Criminal Law Commons^™

The "Victim-Perpetrator" Dilemma: The Role Of State Safe Harbor Laws In Creating A Presumption Of Coercion For Human Trafficking Victims, Matthew Myatt

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Amicus Curiae 290 Criminal Law And Mental Health Law Professors In Support Of Petitioner's Request For Reversal And Remand, Kahler V. Kansas, 18-6135 (U.S. June 6, 2019), Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Amici curiae are a group of philosophically and politically diverse law school professors and scholars in the fields of criminal law and mental health from a variety of disciplines who have been teaching and writing about the insanity defense and related issues throughout their careers. They include the authors of leading criminal law and mental health law treatises and casebooks and numerous important scholarly books and articles.

Amici believe this case raises important questions about principles of criminal responsibility, the integral role of the insanity defense in Anglo-American law, and the inadequacy of the “mens rea alternative” to the traditional …

Machine Learning With Multi-Class Regression And Neural Networks: Analysis And Visualization Of Crime Data In Seattle, Erkin David George

Honors Projects

This article examines the implications of machine learning algorithms and models, and the significance of their construction when investigating criminal data. It uses machine learning models and tools to store, clean and analyze data that is fed into a machine learning model. This model is then compared to another model to test for accuracy, biases and patterns that are detected in between the experiments. The data was collected from data.seattle.gov and was published by the City of Seattle Data Portal and was accessed on September 17, 2018. This research will be looking into how machine learning models can be used …

Circuit Split On The Application Of The "Safety Valve" Provision As Applied To The Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act - Alexander And Mosquera-Murillo, Alexander D. Andruzzi

Ocean and Coastal Law Journal

When the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided the case of United States v. Mosquera-Murillo, it created a circuit-split on whether individuals charged under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (codified as 46 U.S.C. § 705) are entitled to relief under the "Safety Valve" provision of 18 U.S.C. § 3553(f). The "Safety Valve" allows individuals who meet certain criteria to be sentenced according to the sentencing guidelines, regardless of any mandatory minimum sentences. This case note compares the holding of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to the Eleventh Circuit's holding in United States …

The Elusive Object Of Punishment, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

All observers of our legal system recognize that criminal statutes can be complex and obscure. But statutory obscurity often takes a particular form that most observers have overlooked: uncertainty about the identity of the wrong a statute aims to punish. It is not uncommon for parties to disagree about the identity of the underlying wrong even as they agree on the statute’s elements. Hidden in plain sight, these unexamined disagreements underlie or exacerbate an assortment of familiar disputes—about venue, vagueness, and mens rea; about DUI and statutory rape; about hate crimes, child pornography, and counterterrorism laws; about proportionality in punishment; …

Dividing Bail Reform, Shima Baughman

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

There are few issues in criminal law with greater momentum than bail reform. In the last three years, states have passed hundreds of new pretrial release laws, and there are now over 200 bills pending throughout the states. These efforts are rooted in important concerns: Bail reform lies at the heart of broader recent debates about equitable treatment in the criminal justice system. Done right, bail keeps dangerous individuals off the streets; done wrong, it keeps those with less economic means in jail longer. Some jurisdictions are eliminating money bail. Others are adopting risk assessments to determine who to release. …

Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Rethinking Civil Asset Forfeiture And The Innocent Owner Defense, Luis Suarez

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Law enforcement departments across the country use civil asset forfeiture as a method to fund the work of law enforcement departments under the guise of combatting the “War on Drugs.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions made in- creasing civil asset forfeiture a DOJ priority. If civil asset forfeiture continues to rise to the level that Attorney General Sessions would like to see it, then we will soon find ourselves fighting to keep what is rightfully ours. This Comment will argue that the government should be required to prove that the owner of forfeited property had actual knowledge that the property was …

Guilt By Alt-Association: A Review Of Enhanced Punishment For Suspected Gang Members, Rebecca J. Marston

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This essay, written in reaction to the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform’s 2018 Symposium entitled “Alt-Association: The Role of Law in Combating Extremism” (the Symposium), does not dispute the seriousness of gang-related violence. Rather, it examines ways in which current strategies for combating gang-related crimes are ineffective or problematic and suggests possible reforms. Part One of this essay will describe current methods used in labeling, tracking, and prosecuting gang members, which result in a cycle of enhanced punishment. Part Two will evaluate these practices and reflect on whether enhanced punishment is the best way to reduce gang-related violence, …

Misunderstanding Judy Norman: Theory As Cause And Consequence, Martha R. Mahoney

Articles

Judy Norman shot her abusive husband during a late afternoon nap while he rested before violently trafficking her that night. The sharp contrast between the extreme violence and danger Judy faced and the denial of a self-defense instruction triggered extensive academic debates about justification and the use of deadly force. Norman became one of the most famous cases involving battered women, appearing in many casebooks and hundreds of law review articles. Despite all this work, the facts of the case contradict much of what scholars have said about Norman. Misconceptions about expert evidence, "Battered Woman Syndrome, "and battered women drive …

Gun Control And The Color Of Law, Alicia L. Granse

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

No abstract provided.

