Legal Studies Commons^™

Crafted From Whole Cloth: Reverse Stash-House Stings And The Sentencing Factor Manipulation Claim, Molly F. Spakowski

Buffalo Law Review

Kenneth Flowers is currently serving a mandatory minimum sentence of 120 months imprisonment stemming from a conviction of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute five or more kilograms of cocaine. While the ten-year prison sentence is very real, the five-kilograms of cocaine is not, and never was. Mr. Flowers was caught-up in one of the elaborate and overused “reverse stash-house sting” operations employed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (“ATF”).

Mr. Flowers’ story is one of many similar cases resulting from the government operation conducted by the ATF known as a reverse stash-house sting operation. The …

The Policing Of Prosecutors: More Lessons From Administrative Law?, Aaron L. Nielson

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

On a daily basis, prosecutors decide whether and how to charge individuals for alleged criminal conduct. Although many prosecutors avoid abusing this authority, prosecutors’ discretionary decisions might result in biased enforcement, inappropriate leveraging of authority, and a lack of transparency. These problems also arise when agency enforcement officials decide whether to act on conduct that violates a legal prohibition.

An inherent tension between the desire to avoid overburdening the system and the need to prevent inconsistent decision-making exists in the exercises of both prosecutorial discretion and regulatory enforcement discretion. It is clear from the similarities between the two that administrative …

Prosecutorial Misconduct: Mass Gang Indictments And Inflammatory Statements, K. Babe Howell

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This Article examines inflammatory statements by prosecutors in the context of mass gang indictments. I contend that inflammatory remarks not only harm the justice system and defendants, particularly minorities, but also that, when prosecutors craft and repeat hyperbolic narratives about vicious gang wars, prosecutors may come to believe the narratives and become effectively blinded to the fact that these narratives are improper, unfair, and untrue. First, I review the professional rules, standards, and case law that prohibit. Then, drawing on press releases and trial transcripts from two mass gang indictments in New York City, I demonstrate how prosecution statements exaggerate …

Prosecutorial Discretion: The Difficulty And Necessity Of Public Inquiry, Bruce A. Green

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Prosecutors’ discretionary decisions have enormous impact on individuals and communities. Often, prosecutors exercise their vast power and discretion in questionable ways. This Article argues that, to encourage prosecutors to use their power wisely and not abusively, there is a need for more informed public discussion of prosecutorial discretion, particularly with regard to prosecutors’ discretionary decisions about whether to bring criminal charges and which charges to bring. But the Article also highlights two reasons why informed public discussion is difficult—first, because public and professional expectations about how prosecutors should use their power are vague; and, second, because, particularly in individual cases, …

Between Brady Discretion And Brady Misconduct, Bennett L. Gershman

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The Supreme Court’s decision in Brady v. Maryland presented prosecutors with new professional challenges. In Brady, the Supreme Court held that the prosecution must provide the defense with any evidence in its possession that could be exculpatory. If the prosecution fails to timely turn over evidence that materially undermines the defendant’s guilt, a reviewing court must grant the defendant a new trial. While determining whether evidence materially undermines a defendant’s guilt may seem like a simple assessment, the real-life application of such a determination can be complicated. The prosecution’s disclosure determination can be complicated under the Brady paradigm because …

Decarcerating America: The Opportunistic Overlap Between Theory And (Mainly State) Sentencing Practice As A Pathway To Meaningful Reform, Mirko Bagaric, Daniel Mccord

Buffalo Law Review

Criminals engender no community sympathy and have no political capital. This is part of the reason that the United States has the highest prison population on earth, and by a considerable margin. Incarceration levels grew four-fold over the past forty years. Despite this, America is now experiencing an unprecedented phenomenon whereby many states are now simultaneously implementing measures to reduce prison numbers. The unusual aspect of this is that the response is neither coordinated nor consistent in its approach, but the movement is unmistakable. This ground up approach to reducing prison numbers suffers from the misgiving that it is an …

The Impact Of Prosecutorial Misconduct, Overreach, And Misuse Of Discretion On Gender Violence Victims, Leigh Goodmark

