Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

Staring Down The Sights At Mcdonald V. City Of Chicago: Why The Second Amendment Deserves The Kevlar Protection Of Strict Scrutiny, James J. Williamson Ii

Legislation and Policy Brief

In June of 2008, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, declaring that a District of Columbia law prohibiting the possession of handguns in a private home for personal protection violated the Second Amendment of the Constitution.  Justice Scalia, writing for a 5-4 majority, recognized that the protections provided by the Second Amendment apply to individuals—not just “militias”—and emphatically declared that “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.  These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”  After four years of …

The Police Gamesmanship Dilemma, Mary D. Fan

Articles

Police gamesmanship poses a recurring regulatory challenge for constitutional criminal procedure, leading to zigzags and murky zones in the law such as the recent rule shifts regarding searches incident to arrest and interrogation. Police gamesmanship in the “competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime” involves tactics that press on blind spots, blurry regions or gaps in rules and remedies, undermining the purpose of the protections. Currently, courts generally avoid peering into the Pandora’s Box of police stratagems unless the circumvention of a protection becomes too obvious to ignore and requires a stopgap rule-patch that further complicates the maze of criminal procedure. …

Construing The Outer Limits Of Sentencing Authority: A Proposed Bright-Line Rule For Noncapital Proportionality Review, Kevin White

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Your Honor, May I Have That In Writing?" A Proposed Response To Violations Of The Federal Sentencing Written Reasons Requirement, Judy Ann Clausen

UF Law Faculty Publications

A disturbing trend has emerged in our federal courts. District judges are ignoring the statutory mandate to state in writing specific reasons for deviating from the range recommended by the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Rather than vacating these out-of-range sentences, U.S. Courts of Appeals are affirming the sentences despite the fact that they are imposed in violation of law. This article proposes a solution to this problem.

In Part I, this article explores the historical and legal context for the written reasons requirement. Part II explores two circuit splits surrounding the written reasons requirement. Part III recommends that appellate courts adopt …

How United States V. Jones Can Restore Our Faith In The Fourth Amendment, Erica Goldberg

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

United States v. Jones, issued in January of this year, is a landmark case that has the potential to restore a property-based interpretation of the Fourth Amendment to prominence. In 1967, the Supreme Court abandoned its previous Fourth Amendment framework, which had viewed the prohibition on unreasonable searches in light of property and trespass laws, and replaced it with a rule protecting the public’s reasonable expectations of privacy. Although the Court may have intended this reasonable expectations test to provide more protection than a test rooted in property law, the new test in fact made the Justices’ subjective views about …

Modifying The Restrictions On Sentence Modification: United States V. Cobb, Jackie Bosshardt

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sidestepping Deference: How United States V. Ressam Encourages Overly Stringent Review Of Sentencing Decisions, Joseph Leavitt

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion: How To Achieve The Categorical Exemption Of Mentally Retarded Defendants From Execution, J. Amy Dillard

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the Court’s categorical exclusion of mentally retarded defendants from execution and explores how trial courts should employ procedures to accomplish heightened reliability in the mental retardation determination; it maintains that if a mentally retarded defendant is subjected to a death sentence then the Atkins directive has been ignored. To satisfy the Atkins Court’s objective of protecting mentally retarded defendants from the “special risk of wrongful execution,” the article explores whether trial courts should engage in a unified, pre-trial competency assessment in all capital cases where the defendant asserts mental retardation as a bar to execution and how …

Atrocity Crimes Litigation Year-In- Review (2010): A Gender Perspective, Valerie Oosterveld

Law Publications

No abstract provided.

Annual Juvenile Recidivism Report, Becky Noréus

Justice Policy

Executive Summary:

The Maine Department of Corrections (MDOC) Division of Juvenile Services (DJS) contracts with the Muskie School of Public Service in a state-university partnership to analyze juvenile recidivism rates. DJS measures juvenile justice outcomes to guide policy and program development geared toward recidivism reduction. Reduction of youth recidivism in Maine increases public safety.

