Criminal Law Commons^™

Man Camps And Bad Men: Litigating Violence Against American Indian Women, Ana Condes

Northwestern University Law Review

The crisis of sexual violence plaguing Indian Country is made drastically worse by oil-pipeline construction, which often occurs near reservations. The “man camps” constructed to house pipeline workers are hotbeds of rape, domestic violence, and sex trafficking, and American Indian women are frequently targeted due to a perception that men will not be prosecuted for assaulting them. Victims have little recourse, facing underfunded police departments, indifferent prosecutors, and a federal government all too willing to turn a blind eye to the ongoing violence.

This Note proposes a litigation strategy for tribes to address the crisis and compel federal action. Litigation …

Identifying The Most Democratic Institution To Lead Criminal Justice Reform, Harry B. Dodsworth

Northwestern University Law Review

American criminal justice is in crisis, and most scholars agree why: unduly severe laws, mass incarceration, and disproportionate effects on minority groups. But they don’t agree on a solution. One group of scholars—known as the “democratizers”—thinks the answer is to make the criminal justice system more democratic. According to democratizers, layperson participation and local democratic control will impart sensibility into criminal justice reform. In short, a transfer of power away from distant lawmakers and toward local communities, which would craft their own criminal codes and elect their own prosecutors. This argument assumes that more local means more democratic—but what if …

Case Study: The International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia’S Court Transcripts In Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian—Part 1: Needs, Feasibility, And Output Assessment, Besmir Fidahić

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) remains the most important organization for the past, the present, and the future of the former Yugoslavia. Faced with a country that always lived under totalitarian regimes with very little insight into actions of the groups and individuals who reaped unthinkable havoc on each other at the end of the twentieth century, the ICTY set undisputable historical record about events that took place during the 1991–1999 wars and put the country on an excellent track towards transformation for the better. But even 28 years since the establishment of the ICTY, the former …

Corruption And Its Manifestations In The Field Of Public Education At The Present Stage Of Development Of The Republic Of Uzbekistan, Abdullayeva Malikabonu Erkin Qizi

ProAcademy

The article deals with the concept and signs of corruption in national and international legislation. Based on the analysis of legal definitions of the concept of corruption, lists of acts of corruption in conjunction with the provisions of the most significant international legal acts that laid the foundations for understanding corruption, an attempt is made to determine the list and content of essential features of this social and legal phenomenon. As significant signs of corruption, the author singled out: social harm (danger), sphere of existence, subject of corruption, subjects, use by the subject of corruption of official (official) powers or …

General Body Meeting, Cardozo Criminal Law Society

2021–2022 Flyers

No abstract provided.

When Provocation Is No Excuse: Making Gun Owners Bear The Risks Of Carrying In Public, Eric A. Johnson

Buffalo Law Review

Markeis McGlockton, an unarmed 28-year-old African-American father of three, was shot to death in front of his five-year-old son by “wannabe police officer” Michael Drejka during an argument over parking. Because McGlockton had shoved Drejka before Drejka shot him, Drejka was convicted only of heat-of-passion manslaughter, not murder. This Article argues that the heat-of-passion defense shouldn’t be available in cases like Drejka’s—cases where the defendant was carrying a loaded gun in public at the time of the provocation and used the gun to kill his provoker. The heat-of-passion defense is a concession to the difficulty of complying with the law’s …

Roper’S Unfinished Business: A New Approach To Young Offender Death Penalty Eligibility, Nichole M. Austin

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Barred By Their Brains: Inmates With Traumatic Brain Injury (Tbi), Claire Mikita

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

Pulling Back The Curtain: A Follow-Up Report From The Aba Criminal Justice Section Women In Criminal Justice Task Force, Maryam Ahranjani

Faculty Scholarship

In an era when women’s hard-fought and hard-earned participation in the workforce is in peril, the ABA Criminal Justice Section’s Women in Criminal Justice Task Force (TF) continues its groundbreaking work of documenting challenges in hiring, retention and promotion of women criminal lawyers. Pulling Back the Curtain follows up on the initial findings of the TF. The findings are published in the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law and the ABA Criminal Justice magazine. This report describes the results of a subsequent survey of diverse criminal lawyers and judges conducted at the end of 2020. The survey posed questions related to …

