Criminal Law Commons^™

Cabrera V. State, 135 Nev. Adv. Op. 65 (Dec. 26, 2019), Trisha Delos Santos

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined that the plain language of NRS § 194.010(8) cannot be interpreted to limit the duress defense with respect to crimes that are not punishable with death, regardless of the relationship between those crimes and another crime that is punishable with death.

Boynton V. Virginia And The Anxieties Of The Modern African-American Customer, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

In 1958, Bruce Boynton was arrested for ordering food in a Whites-Only diner and charged with criminal trespass. Sixty years later, African Americans continue to face arrest and threat of arrest in commercial establishments based on discriminatory trespass claims. When store owners or employees decide to exclude would-be patrons from their establishment for discriminatory reasons, both overt and implicit, they rely on the police to enforce this form of discrimination. This article considers the legacy of Boynton v. Virginia, particularly the resonance of Boynton’s unaddressed claim, that the state enforcement of discriminatory trespass allegations is an Equal Protection …

Race And Reasonableness In Police Killings, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Alexis D. Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on …

Linked Fate: Justice And The Criminal Legal System During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Susan P. Sturm, Faiz Pirani, Hyun Kim, Natalie Behr, Zachary D. Hardwick

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of “linked fate” has taken on new meaning in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. People all over the world – from every walk of life, spanning class, race, gender, and nationality – face a potentially deadly threat requiring cooperation and sacrifice. The plight of the most vulnerable among us affects the capacity of the larger community to cope with, recover, and learn from COVID-19’s devastating impact. COVID-19 makes visible and urgent the need to embrace our linked fate, “develop a sense of commonality and shared circumstances,” and unstick dysfunctional and inequitable political and legal systems.

Nowhere is …

Guns In The Private Square, Cody Jacobs

Faculty Scholarship

The regulation of guns has been one of the most hotly debated public policy issues in the United States throughout the country’s history. But, up until recently, it has always been just that — a debate about public policy. Two recent developments have changed the landscape and moved the debate about publicly carrying firearms from the realm of public policy, to the realm of private decision-making and private law. First, laws related to publicly carrying firearms have been dramatically loosened throughout the United States to the point that, in the vast majority of states, anyone who is legally allowed to …

Book Review, Roberto Rosas

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming.

Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J. J. Prescott, Benjamin David Pyle, Sonja B. Starr

Faculty Scholarship

People convicted of violent crimes constitute a majority of the imprisoned population but are generally ignored by existing policies aimed at reducing mass incarceration. Serious efforts to shrink the large footprint of the prison system will need to recognize this fact. This point is especially pressing at the time of this writing, as states and the federal system consider large-scale prison releases motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those convicted of violent crimes constitute a large majority of older prisoners, who are extremely vulnerable to the spread of the virus behind bars. Excluding them from protective measures will deeply undermine those …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Ohio State Bar Association And Academic Experts In Support Of Defendant-Appellee Basim Barnes In State Of Ohio V. Basim Barnes, John P. Sahl

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This amicus curiae brief, submitted by the Ohio State Bar Association and a group of legal academic experts including Professor Jack P. Sahl, supports the position of Defendant-Appellee Basim Barnes before the Ohio Supreme Court. The brief addresses significant constitutional and professional responsibility concerns related to prosecutorial conduct and the integrity of the legal process. Specifically, it examines the potential misuse of judicial and prosecutorial discretion in criminal proceedings and its implications for defendants’ rights, due process, and public trust in the justice system. The amici argue for the protection of procedural fairness, adherence to ethical standards, and restraint in …

Encouraging Healing For Home Health Aides.Pdf, Joann Sahl

Akron Law Faculty Publications

The United States faces a national crisis to provide adequate carefor its aging population. A critical component of this crisis is thenation’s inability to provide enough home health care aides to assistwith important, if not vital, long-term care needs.This Article identifies a labor pool to help resolve this crisis: quali-fied workers with criminal convictions. But home health care aideswith criminal convictions face an inhospitable landscape. Employersin the health care field are risk-averse to hiring these workers.Furthermore, most states’ laws impose permanent employment banson home health aides with criminal convictions.The Article examines the warren of laws used to disqualify homehealth care …