Recidivism in this report is defined as a re-adjudication (juvenile) or conviction (adult) for an offense committed by a youth in Maine within three years of his or her first adjudication. This report measures DJS impact on youth who have been adjudicated and placed under supervision …

Crime Mapping And The Fourth Amendment: Redrawing 'High Crime Areas', Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article addresses how “crime mapping” technology has the potential to reshape Fourth Amendment protections in designated “high crime areas.” In the past few years, the ability of police administrators to identify and officially label “high crime areas” has rapidly expanded. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and crime mapping technology has simplified the collection and analysis of crime statistics. These GIS crime mapping technologies can produce almost perfect information about the level, rate, and geographic location of crimes in any given area.While effective policing tools, these technologies have constitutional consequences that are only now being considered. Under existing Supreme Court precedent, …

Preventive Detention In American Theory And Practice, Adam Klein, Benjamin Wittes

National Security Law Program

It is something of an article of faith in public and academic discourse that preventive detention runs counter to American values and law. This meme has become standard fare among human rights groups and in a great deal of legal scholarship. It treats the past nine years of extra-criminal detention of terrorism suspects as an extraordinary aberration from a strong American constitutional norm, under which government locks up citizens pursuant only to criminal punishment, not because of mere fear of their future acts. This argument further asserts that any statutory counterterrorism administrative detention regime would be a radical departure from …

Pretrial Incentives, Post-Conviction Review, And Sorting Criminal Prosecutions By Guilt Or Innocence, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

The fundamental problem with false convictions is that they are unobserved, and in general, unobservable. We don't spot them when they happen-if we did, they wouldn't happen-and in most cases we can't identify them after the fact. We have no general reliable test for innocence or guilt; if we did, we'd use it at trial. As result, we often say that we don't know for sure whether a convicted criminal defendant is innocent or guilty, or even that we can't know for sure. But this isn't exactly true-or rather, its truth depends on who we mean by "we."

Automobile Consent Searches: The Driver's Options In A Lose-Lose Situation, Arthur J. Park

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

"Do you mind if I take a quick look in the vehicle?" This is a question that countless Americans hear every day, but very few citizens understand the ramifications of their answer. How long can the officer keep me here? What if there is something in my car that I do not know about? Can I be arrested if I refuse the search? This article will address the legal context surrounding consent searches of automobiles in order to provide some clarity to drivers and passengers that are put in this lose-lose situation.

Automobile Consent Searches: The Driver's Options In A Lose-Lose Situation, Arthur J. Park

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

"Do you mind if I take a quick look in the vehicle?" This is a question that countless Americans hear every day, but very few citizens understand the ramifications of their answer. How long can the officer keep me here? What if there is something in my car that I do not know about? Can I be arrested if I refuse the search? This article will address the legal context surrounding consent searches of automobiles in order to provide some clarity to drivers and passengers that are put in this lose-lose situation.

How United States V. Jones Can Restore Our Faith In The Fourth Amendment, Erica Goldberg

School of Law Faculty Publications

United States v. Jones, issued in January of this year, is a landmark case that has the potential to restore a property-based interpretation of the Fourth Amendment to prominence. In 1967, the Supreme Court abandoned its previous Fourth Amendment framework, which had viewed the prohibition on unreasonable searches in light of property and trespass laws, and replaced it with a rule protecting the public’s reasonable expectations of privacy. Although the Court may have intended this reasonable expectations test to provide more protection than a test rooted in property law, the new test in fact made the Justices’ subjective views about …

Sentencing, Drugs, And Prisons: A Lesson From Ohio, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Prison overcrowding has become a familiar story. Current data shows that more than 1 in 100 adults in America—over 2 million people—are incarcerated, earning the United States the distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that state and federal prisons are reaching and exceeding capacity. Nor should it be a shock that drug offenders take up many of the beds in those overcapacity prisons. Relative to other crimes, drug sentencing in the United States has been increasingly harsh since the 1970s, and the prison population is feeling the effects …