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Prosecutors are failing victims of gender violence as witnesses and when they become defendants in cases related to their own victimization. But it is questionable whether that behavior should be labeled misconduct. The vast majority of these behaviors range from misuses of discretion to things that some might consider best practices in handling gender violence cases. Nonetheless, prosecutors not only fail to use their discretion appropriately in gender violence cases, but they take affirmative action that does tremendous harm in the name of saving victims and protecting the public. The destructive interactions prosecutors have with victims of gender violence are …

On Efficiency Of Artifact Lookup Strategies In Digital Forensics, Lorenz Liebler, Patrick Schmitt, Harald Baier, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In recent years different strategies have been proposed to handle the problem of ever-growing digital forensic databases. One concept to deal with this data overload is data reduction, which essentially means to separate the wheat from the chaff, e.g., to filter in forensically relevant data. A prominent technique in the context of data reduction are hash-based solutions. Data reduction is achieved because hash values (of possibly large data input) are much smaller than the original input. Today's approaches of storing hash-based data fragments reach from large scale multithreaded databases to simple Bloom filter representations. One main focus was put on …

Between Hagiography And Wounded Attachment: Raphaël Lemkin And The Study Of Genocide, Benjamin Meiches, Jeff Benvenuto

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

In this article, we outline the significance of the special issue on the scholarship of Raphaël Lemkin. We argue that genocide scholars tend to identify with one of three different types of Lemkin scholarship. Each of the articles for the special issue challenges these genres in an effort to extend the study of genocide in new directions. Moreover, we contend that this work suggests that genocide scholars should endeavor to extend the study of genocide beyond Lemkin's vision and writings.

Acculturation: Friend Or Foe Of The Career Aspirations And Educational Aspirations And Expectations Of Hispanic Youth?, Kyhara Nathalia Aguilera

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The modern American Dream says that anyone can be successful if they obtain higher education. Unfortunately, this system does not always meet the needs of our increasingly diverse society. Hispanic immigrant students face a hardship in pursuit of their education and career aspirations because many of them experience acculturation related stresses. This study seeks to investigate the role that acculturation plays in the career aspirations and educational aspirations and expectations of Hispanic students. I go beyond the current literature by exploring how acculturation is a significant factor in determining educational and career aspirations. Specifically, I examine whether different levels of …

Disparities In Sentencing: The Impact Of Race, Gender And Mental Health, Briana Paige

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect that race and mental health play on sentence length in the United States. Mentally ill people are gradually being confined in prisons across the United States and there is an absence of literature that looks at the interaction of race and mental health in regards to sentencing. The focal concerns perspective provides the theoretical framework that guides this study. Multiple linear regressions were used to examine both state and federal prison inmates to examine the effect race, mental health and other extra-legal factors play on sentence length. Results show that …

Voices Unheard: Women And Their Children In Nepal’S Incarceration System, Aune Nuyttens, Mikayla Rose

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research project focused on women in Nepal’s incarceration system. Our goal was to hear and share their stories with the hopes of humanize and de-stigmatize perceptions of female prisoners in and outside of Nepal. A central component to these stories, as we learned, was also the story of prisoner’s children and the NGOs who provide assistance to this vulnerable group of women and their children. The researchers travelled to the east and west of Kathmandu to visit rural and urban prisons in Nepal, and visited various children homes, however the research was based out of Kathmandu, where many of …

Reading Between The Lines: An Intersectional Media Analysis Of Female Sex Offenders In Florida Newspapers, Toniqua C. Mikell

Theses and Dissertations

The media is one of the furthest reaching social institutions of our society. It is a source of white patriarchal ideologies and a vehicle through which they are communicated. Female sex offenders represent a nexus of prescribed social and legal violations. This dissertation examines the reinforcement of patriarchal ideas in media coverage of female sex offenders by posing the question: how are female sex offenders portrayed in the media? Specifically, how are those portrayals racialized? Using an intersectional lens, this study employs a qualitative content analysis to examine the top five circulating newspapers in Florida and their coverage of female …

A Framework To Reveal Clandestine Organ Trafficking In The Dark Web And Beyond, Michael P. Heinl, Bo Yu, Duminda Wijesekera

