Criminal Law Commons^™

Probable Cause Revisited, William Ortman

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Attempting The Unintended: The Problems With Recognizing An Attempted Homicide Offense That Does Not Require Proof Of An Intent-To-Kill, Richard Sanders

St. Thomas Law Review

Start with a simple syllogism: (1) The mental element of the Florida "offense of criminal attempt" is an "inten[t] to commit [an] offense"; (2) it is logically impossible to intend to do something that one does not intend to do, such as intend to cause an unintended harm; so therefore (3) "[t]here is no such criminal offense as an attempt to achieve an unintended [harm]," because it is logically impossible to intend, and thus to attempt, to commit an offense that has an element of causing-unintended-harm. Call this the attempt logic. Most courts accept this logic as to homicide offenses, …

From The Sophisticated Undertakings Of The Genovese Crime Family To The Everyday Criminal: The Loss Of Congressional Intent In Modern Criminal Rico Application, Emily A. Donaher

St. Thomas Law Review

Due to the unmanageable development of organized crime in America, principally the growth of La Cosa Nostra, Congress enacted the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. Through this Act, Congress intended to eliminate organized crime, by criminalizing not only the syndicate but also the activities in which it was engaged. Congress then passed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which was to preclude organized crime from infiltrating legitimate American businesses. Although Congress intended courts to construe the RICO statute liberally to combat organized crime, in some cases, American courts have taken this liberal construction too far. The RICO …

Consent: What It Means And Why It’S Time To Require It, Stephen J. Schulhofer

University of the Pacific Law Review

No abstract provided.

Not Affirmative Consent, Aya Gruber

University of the Pacific Law Review

No abstract provided.

Should Rape Shield Laws Bar Proof That The Alleged Victim Has Made Similar, False Rape Accusations In The Past?: Fair Symmetry With The Rape Sword Laws, Edward J. Imwinkelried

University of the Pacific Law Review

No abstract provided.

Barriers To Affirmative Consent Policies And The Need For Affirmative Sexuality, Kristen N. Jozkowski

University of the Pacific Law Review

No abstract provided.

More Horse-Hair For The Sword Of Damocles? The Rhode Island Probation System And Comparisons To Federal Law, Timothy Baldwin, Olin Thompson

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

No Exit, No End: Probation In Rhode Island, Lara Montecalvo, Kara Maguire, Angela Yingling

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

One Year Later: Reflections From The Mass Incarceration Symposium Student Steering Committee, Meghan Kruger, Danielle Dufault

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Over-Disciplining Students, Racial Bias, And The School-To-Prison Pipeline, Jason P. Nance

UF Law Faculty Publications

Over the last three decades, our nation has witnessed a dramatic change regarding how schools discipline children. Empirical evidence during this time period demonstrates that schools increasingly have relied on extreme forms of punishment such as suspensions, expulsions, referrals to law enforcement, and school-based arrests to discipline students for violations of school rules, including for low-level offenses. Many have referred to this disturbing trend of schools directly referring students to law enforcement or creating conditions under which students are more likely to become involved in the justice system—such as suspending or expelling them—as the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Perhaps the most alarming …

The Dramas Of Criminal Law: Thurman Arnold’S Post-Realist Critique Of Law Enforcement, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

The high legal realist period of the 1930s was not known for its criminal law scholarship, while until fairly recently, criminal law theory was not as well-developed as those fields that had faced a realist and post-realist critique. This Essay attempts to address these issues by describing in detail the criminal law scholarship of Thurman Arnold, a prominent realist whose best known academic writings were his mid-1930s monographs on the New Deal and resistance to it. Arnold’s criminal law scholarship serves as a forgotten link between the classical doctrinal work that dominated midcentury legal academic work on criminal law and …

Public Wrongs And Public Reason, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

The distinction between crimes that involve wrongs in themselves and crimes that are wrong because the law makes them so has long puzzled theorists. This essay argues that the distinction, while getting at something real, is based on a mistake. That mistake is made both by those who see moral wrongness as a necessary condition for criminality and by those who believe merely making something illegal is sufficient to make it criminal. Neither is correct. Rather, what makes something a criminal wrong is that it involves a violation of a law that has been justified in terms of “public reason.”

