Criminal Law Commons^™

The Chilling Effect: The Politics Of Charging Rape Complainants With False Reporting, Lisa Avalos

Brooklyn Law Review

Although legal scholars have addressed the persistent failure to effectively investigate and prosecute rape despite decades of attempts at reform, the issue of prosecutors going so far as to bring false reporting charges against disbelieved sexual assault victims has received scant scholarly attention. This article calls attention to this particularly disturbing externality of the mishandling of rape cases. First contextualizing false reporting prosecutions of rape victims, the article demonstrates that such prosecutions are a direct outgrowth of poor quality, under-resourced police rape investigations. These prosecutions move forward as a result of several systemic problems: procedural irregularities and informal policies that …

Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber

Northwestern University Law Review

McCleskey v. Kemp, the case that upheld the death penalty despite undeniable evidence of its racially disparate impact, is indelibly marked by Justice William Brennan’s phrase, “a fear of too much justice.” The popular interpretation of this phrase is that the Supreme Court harbored what I call a “disparity-claim fear,” dreading a future docket of racial discrimination claims and erecting an impossibly high bar for proving an equal protection violation. A related interpretation is that the majority had a “color-consciousness fear” of remedying discrimination through race-remedial policies. In contrast to these conventional views, I argue that the primary anxiety …

Cook's Field Guide To Prosecution In Georgia, Alan A. Cook

Books

In this practical guidebook former district attorney and director of the University of Georgia's School of Law Prosecutorial Justice Program Alan Cook shares his personal wisdom and advice gathered from his decades of experience into a single volume. The handbook includes introductions to each chapter topic, plus both quick and detailed reference sections on all aspects of criminal law and procedure. It also includes useful appendices with step-by-step practice guides for how to perform specific prosecutorial tasks (such as how to take a guilty plea). Law student testimonies from now seasoned attorneys at the start of the book indicate the …

Bait Questions As Source Of Misinformation In Police Interviews: Does Race Or Age Of The Suspect Increase Jurors' Memory Errors?, Matilde Ascheri

Student Theses

Bait questions—hypothetical questions about evidence, often used by detectives during interrogations—can activate the misinformation effect and alter jurors’ perceptions of the evidence of a case. Here, we were interested in investigating whether mock jurors’ implicit biases could amplify the magnitude of the misinformation effect. We accomplished this by manipulating the age and race of the suspect being interrogated. As an extension of Luke et al. (2017), we had participants read a police report describing evidence found at a crime scene, then read a transcript of a police interrogation where the detective used bait questions to introduce new evidence not presented …

Who Locked Us Up? Examining The Social Meaning Of Black Punitiveness, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

Mass incarceration has received extensive analysis in scholarly and political debates. Beginning in the 1970s, states and the federal government adopted tougher sentencing and police practices that responded to rising punitive sentiment among the general public. Many scholars have argued that U.S. criminal law and enforcement subordinate people of color by denying them political, social, and economic well-being. The harmful and disparate racial impact of U.S. crime policy mirrors historical patterns that emerged during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman, Jr. demonstrates that many …

Criminalizing Battered Mothers, Courtney Cross

Utah Law Review

How a domestic violence survivor responds to the abuse she is experiencing depends on many factors. Some critical considerations include her access to resources, desire to stay in her relationship, and assessment of her own safety. Criminal and civil court systems place enormous pressure on survivors to separate from their abusive partners. Not only are survivors with children pressured to leave, they are punished when they stay. That punishment can come in any combination of diminished custody rights, limited parental rights, and incarceration. Yet a survivor who flees with her children is not immune to these same consequences: if she …

Jury Decision Making: Is The Devil In The Details? Observations Of A Criminal Justice Professor From Inside The Jury Room, Julie K. Coon

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

This paper will first present highlights from the research literature about jury decision making. Second, observations about the jury selection process, along with details of the case, will be shared, including the stories told by the victim and the defendant.

Undergraduate Student Knowledge And Opinion About Campus Carrying And Other Firearms Laws, Heidi S. Bonner, Michele Stacey, Megan Davidson

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

House Bill 937, passed in North Carolina in 2013, modified the provisions associated with concealed carry permissions on college campuses so that concealed carry permit holders could lawfully possess firearms on campus if they were kept in a locked compartment in their vehicles. The present study sought to explore the knowledge and perceptions of firearm law among a sample of undergraduate college students at one public university in North Carolina in the semester following the change in carrying provisions. The findings showed that students were not knowledgeable about gun laws and tended to be relatively supportive of gun rights, although …

Eyewitness Identification: Are We Asking The Right Questions?, Dyan Mcguire

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

As courts struggle with issues concerning the admissibility of eyewitness identification, reliability has emerged as a touchstone of due process analysis. Factors commonly considered by courts in assessing reliability include the witness’s opportunity to view the criminal at the time of the crime, the witness’s degree of attention to the crime, the accuracy of any prior description of the criminal, the level of certainty demonstrated at the confrontation, and the amount of time between the crime and the confrontation. Unfortunately, the empirical record, including the results of this study, indicates that these factors do not have a strong or consistent …

Book Review: “Chokehold: Policing Black Men” (2017) By Paul Butler, Lee E. Ross

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

No abstract provided.