Suspicionless Witness Stops: The New Racial Profiling, Michael Gentithes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Young men of color in high-crime neighborhoods are surrounded by poverty and crime, yet distrustful of the police who frequently stop, frisk, and arrest them and their friends. Every encounter with the police carries the potential for a new arrest or worse, fostering a culture of fear and distrust of law enforcement. That culture exacerbates the problems facing the officers patrolling these neighborhoods as more crimes go unsolved because witnesses are unwilling to come forward. In the past several decades, officers have responded by using a stop-and-frisk technique of dubious constitutionality to control crime. Despite its disastrous implications for the …

Pandemic Surveillance: The New Predictive Policing, Michael Gentithes, Harold J. Krent

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In Part I, we examine the growth of predictive policing, which similarly treats some individuals differently based on the likelihood that they will either commit or be the victim of a crime. If such surveillance does not lead to detention, incursion on the right to travel, or other loss of freedom, we believe such efforts to be constitutional, even though not always wise. Use of data to prioritize law enforcement efforts poses no insuperable constitutional obstacles. But deployment of predictive analytics can result in infringement on the right to liberty, as we relate. In Part II, therefore, we apply the …

Felony Disenfranchisement & The Nineteenth Amendment (Symposium), Michael Gentithes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines the historical response to those arguments and suggests that they can be applied forcefully in the contemporary debate over felony disenfranchisement. Suffragists raised two arguments in response to coverture-based contentions against women enfranchisement: first, that men simply did not represent women's interests in politics, instead subordinating them ever further both in family structures and the public sphere; and second, that women had something important to add to the political conversation that would be missing as long as they were excluded from the debate. Similarly, felony disenfranchisement laws are based upon the fiction that there is a distinction …

Developing A Legal Framework Of Personal Data Protection In The Indonesian Criminal Procedure Law, Josua Sitompul

Indonesia Law Review

Searching and seizing voluminous data is a challenge that Indonesian law enforcement authorities should resolve. Indonesia does not have a comprehensive regime on personal data protection. The absence of a coherent legal framework on personal data protection does not negate the obligation of Indonesian law enforcement authorities to protect personal data of Indonesian subjects. However, the absence of the framework may lead to uncertainties or ambiguities on how the authorities should protect personal data. Against the uncertainties and ambiguities, Indonesian law enforcement authorities should resolve issues of voluminous data in obtaining e-information with the prevailing legislation. This article attempts to …

Contextualizing Restorative Justice Through Diversion Mechanism: A Study Of Indonesia Juvenile Justice System, Faiz Rahman

Indonesia Law Review

Implementation of restorative justice in the juvenile justice system in many countries has undergone its dynamics in the past few decades, including in Indonesia. The enactment of Indonesia Juvenile Justice System Law in mid-2014, which invalidates the 1997 Juvenile Court Law, became a significant point of juvenile justice reformation in Indonesia. The new Law began to shift the retributive paradigm in the Juvenile Court Law, as the previous statutory basis for juvenile justice in Indonesia, to restorative justice paradigm. The new Law introduces the Diversion mechanism as a means to implement the restorative justice approach. This article seeks to discuss …

Improving Law Enforcement’S Victim-Centric Responses To Sexual Assault: Global Best Practice Catalog, Ayesha Ashraf, Sebastián Galleguillos Agurto, Frederick Geyer, Kamela Gjoka, Jasmine Hwang, Stanley Montinat, Jessica Moor, Pierre Reyes, Tara Ventimiglia, Hongda Xu

Publications and Research

This catalog was compiled as part of a U.S. State Department Diplomacy Lab Project entitled “Improving Law Enforcement’s Victim-Centric Responses to Sexual Assault,” in fall semester of 2019, for American Citizens Services, US Embassy Bangkok. It is intended to cover best practices in law enforcement response to sexual assault across the globe, including laws, policies and programs.Ten multilingual graduate students in the capstone seminar of the Master of Arts Degree Program in International Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) established criteria for inclusion and standardized elements for each entry in this catalog. The ultimate aim …

