Criminal Law Commons^™

Playing Hot Pot-Ato: Does Biden’S Presidency Signal The End Of Federal Marijuana Prohibition?, Sara Snowden

Mercer Law Review

“Hot Potato is a very different game when the people playing are starving.” In the context of federal marijuana legalization, various branches and agencies within the government have long engaged in a game of political hot potato—tossing responsibility for legalization off into the hands of someone (anyone) else. These evasive maneuvers are not victimless. As an overwhelming majority of states have taken actions to legalize or decriminalize marijuana, unsuspecting citizens have been caught in the crosshairs between conflicting state and federal laws.

Take for example David Doe, a resident of Colorado, who suffered many afflictions. Three years ago, he was …

Ding Dong! The Count Is Dead, Or Is It?: Criminal Defendants May Not Directly Appeal Convictions If Unresolved Counts Are On The Dead Docket, Lilly B. Nickels

Mercer Law Review

A defendant is indicted on two criminal counts, is found guilty on one of those counts, and is sentenced to time in prison. However, the jury could not come to a decision on the other count, so the trial court judge places the count on the court’s dead docket where the count could remain for an indefinite period of time, deeming the defendant’s case pending in the trial court. Due to the defendant’s case being classified as pending, the defendant does not have the right to a direct appeal. The defendant must helplessly serve prison time without any idea as …

The Death Penalty Standard That Won’T Die: The Georgia Supreme Court Maintains The Highest Possible Standard Of Proof For The Mentally Disabled, Alyssa Ledoux

Mercer Law Review

Several serious issues arise when applying the death penalty to the mentally disabled. First, the social purposes served by the death penalty, retribution and deterrence, are questionable when it comes to the mentally disabled. Retribution by execution is reserved for those at the highest level of culpability or the highest level of conscious and depraved guilt. Likewise, execution is viewed as an effective deterrent on cold calculus that is not found in individuals with a mental disability.

Second, challenges the disabled face, such as the tendency to falsely confess, the lesser ability to present a persuasive showing of mitigating factors, …

The People V Ronald Kaoma Chitotela Sspd/034/2022, Muna B. Ndulo, Milimo Moyo

SAIPAR Case Review

In a recent decision, Magistrate Jennipher Bwalya sitting in Zambia's Economic and Financial Crimes Court (EFCC) discharged former tourism minister Ronald Chitotela in a case he was arrested for, on two counts of possessing property reasonably suspected to be proceeds of crime. Chitotela's arrest had been at the hands of the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC). In 2019, the ACC had signed a consent settlement with Chitotela which, apparently, gave the EFCC a basis for discharging Chitotela. Chitotela raised a preliminary issue before the EFCC, asking Lusaka magistrate Jennipher Bwalya to dismiss the matter he was recently arrested for, arguing that, under …

Completing Expungement, Brian M. Murray

University of Richmond Law Review

The limits of expungement are where the hope for real reentry meet the desire for criminal justice transparency. That a criminal record, ordered expunged by a judge after a long and arduous process, continues to exist in the world of private actors is a cold, harsh reality for those attempting to reenter civil society. It is also reassurance for parents hiring a babysitter, school districts seeking new employees, and employers concerned about workplace liability. Not to mention, the thought that all records of criminal justice adjudication could be purged forever intuitively sounds Orwellian, even in an age where surveillance, whether …

Humanize, Don't Paternalize: Victim-Offender Mediation After Intimate Partner Violence, Ren Warden

University of Richmond Law Review

Retributive legal systems fail survivors of intimate partner violence. In criminal cases, when the government and the offender are the parties to the matter, the legal status of a survivor is reduced to that of a mere witness. Survivors then must surrender their agency in the fight against their own trauma. Survivors of intimate partner violence (“IPV”) who turn to civil litigation to recover after their experiences may experience further trauma as a result of time-consuming, extensive, and often invasive contact with the legal system. Even restitution, a largely restorative remedy, lacks the agency, finality, and emotive opportunities that IPV …

