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Mens Rea Reform And Its Discontents, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article examines the debates over recent proposals for “mens rea reform.” The substantive criminal law has expanded dramatically, and legislators have criminalized a great deal of common conduct. Often, new criminal laws do not require that defendants know they are acting unlawfully. Mens rea reform proposals seek to address the problems of overcriminalization and unintentional offending by increasing the burden on prosecutors to prove a defendant’s culpable mental state. These proposals have been a staple of conservative-backed bills on criminal justice reform. Many on the left remain skeptical of mens rea reform and view it as a deregulatory vehicle …

Exploring Locus Of Control In Offender Cognition And Recidivism Paradigms, Anistasha Lightning, Danielle Polage

All Master's Theses

Working with four Washington State county jails to administer surveys to currently incarcerated inmates, we investigated locus of control and beliefs in the likelihood of continued legal involvement as possible antecedents to criminal recidivism. The surveys examined whether there was any connection between legal involvement frequency and the externalization of locus of control. We investigated external locus of control with specific respect to involvement with the law, the prospect of future incarceration, and feelings concerning the overall cause of original and/or sustained legal involvement utilizing the Revised Causal Dimension Scale (McAuley, Duncan, & Russell, 1992). We identified statistically significant interactions …

Policing, Danger Narratives, And Routine Traffic Stops, Jordan Blair Woods

Michigan Law Review

This Article presents findings from the largest and most comprehensive study to date on violence against the police during traffic stops. Every year, police officers conduct tens of millions of traffic stops. Many of these stops are entirely unremarkable—so much so that they may be fairly described as routine. Nonetheless, the narrative that routine traffic stops are fraught with grave and unpredictable danger to the police permeates police training and animates Fourth Amendment doctrine. This Article challenges this dominant danger narrative and its centrality within key institutions that regulate the police.

The presented study is the first to offer an …

Secret Searches: The Sca's Standing Conundrum, Aviv S. Halpern

Michigan Law Review

The Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) arms federal law enforcement agencies with the ability to use a special type of warrant to access users’ electronically stored communications. In some circumstances, SCA warrants can require service providers to bundle and produce a user’s electronically stored communications without ever disclosing the existence of the warrant to the individual user until charges are brought. Users that are charged will ultimately receive notice of the search after the fact through their legal proceedings. Users that are never charged, however, may never know that their communications were obtained and searched. This practice effectively makes the provisions …

Abolish Ice . . . And Then What?, Peter L. Markowitz

Articles

In recent years, activists and then politicians began calling for the abolition of the United States’s interior immigration-enforcement agency: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many people have misinterpreted the call to “Abolish ICE” as merely a spontaneous rhetorical device used to express outrage at the current Administration’s brutal immigration policies. In fact, abolishing ICE is the natural extension of years of thoughtful organizing by a loose coalition of grassroots immigrant-rights groups. These organizations are serious, not only about their literal goal to eliminate the agency, but also about not replacing it with another dedicated agency of immigration police. Accordingly, …

La Cofradía De Artes Y Artesanos Hispánicos: 1978 To 1983 Redefining Tradition In The New Mexican Art Market, Ethel Mercedes Everett

Dissertations and Theses

La Cofradía de Artes y Artesanos Hispánicos: Redefining Tradition in the New Mexican Art Market. May 2019.

This master’s thesis explores the 1978 founding, existence, dissolve, and the legacy of the Santa Fe, New Mexican artist exhibition group, La Cofradía de Artes y Artesanos Hispánico (La Cofradía). La Cofradía was formed by six Santa Fe Hispano artists in reaction to creative limitations first imposed on Hispano artists in 1926, when the annual Spanish Market was formed. The Spanish Market was the sole arts sales venue available to Hispano artists in the exclusionary Santa Fe gallery and museum market. The Spanish …

The Gendered Burdens Of Conviction And Collateral Consequences On Employment, Joni Hersch, Erin E. Meyers

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Ex-offenders are subject to a wide range of employment restrictions that limit the ability of individuals with a criminal background to earn a living. This Article argues that women involved in the criminal justice system likely suffer a greater income-related burden from criminal conviction than do men. This disproportionate burden arises in occupations that women typically pursue, both through formal pathways, such as restrictions on occupational licensing, and through informal pathways, such as employers’ unwillingness to hire those with a criminal record. In addition, women have access to far fewer vocational programs while incarcerated. Further exacerbating this burden is that …

The Left's Law-And-Order Agenda, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, And The Case Against Solitary Confinement, Francis X. Shen

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Prolonged solitary confinement remains in widespread use in the United States despite many legal challenges. A difficulty when making the legal case against solitary confinement is proffering sufficiently systematic and precise evidence of the detrimental effects of the practice on inmates' mental health. Given this need for further evidence, this Article explores how neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) might provide new evidence of the effects of solitary confinement on the human brain.