The Separation Of Migrant Families At The Border Under The Trump Administration’S Zero-Tolerance Policy: A Critical Analysis Of The Mistreatment Of Immigrant Children Held In U.S. Custody, Dhillon Ramkhelawan

Child and Family Law Journal

This article provides a critical analysis of the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy that separated migrant families at the Southwest United States border from April to June 2018. It will provide a statistical analysis regarding the number of migrant children that were separated from their parents during this time period, and it will describe the poor living conditions that many of these children were subjected to as they waited for their parent’s immigration cases to be decided. Additionally, this article will also critically analyze the United States’ history of mistreating migrant children who started to flee their war-torn countries in Central …

23andeveryone: Privacy Concerns With Law Enforcement’S Use Of Genealogy Databases To Implicate Relatives In Criminal Investigations, Shanni Davidowitz

Brooklyn Law Review

The discovery of DNA typing in the 1980s transformed law enforcement’s ability to exonerate innocent suspects, while implicating those who are guilty, with “the power of a silent biological witness at the crime scene.” This transformation, coupled with the new trend of law enforcement’s use of genealogy databases, has created legal issues that police officers, prosecutors, genealogy companies, and policy makers are all currently trying to navigate. The technological advancement comes with serious ethical and privacy concerns, including fear of the establishment of a “genetic panopticon.” General concern exists that if a “genetic panopticon” comes to fruition, the government can …

Where Are You, Congress?: Silence Rings In Congress As Juvenile Offenders Remain In Prison For Life, Megan R. Pollastro

Brooklyn Law Review

Over the last decade, Supreme Court precedent has changed the way courts have sentenced juveniles in the United States. It has failed, however, to clearly establish the proper handling of cases in which juveniles are sentenced to extended periods of time in prison that equate to a de facto sentence of life in prison without parole. Congress has also remained noticeably silent on the issue. Children are not considered mature enough to vote, to drink alcohol, to serve on a jury, and yet, courts treat juvenile offenders as mature enough to pay for their crimes for the remainder of their …

Coming To Terms With Wartime Collaboration: Post-Conflict Processes & Legal Challenges, Shane Darcy

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The phenomenon of collaboration during wartime is as old as war itself. During situations of armed conflict, civilians or combatants belonging to one party to the conflict frequently provide assistance to the opposing side in various ways, such as by disclosing valuable information, defecting and fighting for the enemy, engaging in propaganda, or providing administrative support to an occupying power. Such acts of collaboration have been punished harshly, with violent retribution often directed at alleged collaborators during armed conflict, while states and at times non-state actors have prosecuted and punished collaboration as treason or related offenses in times of war. …

Select Criminal Law And Procedure Cases From The U.S. Supreme Court's 2018-2019 Term, Eve Brensike Primus, Kristin Froehle

Articles

Although the 2018-19 Term at the Supreme Court did not include any blockbuster rulings like Carpenter v. United States, the Court issued a number of significant criminal law and procedure rulings. It addressed warrantless blood-alcohol testing, the dual-sovereignty doctrine, the right to trial by jury, ineffective assistance of trial counsel, questions of incorporation, prisoners' competence to be executed, permissible methods of execution, and some important statutory interpretation questions. Looking back on the Term, Justice Gorsuch clearly solidified his position as the libertarian "swing" vote in criminal procedure cases. He joined the liberals to uphold a defendant's right to trial …

When Cute Becomes Criminal: Emoji, Threats And Online Grooming, Marilyn M. Mcmahon, Elizabeth A. Kirley