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Due to the scarcity of transplantable organs, patients have to wait on long lists for many years to get a matching kidney. This scarcity has created an illicit market place for wealthy recipients to avoid long waiting times. Brokers arrange such organ transplants and collect most of the payment that is sometimes channeled to fund other illicit activities. In order to collect and disburse payments, they often resort to money laundering-like schemes of money transfers. As the low-cost Internet arrives in some of the affected countries, social media and the dark web are used to illegally trade human organs. This …

On-Duty Police Shootings: Officers Charged With Murder Or Manslaughter 2005-2018, Philip M. Stinson, Chloe A. Wentzlof, Megan L. Swinehart

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

There were 97 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers with the general powers of arrest (e.g., police officers, deputy sheriffs, state troopers) arrested in years 2005-2018 for murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting where the officer shot and killed someone at incidents throughout the United States. Of those 97 officers, to date, only 35 have been convicted of a crime resulting from the on-duty shooting. This poster presents data on the arrested officers, criminal case dispositions, race of arrested officers and their victims, weapons possessed by victims who were shot and killed by police, and related variables.

Determination Of Vehicle Speed From Recorded Video Using Reverse Projection Photogrammetry And File Metadata, Brandon Epstein, Bryce Westlake

Faculty Publications

The prevalence of security and in‐car video has increased the number of motor vehicle accidents captured on digital video. However, inconsistencies in how to accurately determine time and distance for vehicle speed has led to examinations with varying results. A potential solution for calculating time intervals is to use frame timing contained within many digital video file's metadata, recorded with 0.000001 sec precision. This paper examines a fatal motor vehicle accident where frame timing information was used with distance measurements from reverse projection photogrammetry to calculate vehicle speed. A margin of error was then calculated based on the accuracy in …

De-Escalation: What Does That Mean Anyway?, Pat Nelson

Criminal Justice Department Publications

De-escalation is a common phrase in the media and int he general discourse about the criminal justice system, however, the interpretation can vary. This project examines students' understanding of the definition of de-escalation in professional peace officer education. This presentation took place at the 2019 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD on Wednesday, March 27, 2019.

Immersive Virtual Reality Attacks And The Human Joystick, Peter Casey, Ibrahim Baggili, Ananya Yarramreddy

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This is one of the first accounts for the security analysis of consumer immersive Virtual Reality (VR) systems. This work breaks new ground, coins new terms, and constructs proof of concept implementations of attacks related to immersive VR. Our work used the two most widely adopted immersive VR systems, the HTC Vive, and the Oculus Rift. More specifically, we were able to create attacks that can potentially disorient users, turn their Head Mounted Display (HMD) camera on without their knowledge, overlay images in their field of vision, and modify VR environmental factors that force them into hitting physical objects and …

Heien V. North Carolina And Significant Interpretive Court Cases: An Empirical Examination Of Police Officers’ Perceptions And Knowledge, Michael De Leo

Master of Science in Criminal Justice Theses & (Pre-2016) Policy Research Projects

This empirical study examines legal aspects of policing in relation to the recent, landmark United States Supreme Court case of Heien v. North Carolina. In Heien, the Court found that objectively reasonable mistakes of law by police can support traffic stops. By doing so, it extends the permissible margin of error for stops by law enforcement officers. Due to the potential, far-reaching implications of the Heien decision, including implications for law enforcement and for the Fourth Amendment privacy protections of individuals, it is important to better understand how the lower courts have interpreted and applied Heien. Therefore, …

Sexual Assault And Robbery Disclosure: An Examination Of Black’S Theory Of The Behavior Of Law, Caitlyn N. Muniz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The majority of research on victim decision making has focused narrowly on reporting to police neglecting other ways in which victims seek help after a victimization experience. Similarly, this research also focuses on only one crime at a time, typically sexual assault, or focuses broadly on categories of violent crime. This dissertation aims to explore variations in victim help-seeking by examining and comparing various combinations of formal disclosure. Moreover, this study compares two distinctly different yet comparable interpersonal violent crimes: sexual assault and robbery. In so doing, this study employs the Theory of the Behavior of Law to examine whether …