This Article argues that both neuroscience and AI are promising in their potential ability to present courts with new types of evidence on the effects of solitary confinement …

Please Don't Stop The Music: Using The Takings Clause To Protect Inmates' Digital Music, Amber M. Banks

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

In prisons across the country, inmates are encouraged to participate in digital media programs. One in ten correctional facilities in the US has digital media programs in which inmates purchase both a device-such as an MP3 player or tablet-and content or services for the device-such as digital music-from a third-party vendor. Although fee structures vary, the facility or the state corrections department usually receives a commission on the revenue generated from inmates' purchases, thereby profiting off of each purchase that an inmate makes. As their contracts with third-party vendors end, state correctional departments may change vendors, either in search of …

Armed Conflict At The Threshold, Deborah Pearlstein

Articles

Seventeen years into the United States’ engagement in what America has controversially understood as a global, non-international armed conflict against a shifting set of terrorist groups, a growing array of scholars has called for a reassessment of the significance of the “armed conflict” classification under international humanitarian law (IHL). The existence of an “armed conflict” has long been understood as a proxy on/off switch of inescapable importance. When an “armed conflict” exists, lethal targeting—without regard to particular self-defensive need or immediacy of threat—is permitted as a first resort. When an “armed conflict” does not exist, it is not. Challenging the …

Broken Bones And Pepper Spray: The State-Sanctioned Abuse Of Immigrant Juveniles In Custody, Alex Bruce

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Pressure Groups And Problem Definition In Crafting Legislative Solutions To The Opioid Crisis, Taleed El-Sabawi

Faculty Publications

Organized interest groups and federal administrative agencies have historically been influential in defining problem drug use during nationwide crisis. As such, the manner in which these pressure groups defined the problem may have influenced or, at least, provided support for legislators’ decisions to shy away from a criminal justice approach and towards acceptance of a more “health-oriented” — one that did not comprehensively address demand factors or demonstrate a commitment to reforming U.S. drug policy to meet international standards of best practice. In an effort to provide a snapshot of what such involvement may look like, this article explores the …

Carrots, Sticks And Problem Drug Use: The Law Enforcement Lobby's Contribution To The Policy Discourse On Drug Use & The Opioid Crisis, Taleed El-Sabawi

Faculty Publications

Despite the growing support for the idea that problem drug use should be treated like a chronic medical disease, some law enforcement interest groups, including trial court judges associations, prosecuting attorneys associations, and police associations (“law enforcement groups” or “criminal justice actors”), continue to argue for the use of the criminal justice system to address the nation’s drug crises. The justification for the use of the criminal justice system to oversee the psychological and medical treatment of persons with substance use disorders (SUDs) is based on the belief that persons with SUDs are deviants, who cannot refrain from engaging in …

Dna And Law Enforcement: How The Use Of Open Source Dna Databases Violates Privacy Rights, Christine Guest

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dillon's Rule: A Check On Sheriff's Authority To Enter 287(G) Agreements, Gregory Taylor

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Failed Protectors: The Indian Trust And Killers Of The Flower Moon, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Michigan Law Review

Review of David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

Life In Hampton Roads Survey Press Release #5: Politics, Perceptions Of The Police, And Related Issues, Social Science Research Center, Old Dominion University

Life in Hampton Roads Survey Report

[Introductory paragraph]

The political climate is one factor in understanding attitudes on a variety of social and political issues. Respondents were asked an array of questions including party affiliation, political attitudes and voter registration. The 822 participants gave a wide variety of answers to these questions, but much of the data reflects response patterns seen in years past.

Kkk In The Pd: White Supremacist Police And What To Do About It, Vida B. Johnson

Lewis & Clark Law Review

There is an epidemic of white supremacists in police departments. Police officers have been identified as members of white supremacist groups in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana. There have been scandals in over 100 different police departments, in over forty different states, in which individual police officers have sent overtly racist emails, texts, or made racist comments via social media. This is a nation-wide problem. It is one that is not limited to just beat officers; some of these shocking occurrences have even involved high-ranking members of their respective police forces. Although the F.B.I. warned of white supremacists infiltrating police departments …

The Exclusionary Rule In The Age Of Blue Data, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In Herring v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts reframed the Supreme Court’s understanding of the exclusionary rule: “As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence.” The open question remains: how can defendants demonstrate sufficient recurring or systemic negligence to warrant exclusion? The Supreme Court has never answered the question, although the absence of systemic or recurring problems has figured prominently in two recent exclusionary rule decisions. Without the ability to document recurring failures, or patterns of police misconduct, courts can dismiss …