailing the redundant charging phenomenon, which is widespread, we have suggested that the courts develop a law of counts to cabin prosecutorial charging discretion. Thus, our proposal to create a law of counts would not require prosecutors to act against their short- or long-term interests. Rather, it would be implemented by judges using the interpretive method, without going so far as …

Summary Of State V. Bennett, 119 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 63, Shane Jasmine Young

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal and cross-appeal from a district court order granting in part and denying in part Defendant’s post-conviction petition for a writ of habeas corpus in a capital case.

Teaching Susan Glaspell's A Jury Of Her Peers And Trifles, Marina Angel

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Ethical Issues In Defending A Terrorism Case: Stuck In The Middle, Joshua L. Dratel

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

The article discusses the ethical and legal challenges faced by criminal defense attorneys in terrorism cases, particularly focusing on the impact of Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA). These measures create significant barriers to effective legal representation, undermining the constitutional rights of defendants and the attorney-client relationship. The author argues that these practices not only impair the defense in terrorism cases but also risk encroaching on civil liberties in ordinary criminal cases.

Ethical Issues In Defending A Terrorism Case: How Secrecy And Security Impair The Defense Of A Terrorism Case, Joshua L. Dratel

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

The article discusses the unique ethical and legal challenges faced by criminal defense attorneys in terrorism cases, particularly highlighting the impact of Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA). These laws and regulations, expanded post-September 11, 2001, create significant barriers to effective representation, undermining the attorney-client relationship and constitutional protections. The article emphasizes how these measures not only complicate terrorism cases but also risk bleeding into other areas of criminal law, eroding civil liberties more broadly.

Criminal Law And Criminal Procedure, John O. Cole, Bonnie K. Cole

Mercer Law Review

In reading over 900 cases in criminal law and criminal procedure during the survey period, the fact that courts find the time to carefully analyze the allegations of error in each case is striking. The difference in the quality of the courts' work is especially striking when compared to the courts of twenty years ago.

Several themes emerge after reading these cases. The first theme is the number of specious arguments raised on appeal. This is due, in large part, to the Georgia Supreme Court's opinion in Huguley v. State in which the court disapproved Anders motions and forced attorneys …