Criminal Law Commons^™

Crypto Kleptocracy, W. Robert Thomas, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Michigan Law Review Online

Many Americans are worrying about whether they will soon be living in a postdemocracy autocracy. But in the meantime, they may already be living in a crypto-fueled kleptocracy. Less than one year into his second presidential term, Donald Trump has reportedly taken his wealth to new heights by embracing, both as a businessman and a politician, the crypto industry. Trump’s family businesses are involved in minting Trump-themed meme coins, creating America- themed stablecoins, and mining crypto assets—so successfully that most of Trump’s wealth is likely now from crypto, not real estate. All the while, the Trump Administration is rolling back …

Application Paths Of Semantic Modeling In Financial Fraud Detection And Risk Identification, Victor P. Gauthier, Daniel S. Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Financial fraud and risk pose significant threats to economic stability and individual well-being. Traditional detection methods often struggle to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated fraudulent schemes. Semantic modeling, which focuses on understanding the meaning and relationships within data, offers a promising avenue for enhancing fraud detection and risk identification. This review paper explores the application paths of semantic modeling in this domain. We begin with a historical overview of fraud detection techniques, highlighting the limitations of traditional approaches. Subsequently, we delve into core themes, including knowledge graph-based fraud detection and semantic rule-based inference for risk assessment. We then compare and …

When We Don’T Get Community Right In Restorative Justice Spaces: Cancel Culture And Failure To Transform, Aparna Polavarapu

Scholarly Works

This Article argues that community is a central but deeply misunderstood feature of restorative justice. Restorative justice asks us to understand harm as a break in relationship that creates obligations for the person harmed, the person who caused harm, and the community. Community is theorized to play a key role in working towards reintegration and social change, both goals of restorative justice. Yet in practice, community is often misused or underused in ways that weaken these goals. Practitioners are observing an increase in cancel culture actions by groups that claim affinity with restorative and transformative justice. However, by weaponizing the …

Undermining Discretion: The Selective Attacks On Progressive Prosecutors, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Prosecutors are the most powerful officials in the criminal legal system. They decide whether to bring criminal charges and what those criminal charges should be. These decisions are totally within their discretion. The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently protected the power and discretion of prosecutors in making these decisions, and legal challenges to the exercise of prosecutorial discretion have been largely unsuccessful.

In recent years, a growing number of individuals have successfully run for chief prosecutor on platforms of reducing the prison and jail populations, consistent with public safety. They pledged to use their power and discretion to implement policies …

The New Neccesity, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, cities are free to criminalize homelessness. The 2024 case City of Grants Pass v. Johnson is the most important homelessness case in decades and was a significant blow to advocates for the unhoused. The conservative majority rejected the idea that city ordinances criminalizing sleeping in public amounted to cruel and unusual punishment insofar as they penalized status. There is no sidestepping the loss. But within the faint glow of the embers of the oral argument and of the decision itself, there is the possibility that a new understanding of necessity, supported by the same …

Criminal Law: "Legally Magic" Words: The Accessibility Of Fifth Amendment Rights, Kate Weisburd

The Judges' Book

A basic but underappreciated problem pervades Fifth Amendment doctrine (including Miranda v. Arizona): people may know, in a broad sense, that they have the right to remain silent and to counsel, yet a deep disconnect exists between what ordinary people think is required to invoke those rights and what courts demand. Settled Supreme Court case law requires that the right to counsel and silence must be invoked clearly and unambiguously. In practice, those requirements have produced a body of law in which ordinary language and conduct often does not suffice to invoke either right, simply because the suspect did …

Criminal Law: Secretive Sheriffs: Opacity And Variation In California’S Jail Responses To Covid-19, Aparna Komarla, Hadar Aviram

The Judges' Book

Agnotology, a term coined by Robert Proctor and Iain Boal, is the study of culturally produced ignorance, which assumes that gaps in knowledge are not coincidental but rather reflect social values and interests. In this Chapter, we apply this context to a domain in which information gaps have life-or-death consequences: healthcare in county jails, and more particularly, the availability, or lack thereof, of COVID-19 data from California’s fifty-eight county jail systems.

Our argument is twofold: First, that public ignorance about jail healthcare conditions is not accidental but is instead the product of weak state oversight and a culture of noncooperation …

Reproductive Wrongful Convictions: The Making Of "Unfit" Mothers, Valena Beety

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article draws a straight line from wrongful convictions of women in the past to criminal charges based on pregnancy and parenting behaviors today. Faulty forensic evidence and biased evidence based on sex-stereotypes have, in combination, been used to convict innocent women, particularly in situations where an accident or health event was misconstrued to be a criminal act. Seventy-four percent of known exonerated women were wrongly convicted where no crime occurred. Similarly, in criminalizing pregnancy behaviors, police, medical personnel, or prosecutors erroneously label a non-criminal event, such as a miscarriage or stillbirth, as criminal. Criminal charges are being brought against …

Neurobiological Determinants Of Psychopathy And Their Ethical Implications In Capital Punishment Cases, Brooklyn Lewis

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This literature review examines the relationship between the neurobiological determinants of psychopathy and the ethical implications of applying capital punishment to violent offenders. Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and criminal justice, the paper explores how structural and functional differences in brain regions associated with emotional processing, impulse control, and moral reasoning are linked to psychopathic traits. The review synthesizes findings on how these neurobiological factors may contribute to an increased risk of violent behavior while emphasizing that such influences are not deterministic. The paper further analyzes how neuroscientific evidence is interpreted within legal contexts, particularly in relation to assessments …

