Criminal Law Commons^™

In Vindication Of Justiciable Victims' Rights To Truth And Justice For State-Sponsored Crimes, Raquel Aldana-Pindell

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In this Article, Professor Aldana-Pindell explores the norms establishing a state's responsibility to grant victims of human rights violations adequate rights in the criminal prosecution process as a remedy for their victimization. She argues that victim-focused prosecution norms comport and provide more effective means of promoting respect for human rights, in certain nations in democratic transition from mass atrocities. Moreover, she suggests that, as part of other justice reforms, states plagued with impunity should adopt criminal procedures granting surviving human rights victims greater standing in the prosecution process. Professor Aldana-Pindell then uses Guatemala to examine the factors that compel the …

The Jury's Role In Administering Justice In The U.S. Introduction To Saint Louis Public Law Review Jury Issue, Stephen C. Thaman

All Faculty Scholarship

This introduction to the special jury issue of Saint Louis University’s Public Law Review briefly discusses the Conference “Lay Participation in the Criminal Trial in the Twenty-First Century,” in which all of the contributors to this issue participated. The conference took place at the International Institute for Higher Studies in the Criminal Sciences in Siracusa, Italy from May 25-29, 1999. It also discusses select papers and perspectives on the American jury system published in this issue of the journal.

Latin America's First Modern System Of Lay Participation: The Reform Of Inquisitorial Justice In Venezuela, Stephen C. Thaman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article describes the new Venezuelan jury and mixed court systems that were introduced by Codigo Organico Procesal Penal in 1998, in the context of the code’s radical transition to accusatorial and adversarial procedure.

Justice By The Numbers: The Supreme Court And The Rule Of Four-Or Is It Five?, Ira Robbins

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: In the early hours of April 14, 2000, Robert Lee Tarver died in Alabama's electric chair, even though four Justices of the United States Supreme Court had voted to review the merits of his case. This situation is not unique. Each year, practitioners and pro se litigants alike petition the Supreme Court without fully knowing the rules pursuant to which the Court will decide their client's, or their own, fate. The reason is that the Supreme Court operates under two sets of rules-those that are published and those that are not. The former specify This Article is based on …

Introduction To The Symposium: Homophobia In The Halls Of Justice: Sexual Orientation Bias And Its Implications Within The Legal System, Brenda V. Smith, Pamela Bridgewater

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The gay moment is unavoidable. -Andrew Kopkind

Gay activist, journalist and political commentator Andrew Kopkind made this profound observation at a critical moment in the queer rights movement, in the midst of the March on Washington, pride rallies, queer organizing and the ever strengthening movement to address the AIDS crisis within the queer community. The moment, however, meant different things to participants in the movement. Over the years, the queer or sexual liberation movement transformed itself into a much more equality-based movement with the most energy focused on securing recognition of gay marriage and equal access to the military. As …

The Preventive Effects Of Arrest On Intimate Partner Violence: Research, Policy And Theory, Christopher D. Maxwell, Joel H. Garner, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

This research addresses the limitations of prior analyses and reviews of five experiments testing for the specific deterrent effect of arrest on intimate partner violence by applying to individual level data consistent eligibility criteria, common independent and outcome measures, and appropriate statistical tests. Based on 4,032 cases involving adult males who assaulted their female intimate partners, multivariate regression analyses show consistent but modest reductions in subsequent offenses targeting the original victim that is attributable to arresting the suspect. Although the reductions attributable to arrest are similar across all five studies, other factors, such as the suspect's prior arrest record, are …

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 …

The War On Terrorism And The End Of Human Rights, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, President Bush stated that the perpetrators of the deed would be brought to justice. Soon afterwards, the President announced that the United States would engage in a war on terrorism. The first of these statements adopts the familiar language of criminal law and criminal justice. It treats the September 11 attacks as horrific crimes—mass murders—and the government’s mission as apprehending and punishing the surviving planners and conspirators for their roles in the crimes. The War on Terrorism is a different proposition, however, and a different model of governmental action—not law but war. Most …

A Broken System, Part Ii: Why There Is So Much Error In Capital Cases And What Can Be Done About It, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Andrew Gelman, Valerie West, Garth Davies, Alexander Kiss

Faculty Scholarship

There is growing awareness that serious, reversible error permeates America’s death penalty system, putting innocent lives at risk, heightening the suffering of victims, leaving killers at large, wasting tax dollars, and failing citizens, the courts and the justice system.