Less Than We Might: Meditations On Life In Prison Without Parole, Robert Blecker

Articles & Chapters

Today, death penalty opponents mostly claim life without parole (LWOP) as their genuinely popular substitute punishment for the worst of the worst. These abolitionists embrace LWOP as cheaper, equally just, and equally effective - a punishment that eliminates the state’s exercise of an inhumane power to kill helpless human beings who pose no immediate threat. Furthermore, they insist, LWOP allows the criminal justice system to reverse sentencing mistakes. Some even characterize it as a punishment worse than death.

Thousands of hours in several states, interviewing and observing more than a hundred convicted killers, along with dozens of correctional officers who …

Hot Crimes: A Study In Excess, Steven P. Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. . . . [I]ts nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) restored to; . . . sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten . . . at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such as those in legal and social policy or even …

'The Mess We’Re In': Five Steps Towards The Transformation Of Prison Cultures, Lynn S. Branham

All Faculty Scholarship

Few dispute that conditions in prisons need to be improved – that, for example, prisoners with mental-health problems need to have those problems addressed, and addressed effectively, while they are confined. But the more fundamental question is whether prisons can be, not just improved, but transformed. Transformation in this context means deep and sustained changes in the ethos of those who work and live in prisons. That ethos would reflect at least four precepts: (1) hope as an imperative; (2) the viability of renewal; (3) the catharsis that attends personal responsibility and accountability; and (4) the duty and call, extending …

Beyond Experience: Getting Retributive Justice Right, Dan Markel, Chad Flanders, David C. Gray

All Faculty Scholarship

How central should hedonic adaptation be to the establishment of sentencing policy?

In earlier work, Professors Bronsteen, Buccafusco, and Masur (BBM) drew some normative significance from the psychological studies of adaptability for punishment policy. In particular, they argued that retributivists and utilitarians alike are obliged on pain of inconsistency to take account of the fact that most prisoners, most of the time, adapt to imprisonment in fairly short order, and therefore suffer much less than most of us would expect. They also argued that ex-prisoners don't adapt well upon re-entry to society and that social planners should consider their post-release …

Pot As Pretext: Marijuana, Race, And The New Disorder In New York City Street Policing, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Although possession of small quantities of marijuana has been decriminalized in New York State since the late 1970s, arrests for marijuana possession in New York City have increased more than tenfold since the mid-1990s, and remain high more than 10 years later. This rise has been a notable component of the city’s “Order Maintenance Policing” strategy, designed to aggressively target low-level offenses, usually through street interdictions known as “stop, question, and frisk” activity. We analyze data on 2.2 million stops and arrests carried out from 2004 to 2008, and identify significant racial disparities in the implementation of marijuana enforcement. These …

Don't Answer The Door: Montejo V. Louisiana Relaxes Police Restrictions For Questioning Non-Custodial Defendants, Emily Bretz

Michigan Law Review

In 2009, the Supreme Court held in Montejo v. Louisiana that a defendant may validly waive his Sixth Amendment right to counsel during police interrogation, even if police initiate interrogation after the defendant's invocation of the right at the first formal proceeding. This Note asserts that Montejo significantly altered the Sixth Amendment protections available to represented defendants. By increasing defendants' exposure to law enforcement, the decision allows police to try to elicit incriminating statements and waivers of the right to counsel after the defendant has expressed a desire for counsel. In order to protect the defendant's constitutional guarantee of a …

From Harmelin To Graham - Justice Kennedy Stakes Out A Path To Proportional Punishment, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

Graham v. Florida³ is a groundbreaking decision because it revives punishment doctrine on two issues that have lain dormant since Harmelin v. Michigan⁴: proportionality and individualized sentencing. Although it doesn't overrule Harmelin, by recognizing the continued vitality of Weems⁵ and Solem ⁶ the Graham decision appears to acknowledge that the Court's approach to proportionality since Harmelin may be too restrictive for the U.S. justice system today. In Solem, the Court affirmed its Constitutional role in ensuring just punishment; in Graham, the Court reaffirms that role.