Postpartum Psychosis On Trial: A Preview Of Commonwealth V. Clancy, Jolie Zangari

Scholarly Works

In the case of Commonwealth v. Clancy, the deaths of three young children are the focus of the upcoming criminal trial.  However, the identity of their killer will not be at issue.  The children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy, were killed by their mother, Lindsay Clancy, who then attempted suicide, but survived with severe permanent injuries. The critical issue to be litigated is—why?  Why did she kill them?  Most fundamentally at issue is whether Lindsay Clancy was suffering from symptoms of a mental disease so severe that she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

The Commonwealth of …

High Stakes And Random Rewards: A Critical Look At Loot Boxes And Illegal Gambling, Brian T. Wersan

Touro Law Review

Since their inception in the mid-2000s, loot boxes have been legal and virtually unregulated in the United States. Ever-growing mountains of evidence demonstrate the harms of loot boxes, but their structure has not yet been found to be in violation of any current U.S. gambling law, leading to a complete lack of recovery for victims. Certainly, if people experience harm, a legal avenue providing justice must exist. While other avenues are referenced, this Note ultimately argues that loot boxes can be interpreted by courts to satisfy the elements of, and thus, violate multiple state gambling laws, revealing a path to …

Screaming Into The System: The Symbiotic Relationship Between Flannery O'Connor, Violence, And The Criminal Law, Mary Graw

Scholarly Articles

This article argues that criminal violence and the criminal law not only influenced O’Connor’s writing in very specific ways, but that O’Connor’s focus on the marginalized can influence today’s attorneys. The piece explores this symbiotic relationship. Part One discusses O’Connor’s general understanding of her mission as a writer and the utility of violence as a device to advance that vocational mission. Part Two explores the sources of violence generally in O’Connor’s world. Part Three more specifically analyzes how O’Connor utilized actual crimes, and crime in general, to develop her stories. Part Four builds upon that observation to examine how the …

Gratuitous Federalism In Gratuities Enforcement: Section 666 And Plugging The Snyder Gap, Justin New

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Marijuana, Marinol, And Chapter 11: The Federal Roadblock To Bankruptcy Protection, Grace Griggs

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Excavating Miranda, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

Sixty years after it was decided, Miranda v. Arizona remains one of the most significant and renowned cases—as well as, arguably, one of the most controversial cases—in the history of the United States. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s majority opinion, establishing the eponymous Miranda warnings for custodial interrogation of criminal suspects, has prompted voluminous and continuing commentary, among both critics and supporters. This Article is part of an ongoing project exploring a particular aspect of Chief Justice Warren’s majority opinion: a footnote referencing Jewish legal sources, documenting an important passage at the start of a pivotal section of the opinion.

Building …

The Eighth Amendment And Prison Staff-To-Sentenced Prisoner Sexual Violence, Matthew Lyskawa

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, I provide the first comprehensive account of lower federal courts’ Eighth Amendment prison conditions jurisprudence regarding prison staff-to-sentenced prisoner sexual violence. I show that lower federal courts are systematically misunderstanding and misapplying Supreme Court case law in this context. The result is that sexually victimized prisoners must meet extremely burdensome doctrinal standards unique to sexual violence claims. Lower federal courts would faithfully follow Supreme Court precedent if they applied the excessive force standard to sexual assault claims and the conditions of confinement standard to sexual harassment claims. However, a faithful application of Supreme Court case law does …

Confession Contamination And Dna Exonerations, 1989-2025, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Negligent Hiring: Recidivism And Employment With A Criminal Record, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

This Article tackles a difficult legal and policy challenge— reducing the impact of criminal records on job applicants’ chances in a manner that does not spur more discrimination—by looking at how another area of law, tort liability, impacts employers’ decision-making. It uses theoretical and empirical methods to study the most common reason employers report being reluctant to hire workers with a criminal record: legal liability generated by the tort of negligent hiring. While the purpose of the tort is ostensibly to protect and make whole those harmed when an employee misbehaves in a foreseeable manner, I show that, in practice, …

Informed Applicants: Anti-Discrimination Enforcement Based On The Use Of Criminal Records, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

Navigating the labor market with a criminal record is treacherous. Countless job applicants will be turned down immediately after a potential employer learns they have had contact with the criminal legal system. Criminal records reflect and exacerbate long-standing racial and economic inequalities in the United States. Thus, the use of records in employment decisions will often implicate anti-discrimination laws. However, successfully enforcing these protections requires job applicants to, at minimum, understand why they were not hired. Many applicants never learn why they were not hired and thus will never be able to protect their rights. This Article argues that understanding …

The Punishment Paradox, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

What does criminal punishment do? Across centuries of criminal legal thought, a shared answer persists: punishment incapacitates the wrongdoer. And yet punishment sometimes yields its opposite. Paradoxically, punishment sometimes becomes a rallying point-expanding community identification and solidarity around the defendant. This Article shows this punishment paradox using the 2023-24 prosecutions of President Trump and recent and historical case examples-from Luigi Mangione to Karen Read to Rosa Parks. By arguing that criminal law can generate solidarity rather than stigma, the Article both rethinks foundational theories of punishment and reconsiders the role of criminal law in democratic politics. Such an approach transcends …