Postscript | GovernmentA Dose of Dignity: Equitable Vaccination Policies for Incarcerated People and Correctional Staff During the Covid-19 […]
Criminal Law
Article | Criminal Law A Criminal Law Based On Harm Alone: The Story of California Criminal Justice Reform […]
This paper argues that doing so would unconstitutionally force individuals to choose between criminal prosecution or banishment. Part I of this paper will briefly provide an overview of homelessness in the United States, particularly in California, and place the Manhattan Beach ordinance within the various laws and practices localities have implemented in response to the rise of homelessness. Part II will examine the use of banishment in criminal law and explore various challenges to such conditions. Finally, Part III will demonstrate that Manhattan Beach’s ordinance and planned enforcement constitute banishment and are invalid for many of the same reasons courts have used to invalidate conditions of banishment imposed in criminal law.
In the wake of widespread revelations about sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar, and others, the United States is reckoning with the past and present and searching for the means to prevent and punish such offenses in the future. The scourge of sexual crimes goes far beyond instances perpetrated by powerful men; this misconduct is rampant throughout the country. In some of these cases, third parties knew about the abuse and did not try to intervene. Scrutiny of—and the response to—such bystanderism is increasing, including in the legal world.
In order to align law and society more closely with morality, this Article proposes a more holistic, aggressive approach to prompt involvement by third parties who are aware of specific instances of sexual crimes in the United States. This Article begins by documenting the contemporary scope of sexual crimes in the United States and the crucial role bystanders play in facilitating them.
The Article next provides an overview and assessment of “Bad Samaritan laws”: statutes that impose a legal duty to assist others in peril through intervening directly (also known as the “duty to rescue”) or notifying authorities (also known as the “duty to report”). Such laws exist in dozens of foreign countries and, to varying degrees, in twenty-nine U.S. states, Puerto Rico, U.S. federal law, and international law. The author has assembled the most comprehensive global database of Bad Samaritan laws, which provides an important corrective to other scholars’ mistaken claims about the rarity of such statutes, particularly in the United States. Despite how widespread these laws are in the United States, violations are seldom, if ever, charged or successfully prosecuted.
Drawing on historical research, trial transcripts, and interviews with prosecutors, judges, investigators, and “upstanders” (people who intervene to help others in need), the Article then describes four prominent cases in the United States involving witnesses to sexual crimes. Each case provides insight into the range of conduct of both bystanders and upstanders.
Because not all such actors are equal, grouping them together under the general categories of “bystanders” and “upstanders” obscures distinct roles, duties, and culpability for violating those duties. Drawing on the case studies, this Article thus presents original typologies of bystanders (including eleven categories or sub-categories), upstanders (including seven categories), and both kinds of actors (including four categories), which introduce greater nuance into these classifications and this Article’s proposed range of legal (and moral) responsibilities. These typologies are designed to maximize generalizability to crimes and crises beyond sexual abuse.
Finally, the Article prescribes a new approach to the duty to report on sexual abuse and possibly other crimes and crises through implementing a combination of negative incentives (“sticks”) and positive incentives (“carrots”) for third parties. These recommendations benefit from interviews with sexual violence prevention professionals, police, legislators, and social media policy counsel. Legal prescriptions draw on this Article’s typologies and concern strengthening, spreading, and standardizing duty-to-report laws at the state and territory levels; introducing the first general legal duty to report sexual crimes and possibly other offenses (such as human trafficking) at the federal level; exempting from liability one of the two main bystander categories the Article proposes (“excused bystanders”) and each of its six sub-categories (survivors, “confidants,” “unaware bystanders,” children, “endangered bystanders,” and “self-incriminators”); actually charging the other main bystander category the Article proposes (“unexcused bystanders”) and each of its three sub-categories (“abstainers,” “engagers,” and “enablers”) with violations of duty-to-report laws or leveraging these statutes to obtain testimony from such actors; and more consistently charging “enablers” with alternative or additional crimes, such as accomplice liability. Social prescriptions draw on models and lessons from domestic and foreign contexts and also this Article’s typologies to recommend, among other initiatives, raising public awareness of duty-to-report laws and creating what the Article calls “upstander commissions” to identify and “upstander prizes” to honor a category of upstanders the Article proposes (“corroborated upstanders”), including for their efforts to mitigate sexual crimes. A combination of these carrots and sticks could prompt would-be bystanders to act instead as upstanders and help stem the sexual crime epidemic.
The cases of the “Central Park Five” and Brendan Dassey are two of the highest profile criminal cases in the past three decades. Both cases unsurprisingly captured the nation’s attention and became the subjects of several documentaries. Each case forces the public to consider how police officers could mistakenly identify and interrogate an innocent suspect, how an innocent person could feel compelled to falsely confess, and how our legal system could allow the false and coerced confession of a child to be the basis of a criminal conviction. While these two cases made national headlines, they are not unique. False confessions by juveniles are a common and even inevitable occurrence given the impact of the interrogation process on children and the inadequacies of the legal standard that currently exists to protect against juvenile false confessions.
Part I of this Note will discuss the prevalence of false confessions among juvenile suspects, and explain how juveniles’ transient developmental weaknesses make them particularly vulnerable to specific coercive interrogation techniques. Part I will also emphasize the impact that a confession has on the outcome of a defendant’s trial, thereby highlighting the weight that a false confession carries.
Part II of this Note will present the existing law governing the evaluation of the voluntariness of a confession—the procedural safeguards offered by Miranda v. Arizona and the totality of the circumstances test rooted in the concern for due process. Part II will also argue that the totality of the circumstances test is insufficient to protect juveniles because it does not give binding weight to a suspect’s age, but rather considers age among several other characteristics.