Our June 2000 Report shows how often mistakes occur and how serious it is: 68% of all death verdicts imposed and fully reviewed during the 1973-1995 study period were reversed by courts due to serious errors.

Analyses presented for the first time here reveal that 76% of the reversals at the two appeal stages where data are available for study were …

Rates Of Reversible Error And The Risk Of Wrongful Execution, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Innocent fatalities are a concern of all social activity with a capacity to kill. This is especially true when the social activity is the death penalty since an innocent person's execution is not simply a tragic collateral consequence of activity with a non-fatal objective. Instead, the taking of life is the goal of the enterprise, and the killing is the intended act of the state.

There is another difference between accidental fatalities in other social activities and those that occur when the capital system miscarries. Typically, the former fatalities are easy to spot and quantify; the latter are not. Precisely …

This Will Hurt Me More Than It Hurts You: Social And Legal Consequences Of Criminalizing Delinquency, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

What happens to adolescents once placed in the criminal justice system and the potential violations of human rights that ensue is the focus of this essay. The pace of change, the severity of the new laws, the potential for unintended negative outcomes, and the empirical reality of adult punishment of juvenile offenders creates new urgency to these questions. Unfortunately, there has been little analysis of the comparative effects of statutes and administrative laws that relocate juvenile offenders to the adult court, and there has been virtually no research on the efficacy, impact and consequences of sentencing juveniles as adults. There …

People V. Molineux And Other Crime Evidence: One Hundred Years And Counting, Randolph N. Jonakait

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Take Courage: What The Courts Can Do To Improve The Delivery Of Criminal Defense Services, Adele Bernhard

Articles & Chapters

In this article, I first, suggest that the current deplorable state of criminal defense services should provide a motivation for judicial action. Then, I review the precedent providing the foundation for judicial action. In the third section, I discuss the standards applicable to defense services. In the final section, I speculate about the changing role of the criminal defense attorney and how that evolution might hasten judicial action.

Crime And Consciousness: Science And Involuntary Acts , Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This Article confronts this clash between legal and scientific perspectives on consciousness by proposing new ways to structure the voluntary act requirement so that it incorporates the insights of modern science on the human mind. Part I examines the criminal law's voluntary act requirement, particularly in the context of the MPC's influential provision, which reflects the law and psychology of the era in which the MPC was originally developed--the 1950s. Part II analyzes the new science of “consciousness,” a term that typically refers to the sum of a person's thoughts, feelings, and sensations, as well as the everyday circumstances and …

Deterring Retributivism: The Injustice Of 'Just' Punishment, Russell Christopher

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Street Crime, Corporate Crime, And Theories Of Punishment: A Response To Brown, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

In this response to Darryl Brown's important article, Street Crime, Corporate Crime, and the Contingency of Criminal Liability, Professor Huigens argues that Brown has chosen the wrong theory of punishment on which to rest his case for a more regulatory, less punitive, approach to street crime. Brown has chosen the best, most sophisticated consequentialist theory of punishment, as developed principally by Dan Kahan. However, consequentialist punishment theory of any kind has a significant drawback: it has no plausible conception of criminal fault. As a result, Brown is constrained to argue that the language of desert and retribution should be muted …

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

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Policing Guns And Youth Violence, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

To combat the epidemic of youth gun violence in the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement agencies across the United States adopted a variety of innovative strategies. This article presents case studies of eight cities' efforts to police gun crime. Some cities emphasized police-citizen partnerships to address youth violence, whereas others focused on aggressive enforcement against youth suspected of even minor criminal activity. Still others attempted to change youth behavior through "soft" strategies built on alternatives to arrest. Finally, some cities used a combination of approaches. Key findings discussed in this article include:

• Law enforcement agencies that emphasized police-citizen cooperation benefited …

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 …

The Complex Uses Of Sexual Orientation In Criminal Court, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Times may or may not be changing for gay people in the criminal justice system--and for the import of sexual orientation in criminal law. It depends on the nature of the case and, more importantly, exactly whose sexual orientation we are talking about.