Reforming State Bail Reform, Shima Baughman, Lauren Boone, Nathan H. Jackson

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

We are waist-deep in the third wave of bail reform. Scholars, policy makers, and the public have realized that the short period of detention before trial creates ripple effects on a defendant’s judicial fate and has lasting impacts on our system of mass incarceration. Over 200 proposed bail bills are pending throughout the states. This is not the first period of bail reform in America—two previous waves of bail reform in the 1960s and 1980s have both ended in increased pretrial detention for defendants. Some of the recent efforts in the third wave of bail reform have also increased detention …

With Unanimity And Justice For All: The Case For Retroactive Application Of The Unanimous Jury Verdict Requirement, Kara Kurland

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Until the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Ramos v. Louisiana, non-unanimous jury verdicts were constitutional and utilized in two states: Louisiana and Oregon. The Ramos decision not only declared the practice of non-unanimous jury verdicts unconstitutional, but it also emphasized the essential nature of jury verdict unanimity in criminal trials throughout American history and legal jurisprudence. A year later, in Edwards v. Vannoy, the Court considered retroactive application of Ramos. Utilizing the test created in Teague v. Lane that assessed the retroactivity of new rules of criminal procedure, the Court announced that, despite the essential nature of the unanimous jury …

Electronic Bracelet In The United Arab Emirates - A Smart Application And An Alternative To Punishment And Pretrial Detention, Dr. Emadeldin Mohamed Kammel Abdulhamed

Faculty Peer-Reviewed Papers | بحوث هيئة التدريس المحكمة

Electronic monitoring with the electronic bracelet system is one of the most prominent forms of employing modern technologies in the service of criminal justice, especially in the field of penal policy, as an alternative system to punishment and pretrial detention, and it achieves the goal of both. The application of remote electronic monitoring through the electronic bracelet system raises many legal, technical and artistic problems. From a legal perspective, the most prominent of these is studying what might result from its application in terms of violating the privacy of the persons subject to it and the persons residing with the …

Red Flag Laws And Procedural Due Process: Analyzing Proposed Utah Legislation, John R. Richardson

Utah Law Review

In this Note, I analyze the validity of criticism against red flag laws based on procedural due process. I proceed as follows: In Part I, I discuss the background of red flag laws, the different versions passed among states, and the few constitutional challenges brought thus far. In Part II, I analyze the statutes’ validity under federal due process standards. I then specifically examine proposed Utah bills that failed to pass in previous legislative sessions. While providing recommendations, I argue that the legislation would likely pass constitutional muster. In Part III, I conclude that red flag laws are generally constitutional …

How The Gun Control Act Disarms Black Firearm Owners, Maya Itah

Washington Law Review

Through 18 U.S.C. § 924(c), the Gun Control Act (GCA) outlaws the possession of a firearm “in furtherance of” a drug trafficking crime. The statute’s language is broad, and federal courts have interpreted it expansively. By giving prosecutors wide discretion in charging individuals with § 924(c) violations, the language enables the disproportionate incarceration of Black firearm owners.

This Comment addresses this issue in three parts. Part I discusses the ways early gun control laws overtly disarmed Black firearm owners. Additionally, Part I provides context for the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which coincided with the backlash to …

Special Matters: Filtering Privileged Materials In Federal Prosecutions, Christina Frohock

Articles

This Article reviews the U.S. Department of Justice's toolbox for handling potentially privileged materials, with close attention to the evolution from filter teams to the Special Matters Unit in fraud prosecutions. Significant case opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fourth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits reveal the judiciary's diverse views on filter teams. The recent case of United States v. Esformes in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, now on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, illustrates how a filter team can fall short and draw unflattering attention to the Department of Justice. In the …

Revocation And Retribution, Jacob Schuman

Washington Law Review

Revocation of community supervision is a defining feature of American criminal law. Nearly 4.5 million people in the United States are on parole, probation, or supervised release, and 1/3 eventually have their supervision revoked, sending 350,000 to prison each year. Academics, activists, and attorneys warn that “mass supervision” has become a powerful engine of mass incarceration.