Part III of this Note will propose a new legal rule to guide the evaluation of juvenile confessions. The proposed legal rule extends and expands upon the language and holding from J.D.B. v. North Carolina, and requires that age be the primary factor in courts’ evaluations of juvenile confessions. Confessions offered by children during interrogations in which coercive techniques are employed must be presumed involuntary, given the effect that manipulative interrogation techniques have on juveniles’ likelihood to falsely confess. Moreover, given that courts often have no way of knowing the circumstances of an interrogation, confessions by all juveniles should be presumed involuntary until the prosecution can prove that no coercive interrogation techniques were used. Part III also proposes a series of policy reforms that aim to reduce the prevalence of false confessions.
Businesses and organizations expect their managers to use data science to improve and even optimize decisionmaking. Yet when it comes to some criminal justice institutions, such as prosecutors’ offices, there is an aversion to applying cognitive computing to high-stakes decisions. This aversion reflects extra-institutional forces, as activists and scholars are militating against the use of predictive analytics in criminal justice. The aversion also reflects prosecutors’ unease with the practice, as many prefer that decisional weight be placed on attorneys’ experience and intuition, even though experience and intuition have contributed to more than a century of criminal justice disparities.
Instead of viewing historical data and data-hungry academic researchers as liabilities, prosecutors and scholars should treat them as assets in the struggle to achieve outcome fairness. Cutting-edge research on fairness in machine learning is being conducted by computer scientists, applied mathematicians, and social scientists, and this research forms a foundation for the most promising path towards racial equality in criminal justice: suggestive modeling that creates baselines to guide prosecutorial decisionmaking.
Americans recently awoke to a startling revelation: “Our country is getting ripped off.” Indeed, the purportedly deleterious effects of international trade on the United States domestic economy have claimed top billing in President Donald Trump’s nascent “America First” agenda. As the White House publicly excoriates international free trade for the first time in recent memory, global trade deals and domestic tariffs are cast in stark relief. China and Mexico, along these lines, are cast as chief culprits in a system of international exchange allegedly designed to subjugate American workers to nefarious foreign interests. Overall, recent politics underscore the practical importance of, and interdependence between, competition and cooperation in international economic regulation.
In the arena of hard-nosed international competition, it’s all fun and games––until somebody starts a trade war. But beyond the scope of trade deals and tariffs, sovereign states’ domestic antitrust laws are also critical regulatory levers. Americans at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have the power to influence incentives in markets across the globe. For example, although domestic by nature, U.S. antitrust laws do not exclusively apply to conduct in domestic markets—the Sherman Act may extend far beyond American shores to activities conceived and executed abroad.
How can one be expected to demonstrate something they are incapable of, and what if that something meant the difference between freedom and remaining in prison? Thousands of inmates in California face this issue, and many are kept incarcerated for life without any recognition of their cognitive capabilities.
Take Maria’s story, for example; she is a client I became familiar with as a student working in the University of Southern California Gould School of Law’s (“USC”) Post-Conviction Justice Project (“PCJP”). Maria had extensive cognitive impairments that went undiscovered while incarcerated in a California prison for nearly three decades. Because of this, Maria was denied parole an astounding six times with the parole board citing lack of “insight” each time. Maria’s continued denials persisted despite state-issued psychological evaluations concluding that her intellectual functioning was minimal.
Unfortunately, Maria’s predicament is not uncommon. There are several similarly situated inmates who are unable to effectively advocate for themselves due to their cognitive impairments, yet they are not provided with necessary accommodations. As a result, individuals are denied parole even though they do not pose a current danger to society. This culminates in the gravest deprivation of liberty without due process—denial of their freedom.
Bobby James Moore was twenty years old when he “fatally shot a store clerk” while robbing a grocery store in April 1980. On paper, this is a tragic felony murder, but behind the scenes lies a different story. Bobby was not a typical twenty-year-old; he did not understand “the days of the week, the months of the year, [or] the seasons.” Bobby could barely tell time, and he could not understand standard measurements or that subtraction is the opposite of addition. Bobby suffered an “abuse-filled childhood.” Bobby dropped out of high school due to “his limited ability to read and write,” and he lived on the streets after being kicked out of his home for being “stupid.” Bobby is intellectually disabled, and despite the evidence put forth demonstrating his disability, he was sentenced to death pursuant to a set of factors used by a Texas court; these factors are largely based on stereotypes and caricatures from literature. As the United States Supreme Court decided in 2017, this was a gross violation of the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment to rely on “wholly nonclinical” factors rather than the “medical community’s diagnostic framework.”
Just before two o’clock in the afternoon on October 22, 1991, two high school students, Chedell Williams and Zahra Howard, ascended the steps of the Fern Rock train station in North Philadelphia, planning to take a train back to their homes. Seemingly out of nowhere, two men appeared, blocked the girls’ way up to the station, and demanded Chedell’s earrings. Terrified, the girls bolted in opposite directions. The two men followed Chedell. They soon caught her and tore out her earrings. Then “[o]ne of the men grabbed her, held a silver handgun to her neck, and shot her.” The perpetrators fled. Chedell was pronounced dead within the hour.
Police soon focused their investigation on James Dennis, who lived relatively close to the train station in the Abbotsford Homes projects. Detectives would later explain that they heard rumors that Dennis was involved in the shooting, though they were at that time “unable to identify the source of the rumors.” The detectives obtained preliminary descriptions of the perpetrators from three eyewitnesses. These initial descriptions did not align well with Dennis’s actual appearance. Nonetheless, a few eyewitnesses identified Dennis during subsequent photo lineups, live lineups, and the trial. In presenting the government’s case, the prosecution relied heavily on these eyewitness identifications. Dennis was found guilty of “first-degree murder, robbery, carrying a firearm without a license, criminal conspiracy, and possession of an instrument of a crime.” He was sentenced to death.