Criminal Law Commons^™

Passing The Buck: The Perils Of Oklahoma V. Castro-Huerta, Adam Crepelle, Timothy Purdon, Brendan Johnson

Faculty Publications & Other Works

The Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta upended federal Indian law by allowing states to prosecute crimes involving Indians committed in Indian country. Castro-Huerta created a concurrent jurisdiction over Indian country crimes involving non-Indians. While concurrent jurisdiction increases the number of law enforcement agents with jurisdiction, it also creates opportunities for those law enforcement agents to shirk responsibility. Neither state nor federal law enforcement is accountable to tribes, so Castro-Huerta is likely to create a pass the buck mentality among non-Indian law enforcement. Moreover, there is little to indicate expanding state authority over tribes will benefit Indians. In …

The Criminalization Of Mental Illness And Substance Use Disorder: Addressing The Void Between The Healthcare And Criminal Justice Systems, Emily B. Egart

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

When We Need Someone To Blame: Officer Suicide, Justice, And The Felony Murder Rule In The Casey White Case, Mallory Sadler

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Virtual Justice: Criminalizing Avatar Sexual Assault In Metaverse Spaces, Olivia Bellini

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reprieves Return: Minnesota's Decision To Awaken The Reprieve, Mary Fee, Monica Shaffer

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Myth Of The Guilty Suspect: Confession, Narrative, And Political Assent, Susan L. Tanner

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Creditor Courts, Alexander Billy, Neel U. Sukhatme

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

One of the largest institutional creditors in the United States is perhaps the most unexpected: the criminal court system. Each year, creditor courts collect more than $15 billion in revenues from criminal defendants. These fees are the lifeblood of the modern criminal legal system.

In this Article, we shed new light on the legal and economic framework under which myriad stakeholders operate in these creditor courts. By analyzing new survey data from clerks of court and 102 contracts with debt collection agencies in Florida, we provide general insights how creditor courts distort incentives and teem with conflicts of interest. These …

A Second Chance At Success: Using “Second Look” Laws To Modify Sentences Of Juvenile Offenders, Sophia M. Adams

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

“Second look” sentencing laws allow incarcerated individuals to petition to have their sentences reexamined and potentially reduced after they have served a significant period of incarceration. This rehabilitative relief is conditioned upon an offender showing that they have made meaningful positive changes while incarcerated and would not pose a threat to their community if released. Implementing second look laws is particularly appropriate in the context of offenders who have committed crimes as juveniles. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that juvenile offenders are less culpable than their adult counterparts and psychological science supports this conclusion. This Comment examines and compares …

A Critical Assessment Of The First Step Act’S Recidivism-Reduction Measures, Raquel Wilson

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The First Step Act of 2018 (“FSA”) is the most impactful federal sentencing reform of the past 40 years. While the Act represents a partial resurgence of the rehabilitative model of imprisonment, which had fallen out of favor decades before, it also represents a missed opportunity to fully integrate evidence-based rehabilitation programs for those offenders who pose the greatest risks to public safety.

The public has a strong interest in reducing recidivism, particularly among violent offenders, most of whom will be released from federal prison eventually. The FSA incentivizes participation in evidence-based, recidivism-reducing programs offered by the Bureau of Prisons …

Expecting Medication Surveillance, Jennifer D. Oliva

Fordham Law Review

In response to federal financial incentives and mandates, all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories administer electronic prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs). Federal and state policymakers justified the implementation and enhancement of ubiquitous prescription drug monitoring by contending that expansive state drug surveillance was a necessary weapon in the war against the American drug overdose crisis. As is often the case with tools designed for law enforcement surveillance, however, PDMPs have proven susceptible to mission creep. Although pioneer PDMPs were paper-based systems that limited their surveillance to a narrow class of heavily regulated controlled substances, modern …

Who Bears The Burden When Prison Guards Rape?, Meredith B. Esser

Scholarly Works

Several recent scandals have highlighted the continued problem of institutional sexual abuse within the federal Bureau of Prisons ("BOP"). Most notoriously, the rampant sexual abuse of women incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution ("FCI") Dublin, also known as the "rape club," resulted in the prosecution and conviction of several high-ranking officials within FCI Dublin, including both the former Warden and former Chaplain who worked there for several years. In response to these patterns of misconduct, the Federal Sentencing Commission's new guidelines, which went into effect on November 1, 2023, now allow for victims of custodial sexual assault to apply for early …

Extraordinary Punishment: Conditions Of Confinement And Compassionate Release, Meredith B. Esser

