Criminal Law Commons^™

Sb 44 - Expanding The Street Gang Terrorism And Prevention Act, Aaron L. Brown, Anna C. Dillon

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act enhances penalties for violations of the Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, including imposing mandatory minimums, and preserves the State’s right to appeal a court’s deviation from the mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines provided in the Act. The Act also imposes limits on the use of unsecured judicial release.

Hb 219 - Venue For Money Laundering And Theft Involving Digital Currency, Samuel P. Robertson, Lindsey N. Smith

Georgia State University Law Review

The Act creates venue in cases of money laundering and theft that involve the transfer of digital currency by establishing that the crime may be considered to have happened wherever power was exercised over the property, wherever an act in furtherance of the crime occurred, or wherever the victim resides.

State V. Joseph Segrain, 252 A.3d 1255 (R.I. 2021), Jaclyn A. Martin

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Trade Policing, Kathleen Claussen

Articles

At the core of U.S. economic governance, there is a novel and under-noticed phenomenon that challenges longstanding frameworks of international law and corporate compliance. This practice, which this Article terms the new "trade policing," has extraordinary reach. Recent regulatory makeovers and pathbreaking statutes empower our trade agencies to target, for the first time, companies, rather than foreign governments, as used to be their purview. Trade police now pursue companies wherever they may be in the world, not just for violating U.S. law but also for violating foreign law in areas as diverse as labor rights and environmental protections. Such a …

Shifting The Male Gaze Of Evidence, Teneille R. Brown

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In this article I target the altar at which many of us worship—the pursuit of rationality. For evidence purposes, rationality is defined as decisions that are reasonable, objective, inductive, and free from the bias of emotion. This view of rationality is deeply embedded in evidence scholarship and practice. It is also reflected in evidence rules like FRE 403, which treat emotional testimony as unfairly prejudicial simply because it is emotional. The anti-emotion view of rationality reflects the thinking of Western philosophical giants. Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Bacon all thought that men should strive for rationality by suppressing their emotions, because …

Holding Enablers Of Child Sexual Abuse Accountable: The Case Of Jeremy Bell, Amos N. Guiora, Valeri Craigle, Aya Hibben, Henry F. Fradella

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, 1 in every 5 women and 1 in every 13 men report being sexually abused as a child. Of the child sexual abuse that occurs during the K-12 years, much of it is aided and abetted by those in positions of authority who look the other way when abuse is known or suspected. This article uses the novel approach of holding not just the perpetrators of child sexual abuse accountable for these crimes, but also those who enable their criminal acts by failing to report suspicious behaviors or witnessed accounts of abuse. No case in more …

Politics And The Criminal Enforcement Of Superfund, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Age Is Not Just A Number: Problems With Florida’S Statutory Minimum Age For Juvenile Delinquency And Why It Must Be Increased, Natalie Brooks

FIU Law Review

Under a Florida law enacted in 2021, any child over the age of six years old can be arrested and subjected to juvenile delinquency proceedings. Florida, as well as the United States in general, is an outlier when it comes to statutory minimum ages for juvenile delinquency. The most common and recommended minimum age internationally is fourteen years old, and many studies show that arresting, charging, and adjudicating children below the age of fourteen is counterproductive, as it leads to increased recidivism, potentially violates due process, and leaves lasting negative effects on children. This comment will discuss juvenile delinquency in …

Universal Forms Of Influence: Support For Women On Boards, Cindy A. Schipani, Paula J. Caproni

Seattle University Law Review

There are various efforts underway to increase gender diversity on corporate boards, including legislation in California, a recent SEC approved comply or explain rule for companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and efforts by institutional investors such as State Street and BlackRock to recognize the value diversity brings to corporate decisionmaking. Although some of these efforts are being contested in the courts, many companies have begun to comply with these initiatives.

This Article is organized as follows. Part I provides an overview of several efforts to increase gender diversity on boards along with numerous research studies showcasing the benefits …

“Statistics Are Human Beings With The Tears Wiped Away”: Utilizing Data To Develop Strategies To Reduce The Number Of Native Americans Who Go Missing, Lori Mcpherson, Sarah Blazucki

Seattle University Law Review

On New Year’s Eve night, 2019, sixteen-year-old Selena Shelley Faye Not Afraid attended a party in Billings, Montana, about fifty miles west of her home in Hardin, Montana, near the Crow Reservation. A junior at the local high school, she was active in her community. The party carried over until the next day, and she caught a ride back toward home with friends in a van the following afternoon. When the van stopped at an interstate rest stop, Selena got out but never made it back to the van. The friends reported her missing to the police and indicated they …

A Cross-Jurisdictional Analysis Of Penalties For Possession Of Contraband Phones By Inmates And A Proposal To Increase The Federal Penalty, Andrew W. Eichner

Touro Law Review

The federal penalty for possession of a contraband phone by an inmate is currently a statutory maximum of one year of imprisonment, which is a Class A misdemeanor. This Article surveys 56 jurisdictions from across the United States (the 50 States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealths of Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) and discovers that the federal penalty for this offense is much lower than the national average for comparable offenses, which is an average statutory maximum of five years of imprisonment. To rectify this discrepancy, the Article proposes …

Proceed With Caution: Criminal Responsibility For Non-Participating Actors In University Hazing Incidents, Charlie Penrod