The Drug Court Paradigm, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Drug courts are specialized, problem-oriented diversion programs. Qualifying offenders receive treatment and intense court-supervision from these specialized criminal courts, rather than standard incarceration. Although a body of scholarship critiques drug courts and recent sentencing reforms, few scholars explore the drug court movement’s influence on recent sentencing policies outside the context of specialized courts.

This Article explores the broader effects of the drug court movement, arguing that it created a particular paradigm that states have adopted to manage overflowing prison populations. This drug court paradigm has proved attractive to politicians and reformers alike because it facilitates sentencing reforms for low-level, nonviolent …

What Is "Colonial" About Colonial Laws?, Arudra Barra

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Indiana’S Texting-While-Driving Ban: Why Is It Not Working And How Could It Be Better?, Emma Gormley

Indiana Law Journal

This Note will identify and examine obstacles standing in the way of more effective enforcement of Indiana’s texting while driving ban and make recommendations on how to achieve greater success. Part I will take a closer look at what makes texting while driving so dangerous, situating it within the larger context of distracted driving. Part II will then focus on Indiana’s legislative response in particular, breaking down the texting-while-driving laws and discussing impediments to widespread and consistent enforcement. Part III explores alternative strategies for combating those impediments to enforcement, drawing from the approaches of other areas of law and extralegal …

For The Protection Of Society's Most Vulnerable, The Ada Should Apply To Arrests, Thomas J. Auner

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ignorance Of The Law Is No Excuse—Unless You’Re A Cop, Hannah Dunn

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

He Jiahong, Back From The Dead: Wrongful Convictions And Criminal Justice In China, Stanley B. Lubman

Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies

1In 1987, Teng Xingshan was sentenced to death for raping a woman and dismembering her body; wrongfully convicted, he was executed in 1989 – but in 1992 the “victim” returned home, and Teng was exonerated in 2005. His case is only one among numerous other tragic wrongful convictions discussed in Back From the Dead: Wrongful Convictions and Criminal Justice in China, by Professor He Jiahong (Renmin University Law School, Beijing). This book, the product of ten years of research, is a scholarly analysis of wrongful convictions that demonstrates deep system-wide flaws in China’s criminal justice system.

Evidence Laundering In A Post-Herring World, Kay L. Levine, Jenia I. Turner, Ronald F. Wright

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court’s decision in Herring v. United States authorizes police to defeat the Fourth Amendment’s protections through a process we call evidence laundering. Evidence laundering occurs when one police officer makes a constitutional mistake when gathering evidence and then passes that evidence along to a second officer, who develops it further and then delivers it to prosecutors for use in a criminal case. The original constitutional taint disappears in the wash.

Courts have allowed evidence laundering in a variety of contexts, from cases involving flawed databases to cases stemming from faulty judgments and communication lapses in law enforcement teams. …

A Defendant's Fifth Amendment Right And Double Jeopardy In Contempt Cases, Saba Khan

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Criminalization Of Title Ix, Erin R. Collins

Law Faculty Publications

This essay proceeds in three parts. Part I provides a brief overview of the history of feminist-influenced criminal rape law reform and the rise of carceral feminism. Part II demonstrates how key tenets of the criminal law approach have been imported into emerging Title IX policies. Part III engages in a brief distributional analysis to identify who benefits and who loses from this approach. Then, drawing on insights from critical feminist critiques of rape law reform, begins to identify ways to use the opportunity Title IX presents to craft a very different kind of response to sexual assault--one that focuses …