Resisting Face Surveillance With Copyright Law, Amanda Levendowski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Face surveillance is animated by deep-rooted demographic and deployment biases that endanger marginalized communities and threaten the privacy of all. But current approaches have not prevented its adoption by law enforcement. Some companies have offered voluntary moratoria on selling the technology, leaving many others to fill in the gaps. Legislators have enacted regulatory oversight at the state and city levels, but a federal ban remains elusive. Both approaches require vast shifts in practical and political will, each with drawbacks. While we wait, face surveillance persists. This Article suggests a new possibility: face surveillance is fueled by unauthorized copies and reproductions …

Criminalizing Starvation In An Age Of Mass Deprivation In War: Intent, Method, Form, And Consequence, Tom Dannenbaum

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Mass starvation in war is resurgent. Across a range of conflicts, belligerents have attacked farmers and humanitarian workers; destroyed, looted, or rendered unusable food and food sources; and cut off besieged populations from the external supply of essential goods. Millions have been left in famine or on the brink thereof. Increasingly, this has elicited calls for accountability. However, traditional criminal categories are not promising in this respect. The situation and nature of objects indispensable to survival is such that they typically provide sustenance to both civilians and combatants; the conduct that deprives people of those objects often involves acting on …

Pretextual Stops: The Rest Of The Story, J.E.B. Stuart Vi

University of Richmond Law Review

Pretextual stops made by law enforcement officers—stops aimed at serving some purpose other than the official reason for the stop—have received renewed attention in the public discourse following several high-profile law enforcement confrontations with people of color. Naturally, the conversations about pretextual stops have centered around their most horrid iteration: discriminatory stops made by bad cops. These stops are damaging to both motorists and officers, and conversations about them are undeniably important. But there is more to pretextual stops than the nefarious purposes attributed to them.

As a former police officer who regularly made pretextual stops for reasons entirely unrelated …

Criminal Justice Expertise, Benjamin Levin

Fordham Law Review

For decades, commentators have adopted a story of mass incarceration’s rise as caused by “punitive populism.” Growing prison populations, expanding criminal codes, and raced and classed disparities in enforcement result from “pathological politics”: voters and politicians act in a vicious feedback loop, driving more criminal law and punishment. The criminal system’s problems are political. But how should society solve these political problems? Scholars often identify two kinds of approaches: (1) the technocratic, which seeks to wrest power from irrational and punitive voters, replacing electoral politics with agencies and commissions, and (2) the democratic, which treats criminal policy as insufficiently responsive …

Walking Back The System Trope: Reimagining Incarceration And The State Through A Spatial Theory Approach, Cody Hunter

All Dissertations

This dissertation critiques the systems theory approach to incarceration policy, practice, and research and proposes a rhetorically informed spatial theory approach as an alternative. Offering a non-hierarchical complexity theory as a bridge between systems and space, I then integrate rhetorical listening as a strategy for navigating and operationalizing our proposed spatial theory approach. I then apply our proposed methodology to archival research, focusing on the South Carolina Penitentiary as a case study, and offer two heuretic experiments to explore the range of this methodology for archival research. I also explore potential applications of this rhetorically informed spatial theory approach in …

Poetic Justice: Connecting The Modern American Prosecutor To Her Rhetorical Roots, Michael Caves

All Dissertations

Poetic Justice: Connecting the Modern American Prosecutor to her Rhetorical Roots explores the gap between rhetoric and the American prosecutor, to eventually advocate for a more creative, inventive trial practice for prosecutors that embraces the spirit and methods of narrative, poetics, and Ulmeric mystories, with the prosecutor’s unique ethical obligations forming the basis of a new prosecutor’s rhetoric. This research opens with an autoethnographic account of the author’s own path to criminal prosecution, to give the reader a sense of the author’s ethos, to identify the shortcomings of rhetorical training in law school pedagogy, and to outline the rhetorical …

Zinā In The Criminal Legislation Act (1999-2000): An Evaluation Of The Implication For Muslim Women's Right In Nigeria, Paul Orerhime Akpomie