This is the first Article to study theories of punishment in revocation of community supervision, focusing on the federal system of supervised release. Federal courts apply a primarily retributive theory of revocation, aiming to sanction defendants for their “breach of trust.” However, the structure, …

"Send Freedom House!": A Study In Police Abolition, Tiffany Yang

Washington Law Review

Sparked by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the 2020 uprisings accelerated a momentum of abolitionist organizing that demands the defunding and dismantling of policing infrastructures. Although a growing body of legal scholarship recognizes abolitionist frameworks when examining conventional proposals for reform, critics mistakenly continue to disregard police abolition as an unrealistic solution. This Essay helps dispel this myth of “impracticality” and illustrates the pragmatism of abolition by identifying a community-driven effort that achieved a meaningful reduction in policing we now take for granted. I detail the history of the Freedom House Ambulance Service, a Black civilian …

The Trial Preparation Procedures–Criminal, William Rhee, L. Richard Walker

Law Faculty Scholarship

In an effort to provide scholarship immediately useful to the criminal trial advocate, this article proposes a detailed systems workflow to plan and coordinate preparing for federal criminal trials called the Trial Preparation Procedures–Criminal (or "TrialPrepPro–Criminal" for short). The TrialPrepPro–Criminal upon the Trial Preparation Procedures-Civil, expounded in an earlier article.

Although there is an abundance of anecdotal "learning from doing" trial preparation guidance, empirically testable "learning about doing" trial preparation guidance is rare. We present our TrialPrepPro to learn more about doing.

The TrialPrepPro are modeled after the battle-proven military decision-making process used, with modifications, by all U.S. military services, …

Standing By To Protect Child Abuse Victims: Utilizing Standby Counsel In Lieu Of Personal Cross-Examination, Claire Murtha

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Child abuse is a pervasive problem in the United States. Often, the abused child’s word is the only evidence to prove the abuse in court. For this reason, the child’s testimony is critical. Testifying can pose a challenge for the abused child who must face her abuser in the courtroom, especially if that abuser personally questions her.

The United States Supreme Court has recognized the legitimate and strong interest the state has in protecting the psychological and physical well-being of children. When a child will face significant trauma and cannot reasonably communicate in the courtroom, the child can be questioned …

Cyberterrorism And The Public Safety Exception To Miranda, Mitch Snyder

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Cyberattacks against U.S. targets are becoming increasingly common. To effectively combat these attacks, law enforcement officers need the tools to respond to and prevent cyberattacks before they can occur.

In recent years, hackers have launched cyberattacks against infrastructural targets such as power grids, oil and gas distribution computer systems, and telecommunications networks. Cyberattacks have also targeted U.S. government websites, including the U.S. Department of Transportation and the U.S. Department of Treasury. Recently, a cyberattack against SolarWinds, a Texas-based I.T. company, compromised the computer and network systems of federal, state, and local governments; critical infrastructure entities; and other private sector organizations. …

Stemming The Tide: Social Norms And Child Sex Trafficking, Melissa L. Breger

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Despite decades of attempts to eradicate the industry, child sex trafficking continues to flourish. Arguably, there is debate about whether adults willingly choose sex work, yet there are no arguments supporting the notion that children make any such choice. When children are bought and sold for sexual purposes, it is child sex trafficking.

Academic legal research has focused comprehensively on the identification of child victims and the prosecution of child traffickers, yet there has not been as salient a focus on reducing the market of buyers of trafficked children. It is the reduction of demand where theories of re-norming and …

Disarming Abusers And Triggering The Sixth Amendment: Are Domestic Violence Misdemeanants Guaranteed The Right To A Jury Trial?, Julia Hatheway

Fordham Law Review

Domestic violence is a global issue, but in the United States it is especially lethal. Hundreds of women are shot and killed in the United States by intimate partners every year. Federal and state legislatures have enacted laws that focus on the issue of domestic violence and gun violence. In 1996, Congress passed the Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1968, which permanently prohibits individuals convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from possessing firearms. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have also enacted laws that mirror the Lautenberg Amendment. In many jurisdictions, misdemeanor domestic violence convictions carry a …

