Criminal Law Commons^™

Distorted Burden Shifting & Barred Mitigation: Being A Stubborn 234 Years Old Ironically Hasn’T Helped The Supreme Court Mature, Noah Seabrook

Journal of Law and Health

This Note explores the intricate relationship between emerging adulthood, defined as the transitional phase between youth and adulthood (ages 18-25), and the legal implications of capital punishment. Contrary to a fixed age determining adulthood, research highlights the prolonged nature of the maturation process, especially for individuals impacted by Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). The Note challenges the current legal framework that deems individuals aged 18 to 25 who experienced ACEs as eligible for capital punishment, highlighting the cognitive impact of ACEs on developmental trajectories. Examining cases like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Billy Joe Wardlow, this Note argues that courts often bypass mitigating …

The Right To Violence, Sean Hill

Utah Law Review

Scholars have long contended that the state has a monopoly on the use of violence. This monopoly is considered essential for the state to assure the safety and security of its citizens. Whereas public officers have the broadest authority to deploy violence, in order to make arrests or to inflict punishment, private citizens allegedly have severe restrictions on their use of force. Specifically, the state is said to only authorize private violence when civilians face an imminent threat of unlawful force or when civilians are attempting to prevent a crime.

Yet the state explicitly authorized private violence against enslaved people …

Immunity Through Bankruptcy For The Sackler Family, Daniel G. Aaron, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

In August 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked one of the largest public health settlements in history: that of Purdue Pharma, L.P., reached in bankruptcy court. The negotiated bankruptcy settlement approved by the court would give a golden parachute to the very people thought to have ignited the opioid crisis: the Sackler family. As the Supreme Court considers the propriety of immunity through bankruptcy, the case has raised fundamental questions about whether bankruptcy is a proper refuge from tort liability and whether law checks power or law serves power.

Of course, bankruptcy courts often limit liability against a distressed …

The Twenty-First Century Death Penalty And Paths Forward, Jeffrey Omar Usman

Mississippi College Law Review

Today, states are moving closer to another moment of critical decision-making in charting the course of the death penalty in the United States. Unlike the sudden and dramatic immediacy of Furman, however, this moment is arriving through a slower and quieter progression, or perhaps more accurately a deceleration. While not abolished, in many states application of the death penalty is grinding or has ground to a halt. If the status quo holds, the vast majority of defendants who are sentenced to death by the states will instead live out their natural lives in prison for decades dying of old age …

Why Mississippi Should Reform Its Penal Code, Judith J. Johnson

Mississippi College Law Review

The Mississippi Penal Code was determined at the turn of this century to be the fifty-second-worst penal code in the United States. As much as Mississippi is often used to being - and is even proudly defiant for being - ranked low on national scales, this is an issue about which we should be deeply concerned. A well-drafted penal code is crucial because it is at the core of the primary value of justice. While we are experienced with being ranked last in many situations, often unfairly, the criticism of the Mississippi Penal Code is accurate. Although many of the …

Specialty Courts: Time For A Thorough Assessment, Emily F. Wood, Monica K. Miller, Tatyana Kaplan

Mississippi College Law Review

Broadly, the purpose of specialty courts is to address the needs of the individuals in the criminal justice system to reduce recidivism. Most specialty courts adopt the philosophy that the criminal justice system can do more than just impose sanctions; it can address underlying social and health problems that contribute to criminal behavior. The purpose of this article is to discuss the general advantages and disadvantages of specialty courts and to highlight the importance of using research evaluations to determine if the benefits of specialty courts outweigh the costs. This will help determine if courts have achieved their goal of …

Current Trends In Capital Punishment Reform In The American South, André De Gruy

Mississippi College Law Review

No abstract provided.