Theses and Dissertations

The research engages in an exploration of human rights in Islam. Human rights issues are then contrasted with international law positions. The data gotten is then used for investigating women’s human rights issues in Shariʾa penal tradition regarding zinā (adultery) in Nigeria. The re-emergence of Sharia penal codes adopted by 12 Northern states in Nigeria in 1999 as an operative Islamic law has sparked concerns about rulings amounting to stoning to death in several cases of zinā. These events raised concerns about Shariʾa penal traditions’ legality and relationship with other legal traditions operational in Nigeria, a secular political space. …

Juvenile Delinquency: Theory, Reality, And Reasons In Vietnam, Nguyen Thu Trang

Indonesia Law Review

The article studies one of the socio-legal phenomena that are always concerned by the Vietnamese government, which is juvenile delinquency. Since the birth of criminal law, especially in the modern era, this particular subject has always been a special concern for countries. First of all, the article delves into the research community in Vietnam to understand the term and definition of crime. Since then, the author has laid out a theoretical basis for the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency in Vietnamese criminology. Like most other types of crime, juvenile crimes also have their origins in society, but they also have their …

The Restorative Prison: Essays On Inmate Peer Ministry & Prosocial Corrections, Michael A. Hallett

Showcase of Faculty Scholarly & Creative Activity

Drawing on work from inside some of America’s largest and toughest prisons, this book documents an alternative model of "restorative corrections" utilizing the lived experience of successful inmates, fast disrupting traditional models of correctional programming. While research documents a strong desire among those serving time in prison to redeem themselves, inmates often confront a profound lack of opportunity for achieving redemption. In a system that has become obsessively and dysfunctionally punitive, often fewer than 10% of prisoners receive any programming. Incarcerated citizens emerge from prisons in the United States to reoffend at profoundly high rates, with the majority of released …

Against The Death Penalty, Charles Jessup

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

My thesis is an argument against the death penalty. Given that public support for the death penalty in America is at a half-century low (according to the Pew Research Center), the timing could not be more appropriate to examine the death penalty. This research project had a two-step approach: first, ethical theory-based arguments for and against the death penalty were examined. Following that ethical theory-based examination, real-world statistics were applied to these theories to test where they stand in modern society. The findings contained in this research project point to a clear reality that the death penalty in America is …

Choosing Children: Preventing Intra-Family Conflict From Feeding The Prison Pipeline, Samantha D. Mier

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

Parents struggling to raise challenging children often lack needed community

support. These parents turn to law enforcement when they feel their

child cannot be controlled. Problematically, law enforcement officers are

trained to respond to crime, not simple parent-child domestic disputes. Thus,

when parents call police during disagreements, the argument may end in arrest

and contact with the juvenile court system. Interaction with the juvenile

justice system carries a myriad of risks. This comment outlines the risks inherent

in calling the police and entering the juvenile court system. The author

evaluates existing alternatives to calling law enforcement and recommends

that communities …

Symposium Transcript

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Gardener's Tale: Confronting Racial Discrimination At The Intersection Of The School-To-Prison Pipeline And Adolescent Health, Sogand Falahatpour

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

Racism is a public health crisis and it is killing Black youth. Systemic racism

in education is a root cause of a long list of inequities faced by Black

youth. These inequities compound over the years and create extreme hurdles

to academic success and, in many cases, are hazardous to overall health.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a severe health equity issue affecting

Black children and adolescents. Racism is a core social determinant of health

that has a profound impact on child and adolescent health. Moreover, health

is not just an individual matter; institutional and structural forces influence

who has access …

Disrupting The School-To-Prison Pipeline: Reforming The Role Of The School Resource Officer, Olivia Seksinsky

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

A School Resource Officer (“SRO”) is a law enforcement officer employed

by local law enforcement agencies to provide security to public schools. As

a result of fatal and highly publicized school shootings such as Columbine

and Parkland, SROs have become a fixed aspect of many school communities.

There are tens of thousands of SROs patrolling the halls of Virginia’s

public elementary and secondary schools every year. Despite their intended

purpose to keep students safe and prevent crime, SROs too often contribute

to the school-to-prison pipeline. When SROs are brought into the classroom

to address “disruptive” behaviors, students are at an …