Blood In The Water: Why The First Step Act Of 2018 Fails Those Sentenced Under The Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, Lauren R. Robertson

Washington and Lee Law Review

For some, the open ocean is prison. The Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (MDLEA) prohibits individuals from knowingly or intentionally distributing a controlled substance or possessing it with the intent to distribute. Empowered by the MDLEA, the United States Coast Guard arrests and detains foreign nationals hundreds of miles outside of U.S. territorial waters. After months shackled to Coast Guard ships, these individuals face the harsh reality of American mandatory minimum drug sentencing, judged by the kilograms of drugs on their vessels. But the MDLEA conflates kilograms with culpability. More often than not, those sentenced are fishermen-turned-smugglers due to financial …

Southern Harm: Analyzing The Criminal Enforcement Of Environmental Law In The Southern United States, 1983-2019, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa L. Jarrell

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

When violations of environmental laws involve significant harm or culpable conduct, the application of criminal enforcement tools is required. Yet, our understanding of how environmental laws have been criminally enforced historically in the Southern United States remains poor. Our goal is to analyze historical charging and sentencing patterns and show the broader themes that emerge in environmental crime prosecutions over time in the region. Through content analysis of all 2,588 criminal prosecutions resulting from U.S. EPA criminal investigations, 1983–2019, we select all 799 prosecutions occurring in the Southern United States. Results show that 44% of prosecutions focus on water pollution, …

Police Or Pirates? Reforming Washington's Civil Asset Forfeiture System, Jasmin Chigbrow

Washington Law Review

Civil asset forfeiture laws permit police officers to seize property they suspect is connected to criminal activity and sell or retain the property for the police department’s use. In many states, including Washington, civil forfeiture occurs independent of any criminal case—many property owners are never charged with the offense police allege occurred. Because the government is not required to file criminal charges, property owners facing civil forfeiture lack the constitutional safeguards normally guaranteed to defendants in the criminal justice system: the right to an attorney, the presumption of innocence, the government’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, …

Who Gets To Make A Living? Street Vending In America, Joseph Pileri

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Street vending has long provided those at the margins of American society with the opportunity for economic advancement. A key segment of the informal economy, street vending has low barriers of entry and attracts entrepreneurs who lack the resources, ability, or desire to start brick-and-mortar businesses or work for someone else. Street vending also contributes to the vitality and safety of urban America.

Despite the pivotal role that street vending plays, cities around the country criminalize vending by treating the violation of street vending regulations as a criminal offense. Recent high-profile vendor arrests in New York City and Washington, DC …

Explaining Florida Man, Ira P. Robbins

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

"Florida Man" is a popular cultural phenomenon in which journalists report on Floridians' unusual (and often criminal) behavior, and readers relish in and share the stories, largely on social media. A meme based on Florida Man news stories emerged in 2013 and continues to capture people's attention nationwide. Florida man is one of the latest unique trends to come from the Sunshine State and contributes to Florida's reputation as a quirky place.

Explanations for Florida Man center on Florida's Public Records Law, which is known as one of the most expansive open records laws in the country. All states and …

The End Of Liberty, Adam J. Kolber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Prosecutors, Ethics And The Pursuit Of Racial Justice, Roger Fairfax

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The 2020 murder of George Floyd catalyzed a national reckoning on race, and scrutiny of barriers to racial justice, rightfully focused on policing. However, as this Symposium has demonstrated, it is also critical to interrogate the prosecutorial function, given the outsize role prosecutors play in the criminal legal system. Scholars and advocates have utilized a number of frames to explore a key topic of this symposium-the intersection between prosecutorial discretion, prosecutorial ethics, and racial inequity.'

Although the renewed interest in the prosecutor's role in the pursuit of racial justice raises many new questions and opportunities, the scaffolding for such work …

Beyond Binary Thinking: Addressing The Biases That Threaten The Progressive Prosecution Movement, Olwyn Conway

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

A society that regularly and systematically dehumanizes citizens of color will continue to wield the most punitive aspects of its criminal system against those citizens, so long as they are legally available. The racial discrimination that pervades the American criminal system drives its punitiveness and fosters excessive punishments that increase harm and criminal wrongdoing.