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

How Gun Control Laws Affect Homicide, Abbey Maloney

Honors Theses

Homicide is an ever-prevalent problem in the United States (U.S.). One solution that is often turned to is the implementation of stricter gun control laws. This causes much divide as many citizens are not in agreement about whether or not these laws do what they are intended to. The aim of this study was to determine whether or not gun control laws have an effect on homicide, and, if so, what this effect is. The U.S. states were evaluated in several different categories to determine how strict or lax their gun laws were. They were scored using the number of …

Comparing The Violent Crime Trends In Select States To The National Trends To Determine Differences Between Crimes, States, And Regions, Alexandra N. Kremer

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

Violent crimes include crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and assault. The FBI in the UCR breaks these down into Type I, crimes against the person, and Type II, property crimes, offenses. The FBI also divides the country into four regions: West, South, Northeast, and Midwest. Each of these regions are examined, through the use of two states from each, here. Their overall violent crime rates and trends, and their specific Type I offensive rates and trends, are examined against the national data and against each other. Several theories are used to explain the potential causes of the differences in …

Getting Out: Bruce Bryant’S Climb To Redemption Inside Prison, Rachel M. Rippetoe, Sean Sanders-Mills

Capstones

Bruce Bryant, 50, was convicted of the murder of 11-year-old Travis Lilley in June 1996. Bryant maintains he never fired a weapon that day in 1993. But he recognizes that his lifestyle as a young person — he started dealing drugs when he was 14 — contributed to an environment in which a stray bullet could take a young life. And for that reason, he’s spent most of his 25 years in prison working to help young people.

With at least 12 more years on his sentence, Bryant is now asking the governor for early release, with the hope that …

Case Law On American Indians August 2018-2019, Thomas P. Schlosser

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Finding Justice, Hannah Miller

Capstones

Finding Justice tackles the devastation caused by wrongful conviction through the journey of Jeffrey Deskovic. After serving 16 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, Deskovic has strived to rebuild his life. The film follows him as he finishes law school and runs a foundation that frees the wrongfully convicted, all while dealing with lingering trauma.

After 31 Years In Prison, Lee Chalk Asks For Forgiveness., Jeffery Harrell, Brenda Leon

Capstones

Lee Chalk has spent more than three decades in state prison, and is now applying for executive clemency to have his sentence ended early. He is guilty of a crime, being involved in an armed robbery turned deadly which killed two people. Our project explores the potential for transformation and rehabilitation inside prison, and the personal and political ramification of mass incarceration and extreme sentencing.

https://medium.com/p/738d1cb28532/edit

A shorter version of the capstone was also published with Gothamist here: https://gothamist.com/news/ny-prison-clemency-parole-cuomo

Discipline Or Destiny: A School-To-Prison Pipeline Story, Trayonna Hendricks, Kourtney Webb

Capstones

The school-to-prison pipeline is a phenomenon by which students, mainly students of color, are pushed out of schools and into juvenile detention centers and through the criminal justice system. This documentary series explains and displays what "the school-to-prison pipeline looks like through a personal story.

https://readymag.com/u1985351703/1646028/

Ny State Marijuana Law Clears The Records Of Thousands, But Will It Help Immigrants?, Jaime Longoria, Harsha Nahata

Capstones

In July 2019, Governor Cuomo signed legislation that would clear criminal records for over 200,000 people with marijuana related convictions and reduce punishment for possession. But, there’s one group of New Yorkers who are left out — and that’s immigrants. With over 4 million immigrants in New York State, the lives of those with prior marijuana convictions are still in limbo. Harsha Nahata and Jaime Longoria spoke with immigrants and advocates to find out why. The full story can be found here: https://jaimelongoria.github.io/nys-marijuana-law/

Impact Of High Profile Police Use Of Force Incidents On Violent Crime Rates, Megan Galante

Honors Theses

This research study examined the relationship between high-profile police use of force incidents and local violent crime rates. It is important to analyze the impact that police use of force has on the respective community in regard to crime rates. This study analyzed three incidents of police use of force that have received extensive coverage in the media in order to determine if there was a change in the rates of violent crime in that city. The theory of de-policing suggests that in the aftermath of a high-profile incident of police brutality, police departments in the area change their behaviors …