Clear As Mud: The Confused State Of Mississippi's State Firearm Carry Laws, Garrett Anderson

Mississippi College Law Review

Few debates in America are more divisive than the debate over gun control. In the wake of large-scale shootings and heightened awareness of gun violence across the nation, discussions inevitably take place over viable solutions. Some propose more comprehensive, restrictive gun ownership legislation that would limit citizens' ability to carry firearms, while others believe the solution lies in relaxing existing regulations to allow armed citizens to intervene when necessary. While these two camps often find little middle ground in the gun debate, each would likely agree on one thing: a need for clarity and greater effectiveness of current laws. This …

Spectre Of Justice: Russian Reform In The Courtrooms Of Dostoevsky And Tolstoy, Abby Moore

Senior Theses

The Great Reforms of Alexander II are regarded as transformative policies in the history of Tsarist Russia, drastically changing the empire’s social and political fabric. The judicial reforms of 1864 in particular addressed longstanding issues within the existing criminal justice system, yet they also liberalized the institution at large. Following in the West’s footsteps, the reforms introduced an unprecedented level of democracy into Russia’s courtroom. Among the critics of these changes were renowned authors Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, both of whom used the realm of fiction to explore their respective concerns with reformed Russian jurisprudence. Both authors bring distinct …

Whom Do Prosecutors Protect?, Vida Johnson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Prosecutors regard themselves as public servants who fight crime and increase community safety on behalf of their constituents. But prosecutors do not only seek to protect those they are supposed to serve. Instead, prosecutors often trade community safety, privacy, and even the constitutional rights of the general public to enlarge police power. Prosecutors routinely advocate for weaker public rights, shield police from public accountability, and fail to prosecute police when they break the law.

This Article will show how prosecutors often protect police at the expense of the public. This Article suggests a novel theory of evaluating the conduct of …

Tort Liability For Physical Harm To Police Arising From Protest: Common-Law Principles For A Politicized World, Ellen M. Bublick, Jane R. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

When police officers bring tort suits for physical harms suffered during protest, courts must navigate two critically important sets of values—on the one hand, protesters’ rights to free speech and assembly, and on the other, the value of officers’ lives, health, and rights of redress. This year courts, including the United States Supreme Court, must decide who, if anyone, can be held accountable for severe physical harms suffered by police called upon to respond to protest. Two highly visible cases well illustrate the trend. In one, United States Capitol Police officers were injured on January 6, 2021, during organized attempts …

Circumventing The Fourth Amendment: The Unconstitutional Nature Of Geofence Warrants, Shelby Stender

Utah Law Review

Federal and state law enforcement agencies are using a new tactic for gathering evidence: geofence warrants. These warrants allow law enforcement to gather historical location data collected by third party companies including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. Armed with a geofence warrant today, law enforcement agencies can track the previous location of an individual at any point from the moment they acquired a cell phone—so long as the location history is turned on. The tactic has grown in popularity since 2019 and has been used to uncover suspects in cases where police had few leads. Troublingly though, the tactic has …

“White Collar Crime” Is A Euphemism To Abandon, Anthony J. Meyer

SLU Law Journal Online

Although the phrase “white collar crime” is ubiquitous among lawyers, it is a euphemism that creates an arbitrary distinction among crimes and perpetuates an upper-class bias for certain types of criminal conduct while simultaneously denigrating others. The phrase further performs a problematic social signaling function, including by expressly invoking “whiteness.” On balance, the phrase should be abandoned and replaced with one that either creates a meaningful distinction or leads to more inclusiveness in the legal practice.

Victor Hugo Was Right All Along: Les Misérables, The Tragedy Of A Punitive Parole System, And A Modern Path Forward, Sarah Gerwig

Mercer Law Review

Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s tragic novel, was published over 160 years ago and yet it continues to capture imaginations and sympathies worldwide. It was made into an award-winning film over a decade ago. But before that, Les Misérables was one of the most popular Broadway musicals ever produced, having been viewed by over sixty million people, even beyond the viewership of other popular renditions in film and television. Despite (or perhaps because of) its heartbreaking themes, audiences sympathize with the main characters’ quest for redemption. How easy, in the story, to see the struggles and barriers Jean Valjean encounters—and …

Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones, But Words Will Never Hurt Me. Or Will They? The Eleventh Circuit Expands The “Extreme Cruelty” Definition In 8 U.S.C. §1229b(B)(2) To Encompass Mental And Physical Abuse In Ruiz V. United States Attorney General, Sydnie N. Winter

Mercer Law Review

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), originally passed in 1994, was the first federal legislation acknowledging domestic violence as a crime. As part of this Act, Congress enacted 8 U.S.C. § 1229b(b)(2), a rule that allows battered spouses (or children) who are not citizens or nationals of the United States of America to seek the discretionary cancellation of the government’s removal of them from the country. The VAWA special-rule was enacted as a way to enable abuse victims to obtain discretionary deportation relief, allowing them to leave their abusers without fear of deportation or other immigration-related consequences. ...

The United …

The Miller Trilogy, Jones, And The Future Of Juvenile Sentencing And Constitutional Interpretation In The Post-Jones America, Gabriela Seguinot

Senior Theses and Projects

The United States is an outlier in juvenile sentencing practices, often subjecting youth offenders to extreme and lengthy punishments. While the Supreme Court over the past two decades has been slowly narrowing the nation’s use of such sentences against children through a series of cases known as the Miller Trilogy, this progress came to a sudden halt in the 2021 case of Jones v. Mississippi. However, in surprising turn of events, the Supreme Court’s recent national display of restraint has not stopped sentencing reform efforts in the states. Contrary to the current Supreme Court, states in the U.S. have …

Solving A Sixth Amendment Crisis: The Case For Resource Parity In Georgia’S Indigent Defense System, Meagan R. Hurley

Mercer Law Review

The United States criminal legal system employs what is said to be an “adversary” system—one in which opposing parties—the prosecution and the defense—present their evidence and arguments (usually in conflict with one another) to a neutral third party (a judge or jury) for adjudication. The idea behind the adversarial process is that a judge or jury is best positioned to make determinations of guilt or innocence once provided with reliable information from competent, zealous, and prepared advocates on both sides of the podium. At its core, the adversarial system is meant to function as the mechanism by which constitutional principles …

“[T]Here Appears To Be Intentional Discrimination In The Panel”: The Case For Abolishing Peremptory Challenges In Georgia, Ariane Williams

Georgia Criminal Law Review

In Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), the Supreme Court attempted to prevent peremptory strikes motivated by race. However, evidence and jurisprudence since Batson have indicated that the Court did not succeed. Furthermore, peremptory strikes perpetuate racial imbalance in juries and erode public faith in an unbiased legal system, as seen in reactions to the recent McMichael-Bryant trial in Georgia, in which only one black juror was seated. Given the longstanding and intractable issues with peremptory challenges, the Arizona Supreme Court decided to eliminate them entirely in 2021. This Article argues that Georgia should follow suit and abolish …

Answering The Call From Victims Of Dating Violence: Georgia’S New Dating Violence Law, Sydney K. Parish

Georgia Criminal Law Review

Dating violence is a topic that has garnered increased awareness in recent days, both in the media and in the legal field. Many states have begun to pass legislation in attempt to address this issue and provide relief for victims of dating violence. In the summer of 2021, the state of Georgia passed House Bill 231, what later became known as Georgia’s Dating Violence law. This Article first examines our nation’s history of intimate partner violence to show why dating violence legislation was so desperately needed and how these legislative reforms have attempted to heal a system that for so …

The Death Dignity Demands: The Eighth Amendment Requires Incarcerated People Decide Their Method Of Execution, Kali A. Haney

Georgia Criminal Law Review

Recently, there have been a number of incarcerated people on death-row challenging their method of execution and proposing an alternative: usually, firing squad. Courts are hesitant to grant this request for a number of reasons, including the rare use of the firing squad. But there is substantial evidence this method is the most humane. Additionally, it appears incarcerated people think so, which is why so many in recent years chose—or petitioned for—death by firing squad rather than lethal injection or electrocution. As pharmaceutical companies halt their drugs’ distribution to prisons, prisons are forced to come up with their own—often more …