Racial States Of Municipal Governance: Policing Bodies And Space For Revenue In North St. Louis County, Mo, Jodi Rios

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

No abstract provided.

Social Media, Venue And The Right To A Fair Trial, Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Judicial failure to recognize social media's influence on juror decision making has identifiable constitutional implications. The Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial demands that courts grant a defendant's change of venue motion when media-generated pretrial publicity invades the unbiased sensibility of those who are asked to sit in judgment. Courts limit publicity suitable for granting a defendant's motion to information culled from newspapers, radio, and television reports. Since about 2014, however, a handful of defendants have introduced social media posts to support their claims of unconstitutional bias in the community. Despite defendants' introduction of negative social media in support …

Texas Indian Holocaust And Survival: Mcallen Grace Brethren Church V. Salazar, Milo Colton

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

When the first Europeans entered the land that would one day be called Texas, they found a place that contained more Indian tribes than any other would-be American state at the time. At the turn of the twentieth century, the federal government documented that American Indians in Texas were nearly extinct, decreasing in number from 708 people in 1890 to 470 in 1900. A century later, the U.S. census recorded an explosion in the American Indian population living in Texas at 215,599 people. By 2010, that population jumped to 315,264 people.

Part One of this Article chronicles the forces contributing …

Skinning The Cat: How Mandatory Psychiatric Evaluations For Animal Cruelty Offenders Can Prevent Future Violence, Ashley Kunz

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

In 2017, the Texas legislature amended Texas Penal Code § 42.092, which governs acts of cruelty against non-livestock animals. The statute in its current form makes torturing, killing, or seriously injuring a non-livestock animal a third degree felony, while less serious offenses carry either a state jail felony or a Class A misdemeanor charge.

While a step in the right direction, Texas law is not comprehensive in that it fails to address a significant aspect of animal cruelty offenses: mental illness. For over fifteen years, Texas Family Code § 54.0407 has required psychiatric counseling for juveniles convicted of cruelty to …

The Calculus Of Public Corruption Cases: Hidden Decisions In Investigations And Prosecutions, Kristine Artello, Jay Albanese

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

Acts of public corruption can undermine the rule of law and the legitimacy of the state. Holding public officials to the rule of law through the threat of prosecution is a crucial mechanism to give the law meaning in practice. In the United States, nearly all prosecutions for public corruption occur at the federal level, although many defendants in these cases are officials at the state and local levels of government. When corruption cases are brought, they usually result in a conviction via a guilty plea. However, making these cases is difficult, with only about a third of investigations resulting …

A Statistical Analysis Of Predictors Associated With The Dramatic Decline In Death Sentences In The United States In The Last Two Decades, Talia R. Harmon, David Mccord

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

The annual number of new death sentences in the United States has fallen by more than 75% in the last two decades. The current study examines 1,665 death-eligible cases from 1994, 2004, and 2014 to draw empirically based conclusions that can shed light on some significant predictors associated with this dramatic decline. The results of logistic regression models suggest that the following were consistently significant predictors of case outcomes throughout the country over time: multiple perpetrators, age of perpetrators between 18 and 20 years, number of mitigators, cases with high and low aggravation, and five formerly high-volume counties. By contrast, …

Agenda Setting In State Courts Of Last Resort, Philip Marcin, Nancy Marion

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

Little academic research has been carried out on the agenda-setting process for judges, particularly in states. This study examines the rhetoric and agenda setting of judges in 47 state courts of last resort from 2005 to 2015. A content analysis of the end-of-the-year speeches delivered by the justices was performed to determine patterns and trends in rhetoric according to political party affiliation, region, proximity to the border, and method of appointment. It was discovered that the topics discussed by state chief justices did not vary over time; that agenda items differed slightly between Republican and Democratic justices; that there were …

Livable Term Sentences As Alternatives To Juvenile Life Without Parole: A Sentencing Framework Based On United States V. Grant, Brittany Ripper, Robert Johnson

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

In Miller v. Alabama (2012), the United States Supreme Court held that mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles are unconstitutional. In Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016), the Supreme Court made this holding retroactive, leaving the states to fashion new sentencing schemes for juveniles previously sentenced to life without parole. Complicating this task is the debate around “de facto,” or virtual, life sentences, which are term-of-years sentences that extend beyond an individual’s life expectancy. This article proposes a framework to be used for sentencing juvenile lifers in light of the Supreme Court’s opinions and the Third Circuit Court …

The Potholes Of Offender-Funded Driving Diversion: How Minnesota's Driving Diversion Program Fails The People It Is Supposed To Help, Sammi Nachtigal

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

No abstract provided.

Reforming Recidivism: Making Prison Practical Through Help, Katelyn Copperud

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

While Texas has long been recognized as “Tough Texas” when it comes to crime, recent efforts have been made to combat that reputation. Efforts such as offering “good time” credit and more liberal parole standards are used to reduce the Texas prison populations. Although effective in reducing prison populations, do these incentives truly reduce a larger issue of prison overpopulation: recidivism?

In both state and federal prison systems, inmate education is proven to reduce recidivism. Texas’s own, Windham School District, provides a broad spectrum of education to Texas Department of Criminal Justice inmates; from General Education Development (GED) classes to …