Finding Prejudice: Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel In Lee V. United States, Michelle M. Watson, Melanie K. Worsely

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

This paper discusses the 2017 case of Lee v. United States, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held for the first time that a defendant had been prejudiced by his counsel’s misinformation about the deportation consequences of a guilty plea. The Lee case marks a significant step in the Court’s recognition of ineffective assistance of counsel claims and criminal defendants’ right to receive accurate legal advice when deciding whether to accept a plea offer. The Court’s journey to Lee is examined, beginning with its declaration in 1985 that the test for ineffective assistance of counsel claims, established in Strickland …

Elder Care In The United States: Filial Responsibility Laws, Judicial Decisions, And Enforcement Issues, Sesha Kethineni, Gowtami Rajendran

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

Filial responsibility (duty of care) laws often require adult children to support their elderly and infirm parents. Some states extend this obligation to close relatives. This responsibility may be enforced via statute or morally encouraged as part of religion within a culture. Given the diversity of cultures in America, the duty of care is difficult to define, enforce, and interpret when such cases come to the attention of the courts. Twenty-nine states that currently have statutes related to filial responsibility vary widely in defining the concept and specifying how to enforce the laws. Because many of these involve neglect rather …

Combating Discrimination Against The Formerly Incarcerated In The Labor Market, Ifeoma Ajunwa, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Northwestern University Law Review

Both discrimination by private employers and governmental restrictions in the form of statutes that prohibit professional licensing serve to exclude the formerly incarcerated from much of the labor market. This Essay explores and analyzes potential legislative and contractual means for removing these barriers to labor market participation by the formerly incarcerated. First, as a means of addressing discrimination by the state, Part I of this Essay explores the ways in which the adoption of racial impact statements—which mandate that legislators consider statistical analyses of the potential impact their proposed legislation may have on racial and ethnic groups prior to enacting …

Equal Protection And White Supremacy, Paul Butler

Northwestern University Law Review

The project of using social science to help win equal protection claims is doomed to fail if its premise is that the Supreme Court post-McCleskey just needs more or better evidence of racial discrimination. Everyone—including the Justices of the Court—already knows that racial discrimination is endemic in the criminal justice system. Social science does help us to understand the role of white supremacy in U.S. police and punishment practices. Social science also can help us understand how to move people to resist, and can inform our imagination of the transformation needed for equal justice under the law.

Pull And Push'- Implementing The Complementarity Principle Of The Rome Statute Of The Icc Within The Au: Opportunities And Challenges, Sascha Dominik Dov Bachmann, Eda Luke Nwibo

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The complementarity principle of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is an international legal principle that governs the relationship between two; sometimes; contrasting international principles of law; namely sovereign equality of States and the international community’s duty to end impunity for international core crimes. Article 17 of the Rome Statute envisages that States maintain primary jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute international crimes; while the ICC’s jurisdiction to prosecute when States are unwilling or genuinely unable to carry out such investigations or prosecutions constitutes the exception. This article provides an analysis of this principle in the context of …

Talent Can't Be Allocated: A Labor Economics Justification For No-Poaching Agreement Criminality In Antitrust Regulation, Rochella T. Davis

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

As of late, labor markets have been a focus point in antitrust enforcement. In 2016 the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced an unprecedented policy to pursue no-poaching agreements criminally. More recently, in January 2018, the DOJ’s Attorney General indicated that the agency is following through on the policy. This Article argues that the DOJ’s new policy is logical and prudent because the economic effects that no-poaching agreements have on labor markets mirror the anticompetitive effects of customer allocation agreements. It also shows that the policy is well-supported by labor economics and antitrust policies. In efforts to comply with the DOJ’s …

Cashing In On Convicts: Privatization, Punishment, And The People, Laura I. Appleman

Utah Law Review

For-profit prisons, jails, and alternative corrections present a disturbing commodification of the criminal justice system. Though part of a modern trend, privatized corrections has well-established roots traceable to slavery, Jim Crow, and current racially-based inequities. This monetizing of the physical incarceration and regulation of human bodies has had deleterious effects on offenders, communities, and the proper functioning of punishment in our society. Criminal justice privatization severs an essential link between the people and criminal punishment. When we remove the imposition of punishment from the people and delegate it to private actors, we sacrifice the core criminal justice values of expressive, …

Accelerated Civil Rights Settlements In The Shadow Of Section 1983, Katherine A. Macfarlane

Utah Law Review

The families of Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott have obtained multimillion dollar settlements from the cities in which their family members lost their lives. This Article identifies and labels these settlements as a legal response unique to high-profile policeinvolved deaths: accelerated civil rights settlement. It defines accelerated civil rights settlement as a resolution strategy that uses the threat of 42 U.S.C. Section 1983 litigation rather than litigation itself to compensate police-involved shooting victims’ family members. This Article explains how accelerated civil rights settlement involves no complaint or case—nothing is filed. Also, the goal of accelerated civil …

Mccleskey V. Kemp: Field Notes From 1977-1991, John Charles Boger

Northwestern University Law Review

The litigation campaign that led to McCleskey v. Kemp did not begin as an anti-death-penalty effort. It grew in soil long washed in the blood of African-Americans, lynched or executed following rude semblances of trials and hasty appeals, which had prompted the NAACP from its very founding to demand “simple justice” in individual criminal cases. When the Warren Court signaled, in the early 1960s, that it might be open to reflection on broader patterns of racial discrimination in capital sentencing, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) began to gather empirical evidence and craft appropriate constitutional responses. As …

Volume 1, Issue 2 (2017) Inaugural Issue

International Journal on Responsibility

Contents:

Introduction: Terry Beitzel, Types of Responsibility: Challenges and Opportunities

3 – 5 Howard Zehr, Restorative Justice and the Gandhian Tradition.

6 – 26 Richard E. Rubenstein, Responsibility for Peacemaking in the Context of Structural Violence.

27 – 64 Marc Pufong, Terror, Insecurity, State Responsibility and Challenges: Yesterday and Today?

65 – 77 Ron Kraybill, Responsibility, Community and Conflict Resolution in an Age of Polarization.

78 – 96 John Fairfield, Beyond non-violence to courtship.

97 – 98 Call for papers for forthcoming issues of the International Journal on Responsibility and instructions for authors.