Harmelin has had an enormous and regrettable impact …

The Anatomy Of A Search: Intrusiveness And The Fourth Amendment, Renée Mcdonald Hutchins

University of Richmond Law Review

In this essay, I contend that when evaluating the constitutionality of enhanced surveillance devices, the existing test for assessing the occurrence of a Fourth Amendment search should be modified. Specifically, I suggest that intrusiveness should be unambiguously adopted by the Court as the benchmark for assessing and defining the existence of a search under the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, intrusiveness should be clearly defined to require an examination of two factors: the functionality of a challenged form of surveillance and the potential for disclosure created by the device.

Curriculum: Investigating Allegations Of Staff Sexual Misconduct With Offenders (Facilitator's Guide), Brenda V. Smith, Morris L. Thigpen, Thomas Beauclair, Dee Halley, Jaime M. Yarussi, Marcia Morgan, Aaron Aldrich, Darrell Alley, Roy Austin, Diane Berman, Susan Carle, Wally Carmichael, Deborah Connor, Dan Dunne, Karen Giannakoulias, Katherine Huffman, Madeleine Lamarre, Susan Mccampbell, Andie Moss, Mary Pinn, Susan Poole, Keith Reid, Jo Sterns, Melissa Turner, A.T. Wall

Research Reports & White Papers

Investigating Allegations of Staff Sexual Misconduct with Offenders is a 36-hour educational program that addresses the complex issues in investigations of staff on offender sexual abuse in correctional settings. It is primarily designed for investigators, prosecutors, human resource administrators, and high-level correctional administrators, but can be adapted for other audiences.

Before the lesson plans begin on page 31, you will find background information for the instructor. First you will find the proposed program agenda for the training, a list of topics and break times. This provides the instructor with a snapshot of the entire training; each module, topic and time …

"You Crossed The Fog Line!"—Kansas, Pretext, And The Fourth Amendment, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

In Whren, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned pretextual traffic stops. In practice the holding of Whren condones police investigations that target certain suspect classes of people, like Hispanics, for increased police scrutiny. In permitting pretextual stops, the Court ignored the risk that such practices will encourage police to distort the truth, overlooked the cost of under-enforcement of the laws, and ignored the consequences to the criminal justice system of race and ethnicity based discrimination.

Kansas law exacerbates these risks by making fog-line stops a model for protecting ulterior motives from a sifting judicial inquiry. In Kansas, it makes …

Improbable Cause: A Case For Judging Police By A More Majestic Standard, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

Several prior studies have demonstrated that police sometimes, if not often, lie in an attempt to avoid the effects of the exclusionary rule. This study of federal trial judges in the District of Kansas suggests that judges may be fostering this police perjury. Judges may unwittingly encourage police perjury because they subconsciously recognize that acknowledging perjury will probably result in release of a culpable defendant. Judges may also permit perjury because they cannot determine when police are lying. In either case, the Supreme Court majority's conception of the exclusionary rule naturally leads trial judges to deny defendants' motions to suppress. …

An Exclusionary Rule For Police Lies, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

Our legal system treats the police as if they are impartial fact gatherers, trained and motivated to gather facts both for and against guilt, rather than biased advocates attempting to disprove innocence, which is the reality. Because of its partiality in favor of officers, the criminal justice system lacks the appropriate structure to expose and effectively deter police lies, which distort the truth about criminal or unconstitutional conduct.

This Article, presented in three parts, argues that the current system should be changed to provide the structure necessary to promote honest police work. Specifically, it urges a modification to the exclusionary …

The Exclusionary Rule Applied To Coerced Statements From Nondefendants, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 795 (2010), Victoria D. Noel

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.