Charging On The Margin, Paul T. Crane

Law Faculty Publications

The American criminal justice system has experienced a significant expansion in the number and severity of penalties triggered by misdemeanor convictions. In particular, legislatures have increasingly attached severe collateral consequences to misdemeanor offenses- penalties such as requirements to register as a sex offender, prohibitions on owning or possessing a firearm, and deportation. Although there is a wealth of scholarship studying the effect this development has on defendants and their attorneys, little attention has been paid to the impact collateral consequences have on prosecutorial incentives. This Article starts to remedy that gap by exploring the influence that collateral consequences exert on …

The Prosecutor's Ethical Duty To End Mass Incarceration, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Research Agenda For The Forensic Sciences, Jonathan J. Koehler, John B. Meixner Jr.

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

After the National Academy of Sciences issued a stunning report in 2009 on the unscientific state of many forensic science subfields, forensic science has undergone internal and external scrutiny that it had managed to avoid for decades. Although some reform efforts are underway, forensic science writ large has yet to embrace and settle upon an empirical research agenda that addresses knowledge gaps pertaining to the reliability of its methods. Our paper addresses this problem by proposing a preliminary set of fourteen empirical studies for the forensic sciences. Following a brief discussion of the courtroom treatment of forensic science evidence, we …

The Exercise Of Power In Prison Organizations And Implications For Legitimacy, John Wooldredge, Benjamin Steiner

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Extrapolating from Bottoms and Tankebe’s framework for a social scientific understanding of “legitimacy,” we argue that differences in how correctional officers exercise “power” over prisoners can potentially impact their rightful claims to legitimate authority. Given the implications of this argument for the “cultivation” of legitimacy (as discussed by Weber), the study described here focused on (a) individual and prison level effects on the degree to which officers generally rely on different power bases when exercising their authority, and (b) whether more or less reliance on different power bases at the facility level impacts prisoners’ general perceptions of officers as legitimate …

Small Cells, Big Problems: The Increasing Precision Of Cell Site Location Information And The Need For Fourth Amendment Protections, Robert M. Bloom, William T. Clark

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The past fifty years has witnessed an evolution in technology advancement in police surveillance. Today, one of the essential tools of police surveillance is something most Americans carry with them in their pockets every day, the cell phone. Cell phones not only contain a huge repository of personal data, they also provide continuous surveillance of a person’s movement known as cell site location information (CSLI).

In 1986, Congress sought to provide some privacy protections to CSLI in the Stored Communication Act. Although this solution may have struck the proper balance in an age when cell phones were a mere novelty …

Recidivism And Time Served In Prison, Daniel P. Mears, Joshua C. Cochran, William D. Bales, Avinash S. Bhati

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

A justification for lengthier stays in prison stems from the belief that spending more time in prison reduces recidivism. Extant studies, however, have provided limited evidence for that belief and, indeed, suggest the effect of time served may be minimal. Few studies have employed rigorous methodological approaches, examined time spans of more than one to two years, or investigated the potential for the relationship between recidivism and time served to be curvilinear. Drawing on prior scholarship, this paper identifies three sets of hypotheses about the functional form of the time served and recidivism relationship. Using generalized propensity score analysis to …

Fulfilling Daubert's Gatekeeping Mandate Through Court-Appointed Experts, Stephanie Domitrovich

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

Looking Backwards At Old Cases: When Science Moves Forward, Jules Epstein

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Forensic evidence—be it in the form of science-derived analyses such as DNA profiling or drug identification, or in more subjective analyses such as pattern or impression [latent print, handwriting, firearms] examinations—is prevalent and often critical in criminal prosecutions. Yet, while the criminal court processes prize finality of verdicts, science evolves and often proves that earlier analyses were inadequate or plainly wrong. This article examines the tension between those two concerns by focusing on the 2015 decision of the United States Supreme Court in Maryland v. Kulbicki, addresses the inadequacies of the Court’s analysis, and suggests some factors for judges confronted …