Scholarly Works

People experience severe forms of harm while incarcerated, including medical neglect, prolonged solitary confinement, sexual and physical violence, and a host of other ills. But civil rights litigation under the Eighth Amendment the most common vehicle through which people seek to redress these harms presents significant practical and doctrinal barriers to incarcerated plaintiffs. Most notably, the Eighth Amendment's "deliberate indifference" standard asks not whether a person has been harmed, but instead requires plaintiffs to demonstrate a criminally reckless mental state on the part of prison officials. Further, Eighth Amendment remedies are limited to damages or injunctions, which may not adequately …

We Shall Overcome: The Evolution Of Quotas In The Land Of The Free And The Home Of Samba, Stella Emery Santana

Seattle University Law Review

When were voices given to the voiceless? When will education be permitted to all? When will we need to protest no more? It’s the twenty-first century, and the fight for equity in higher education remains a challenge to peoples all over the world. While students in the United States must deal with the increase in loans, in Brazil, only around 20% of youth between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have a higher education degree.

The primary objective of this Article is to conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of the development, implementation, and legal adjudication of educational quota systems within …

Pacific Islands And The U.S. Military: The Legal Borderlands Of The Environmental Movement, Sonia Lei

Seattle University Law Review

Climate change remains an urgent, ongoing global issue that requires critical examination of institutional polluters. This includes the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum: the United States military. The Department of Defense (DoD) is a massive institution with little oversight, a carbon footprint spanning the globe, a budget greater than the next ten largest nations combined, and overly generous exemptions to environmental regulations and carbon reduction targets. This Comment examines how this lack of accountability and oversight plays out in the context of three Pacific islands that have hosted U.S. military bases for decades. By considering the environmental impact of …

Book Review, Mia Swart, On Bonifratròw Street: How A Boy From Lwów Escaped The Nazis (2024), Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

On Bonifratròw Street is a book about biography, history, and law. It begins with Katz’s childhood in Lwów, Poland, before World War II. The story unwraps the backgrounds of his parents and other family members, notably his biological father, whose presence and then absence loom large in his life. The book then moves to the war. It details Katz’s life in a variety of places, including Lodz and Warsaw, among others, seen from his perspective as a teenager at the time. The book ends with Katz’s post-war emigration to the US, where he joined a distant relative. Defying odds and …

Going Federal, Staying Stateside: Felons, Firearms, And The "Federalization" Of Crime, Jonathan Abel

American University Law Review

Scholars have long debated the federalization of crime. Proponents assert that federal prosecutions are more likely than state prosecutions to result in convictions and severe punishments, and thus more likely to deter crime. Opponents argue that federalization leads to the arbitrary, and even racist, punishment of a few unlucky defendants plucked from a sea of similarly situated peers. Everyone seems to agree about one thing, though: the federal system outstrips the state system in effectiveness and severity. Yet, no one has obtained the state-court data needed to substantiate these comparisons. This Article fills that gap with an examination of the …

Prison Administrative Law, Erin Braatz

American University Law Review

This Article examines a matching pair of gaps in the legal literature on prisons and the administrative state. On the one hand, prison law focuses on constitutional protections for prisoners. As such, it emphasizes the minimum conditions the Constitution ensures for the nearly two million individuals currently incarcerated throughout the United States. What this focus misses, however, is the administrative nature of these institutions. With vast powers delegated to prison departments, prison law often fails to fully engage with the administrative nature of power and decision-making within prison departments. This administrative structure shapes the conditions that prevail inside American prisons. …

Progressive Facade: How Bail Reforms Expose The Limitations Of The Progressive Prosecutor Movement, Sarah Gottlieb

Washington and Lee Law Review

Progressive prosecutors have been acclaimed as the new hope for change in the criminal legal system. Advocates and scholars touting progressive prosecution believe that progressive prosecutors will use their power and discretion to address systemic racism and end mass incarceration. Just as this hope has arisen, however, so have concerns that meaningful change cannot be enacted within the criminal system by the very actors whose job it is to incarcerate. This Article highlights these concerns by looking at the bail reforms enacted by four different progressive prosecutors and analyzes the initial promises made, the actions taken to reform and eliminate …

Punishing Gender, Erin Collins

Law Faculty Publications

As jurisdictions across the country grapple with the urgent need to redress the impact of mass incarceration, there has been renewed interest in reforms that reduce the harms punishment inflicts on women. These "gender-responsive" reforms aim to adapt traditional punishment practices that, proponents claim, were designed "for men." The push to change how we punish based on gender, while perhaps well intentioned, is misguided. As abolition feminist principles reveal, these gender-responsive practices not only reify traditional gender norms, but also strengthen the operation of the carceral state. This Article catalogs the ways in that the gender-responsive approach currently influences various …

U.S. Judiciary Syllabus: True True Crime Zines, Jason Leggett

Open Educational Resources

An experimental, open education syllabus for a pilot zero textbook cost course, U.S. Judiciary using zines and true crime.