Touro Law Review

Hazing in university fraternities has become an epidemic. Most hazing involves new pledges who are coerced to endure physical, emotional, or psychological harm to prove themselves worthy of admission to the group. Sadly, many students suffer severe injuries from hazing, up to and including death. Many states have passed specific laws banning hazing and expanded the universe of persons guilty of hazing to possibly include non-participants who aided the hazing. In 2020, a Florida appellate court broadened this further, potentially holding a fraternity president responsible for hazing for making the mistake of allowing liquor at an off-campus party. The fraternity …

Guilty Of Probable Cause: Public Arrest Records And Dignity In The Information Age, Nicholas Thompson

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The United States is exceptional among Western nations in its treatment of criminal records. Today, an estimated one-third of Americans1 bear the “modern equivalent of branding”: the publicly-accessible criminal record.2 Far from remaining locked in digital limbo, these records serve a variety of purposes, from legitimate law enforcement use to extortion against arrestees seeking to scrub their mugshots from a Google search.3 It would be natural to assume that such records result from an individual’s commission of a crime, for which the individual is duly convicted and then marked with the brand of the state for the transgression. But the …

How The “Black Criminal” Stereotype Shapes Black People’S Psychological Experience Of Policing: Evidence Of Stereotype Threat And Remaining Questions, Cynthia J. Najdowski

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Cultural stereotypes that link Black race to crime in the U.S. originated in and are perpetuated by policies that result in the disproportionate criminalization and punishment of Black people. The scientific record is replete with evidence that these stereotypes impact perceivers’ perceptions, information processing, and decision-making in ways that produce more negative criminal legal outcomes for Black people than White people. However, relatively scant attention has been paid to understanding how situations that present a risk of being evaluated through the lens of crime-related stereotypes also directly affect Black people. In this article, I consider one situation in particular: encounters …

Racial Disparities In Policing: Psychological Consequences Over The Lifespan, Kelly C. Burke, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Margaret C. Stevenson

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We review the psychological consequences of racialized policing for people of color over the course of their lives, organizing our review within Bronfrenbrenner’s (1979) social-ecological model and emerging science on racial, legal, and racial-legal socialization. First, we consider the broader social climate that criminalizes and punishes people of color, and thereby generates racialized policing (macrosystem). Then, we turn to the institution and practice of policing and how this influences the way people of color come to think about their relationships with police (exosystem). Next, we examine how vicarious experiences with police shape attitudes toward police (mesosystem), and how direct experiences …

Between Cooperation And Conflict In Second Look Sentence Review, Kay L. Levine, Ronald F. Wright

Faculty Articles

This Article offers the first scholarly assessment of new resentencing practices initiated by state prosecutors in the United States. Unlike the conviction integrity units that have become institutional fixtures in many prosecutors’ offices over the past two decades, attorneys working on resentencing matters rarely address concerns about the legal integrity or factual accuracy of the conviction itself. Prosecutors and defense attorneys instead consider the continuing integrity of the sentence imposed on the defendant. Perhaps a second look is necessary because the sentence imposed for the crime no longer appears necessary to serve public safety goals, because the prisoner has aged …

The Public Voice Of The Defender, Russell M. Gold, Kay L. Levine

Faculty Articles

For decades police and prosecutors have controlled the public narrative about criminal law. The news landscape features salacious stories of violent crimes while ignoring the more mundane but far more prevalent minor cases that clog the court dockets. Defenders, faced with overwhelming caseloads and fear that speaking out may harm their clients, have largely ceded the opportunity to offer a counternarrative based on what they see every day. Defenders tell each other about overuse of pretrial detention, intensive pressure to plead guilty, overzealous prosecutors, cycles of violence, and rampant constitutional violations—all of which inflict severe harm on defendants and their …

The Market For Corporate Criminals, Andrew K. Jennings

Faculty Articles

This Article identifies problems and opportunities at the intersection of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and corporate crime and compliance. In M&A, criminal successor liability is of particular importance, because it is quantitatively less predictable and qualitatively more threatening to buyers than successor liability in tort or contract. Private successor liability requires a buyer to bear bounded economic costs, which can in turn be reallocated to sellers via the contracting process. Criminal successor liability, however, threatens a buyer with non-indemnifiable and potentially ruinous punishment for another firm’s wrongful acts.

This threat may inhibit the marketability of businesses that have criminal exposure, …

Searches Without Suspicion: Avoiding A Four Million Person Underclass, Tonja Jacobi, Addie Maguire

Faculty Articles

In Samson v. California, the Supreme Court upheld warrantless, suspicionless searches for parolees. That determination was controversial both because suspicionless searches are, by definition, anathema to the Fourth Amendment, and because they arguably undermine parolees’ rehabilitation. Less attention has been given to the fact that the implications of the case were not limited to parolees. The opinion in Samson included half a sentence of dicta that seemingly swept probationers into its analysis, implicating the rights of millions of additional people in the United States. Not only is analogizing parolees and probationers not logically sound because the two groups differ …

How They Get Away With Murder: The Intersection Of Capital Punishment, Prosecutor Misconduct, And Systemic Injustice, Rushton Davis Pope

Emory Law Journal

Black defendants are executed at a disproportionately high rate, an injustice quietly persisting in the shadow of America’s dark history of slavery and Jim Crow. While a variety of intersectional factors have perpetuated this injustice, the role of prosecutors who commit misconduct to secure a conviction is significant. Defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty, but when the prosecutors who carry the burden of proving that guilt choose not to play by the rules, they wantonly and recklessly embrace the risk of convicting—even killing—an innocent person.

This Comment focuses on two primary forms of prosecutor misconduct: Batson violations that occur …