Signs of positive change include the recent high profile Matthew Shepard and Diane Whipple cases, in which gay and lesbian homicide victims were mourned not only by the gay community, but also by the entire country. It was no doubt helpful that both Shepard and Whipple presented very appealing images of gay people: each was young, attractive, …

Architecture As Crime Control, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Building on work in architectural theory, this Article demonstrates how additional attention to cities, neighborhoods, and individual buildings can reduce criminal activity. The field of cyberlaw has been transformed by the insight that architecture can regulate behavior in cyberspace; this insight will now be applied to the regulation of behavior in real space. The instinct of many lawyers, however, is to focus on legal rules, without thinking about the constraint of physical space. Ironically, even an architectural problem in crime control - "broken windows" - has prompted legal, not architectural solutions. Four architectural concepts are considered: increasing an area's natural …

What Would It Take To Feel Safe?, Mari J. Matsuda

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What would it take to make people feel safe? What message will those who would wage peace offer to this beleaguered planet? There is indeed a threat. I will call that threat terrorist fascism because that is what it is. It thwarts human beings in pursuit of the most basic need identified by psychologists: The need to feel their bodies are safe. This threat is horrible indeed, and the road to ending it is long and hard. I do not know all we need to do to end terrorist fascism, but what I know of history tells me that militarism …

Procedural Justice: Tempering The State’S Response To Domestic Violence, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part I of this Article documents the recent legal reforms implemented on behalf of battered women in the criminal and civil justice systems. These include warrantless arrest, mandatory arrest laws, and no-drop prosecution policies, as well as civil protection order statutes and statutory modifications recommended by the Model State Code on Domestic and Family Violence. Part II describes the ways in which these reforms have improved the state's responsiveness to victims, yet simultaneously entailed serious costs by diminishing batterers' perceptions of procedural justice. Part III defines the building blocks of procedural justice and reviews the social science data demonstrating its …

The Bounds Of Zeal In Criminal Defense: Some Thoughts On Lynne Stewart, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

On April 9, 2002, a troop of armed FBI agents stormed the Brooklyn town house of sixty-two-year-old Lynne Stewart. A school librarian turned criminal lawyer, Stewart thought they had come for her life partner, longtime political activist Ralph Poynter. Flashing an arrest warrant, the agent in charge informed her otherwise, "We're not here for him, we're here for you." As her neighbors looked on, Stewart was handcuffed and taken off to jail.

Indicted under a federal law that prohibits providing "material support or resources" to organizations designated by the Secretary of State as engaging in terrorist activity, Stewart suddenly found …

State-Supported Terrorism And The U.S. Courts: Some Foreign Policy Problems, Barry E. Carter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Terrorism is an evil that the United States and other civilized countries should combat aggressively. Fortunately, these countries have many tools they can use in their fight against terrorism, among them military force (as we have just demonstrated in Afghanistan), covert actions, and a variety of economic sanctions against a country or group that supports terrorists. These sanctions - which would preferably be applied in union with other countries, though unilaterally if necessary - can include freezing assets, as well as ending or limiting U.S. government programs (ranging from landing rights to foreign aid), cutting off exports to or imports …

Solving The Apprendi Puzzle, Kyron Huigens

Articles

No abstract provided.

Community Prosecutors, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

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. …

Internationalised Criminal Trial And Access To Justice, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The influence of a human rights paradigm over the recent development of local and regional criminal justice concerns throughout Europe is indisputable. Essential to this is the commitment that crucial lay parties within the justice process (such as the accused and the victims) should have adequate access to common procedural protections of criminal justice. This paper takes this trend and measures its influence on the development of international criminal justice, the trial in particular. At the very least we argue that parallel concerns about fair trial in the international procedural context will endorse the importance of a fair trial paradigm …

Measured Interpretation: Introducing The Method Of Correspondence Analysis To Legal Studies, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Harcourt develops and advocates a method to more rigorously measure and evaluate how qualitative “social meaning” variables relate to legal practices and public policies. The method integrates in-depth qualitative interviews with an experimental free associational component, map analysis of the interviews, and a methodology, correspondence analysis, that remains little known in the United States despite its acceptance in other parts of the world. Correspondence analysis, according to Professor Harcourt, is a tool that allows researchers to visually represent the relationship between structures of social meaning and the contexts and practices within which they are embedded. This method opens up …