Tag: Criminal Law

Limping Toward Decriminalization: The Case Act, De Facto Decriminalization of Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Victims, and 2-Way CCTV – Note by Alyssa N. Daniels

From Volume 88, Number 6 (September 2015)
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At about 8:15 a.m. on May 2, 2012, National City Police picked up a fourteen-year-old runaway for loitering and suspected prostitution. Lauren’s twenty-eight-year-old “boyfriend” had brought her from her hometown of El Paso, Texas, to California to pimp her out. 

While her “boyfriend” was exploiting her, Lauren performed hundreds of sexual acts on clients. Typically meeting with seven to ten “johns” each day, she was shuffled from one seedy southern California hotel room to the next. Her trafficker moved her from Los Angeles, down to San Diego, back up to Los Angeles, down to Orange County, and finally back to San Diego where she was arrested. During this time, her “boyfriend” had total control over Lauren—he posted online advertisements offering her sexual services on Backpage.com, arranged and paid for the hotel rooms in which she met her clients, dictated how she should dress, and took all of her earnings. 

After being picked up by police in National City, Lauren ran away from a victim’s service center back to her “boyfriend.” She was arrested again for prostitution less than a week later in Los Angeles. Her trafficker was arrested as well and eventually charged by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California with Sex Trafficking of a Child in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1591 and Transportation of a Minor to Engage in Prostitution in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2423(a).

 

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Miller v. Alabama: A Proposed Solution for a Court that Feels Strongly Both Ways – Note by Liza Little

From Volume 88, Number 6 (September 2015)
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Consider a fourteen-year-old boy whose entire life was spent moving in and out of foster care because his mother was an alcoholic and his stepfather was abusive. This boy suffered from early-onset depression, and had already attempted suicide four times by the age of fourteen. One night, the boy and his friend went to a trailer owned by his mother’s drug dealer to drink and do drugs. After the adult drug dealer passed out from consumption, the boy—seeing an opportunity for some quick cash—took the dealer’s wallet from his back pocket to steal his money. However, the dealer woke up and grabbed the boy by the throat. The boy’s friend hit the dealer with a nearby baseball bat. Once the boy was released, he repeatedly struck the drug dealer with the bat until he believed the man to be dead. To hide the evidence of the crime, the boys set fire to the drug dealer’s trailer, ultimately killing the man inside. This fourteen-year-old boy was sentenced to die in prison for his crimes, without any hope for release. This boy’s name is Evan Miller.

 

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Defending Data – Article by Pamela Metzger & Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

From Volume 88, Number 5 (July 2015)
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Defending Data proposes a data-driven, systems-based approach to improving public defense in America. Public defenders represent millions of defendants every year. Yet public defense remains a largely data-less enterprise, a black box of discretionary decisions disconnected from any systemic analysis about the relationship between defender practices and case outcomes. Defending Data adopts a novel approach to the crisis of public defense. Building off of the successful implementation of system-based approaches in other complex, high-risk industries such as aviation and medicine, Defending Data explains how defenders can develop a data-driven systems approach to public defense.

 

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Narratives of Cultural Collision and Racial Oppression: How to Reconcile Theories of a Cultural Defense and Rotten Social Background Defense to Best Serve Criminal Defendants – Note by Sierra Villaran

From Volume 88, Number 5 (July 2015)
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“Once upon a time, not so long ago, culture, in the lower case, was primarily an anthropological preoccupation. Not any more. It is hardly news that peoples across the planet have taken to invoking it, to signifying themselves with reference to it, to investing it with an authority, a determinacy, a superorganic unity of which even the most conservative anthropologist would be wary. Culture, now capitalized in both senses of the term, has come to provide the language, the Esperanto, of difference spoken in the active voice.”

 

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The Right to a Complete Defense: A Special Brady Rule in Capital Cases – Note by Scott Hardy

From Volume 87, Number 6 (September 2014)
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In 1980, twenty-one-year-old Delma Banks, Jr. was convicted of murdering sixteen-year-old Richard Whitehead outside of Nash, Texas and was sentenced to death for his crime. During the penalty phase of Banks’s trial, the question that would determine whether Banks was eligible for a death sentence was whether a probability existed that he would commit other violent crimes and continue to pose a threat to society if allowed to live. Robert Farr was an essential witness for the prosecution on this point. Farr testified that, before Banks was arrested, Farr had traveled with Banks to Dallas to pick up a pistol that he and Banks needed to commit a series of robberies they were planning. “According to Farr, Banks ‘said he would take care of it’ if ‘there was any trouble during these burglaries.’” On cross-examination, Farr perjured himself twice when asked if he had provided information about the trip to a deputy sheriff, answering that he had not. The state remained silent during this questioning.

 

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The Attrition of Rights Under Parole – Article by Tonja Jacobi, Song Richardson, & Gregory Barr

From Volume 87, Number 4 (May 2014)
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We conduct a detailed doctrinal and empirical study of the adverse effects of parole on the constitutional rights of both individual parolees and the communities in which they live. We show that parolees’ Fourth,Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights have been eroded by a multitude of punitive conditions endorsed by the courts. Punitive parole conditions actually increase parolees’ vulnerability to criminal elements, and thus likely worsen recidivism. Simultaneously, the parole system broadly undermines the rights of nonparolees, including family members, cotenants, and communities. We show that police target parolee-dense neighborhoods for additional Terry stops, even when income, race, population, and single- family status are accounted for. Furthermore, police take advantage of the permissive parole search jurisprudence, conducting more searches and arrests of both parolees and their nonparolee neighbors. Combined, this analysis shows that parole institutionalizes individuals and marginalizes communities.

 

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Accuracy in Sentencing – Article by Brandon L. Garrett

From Volume 87, Number 3 (March 2014)
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A host of errors can occur at sentencing, but whether a particular sentencing error can be remedied may depend on whether judges characterize errors as involving a “miscarriage of justice”—that is, a claim of innocence. The Supreme Court’s miscarriage of justice standard, created as an exception to excuse procedural barriers in the context of federal habeas corpus review, has colonized a wide range of areas of law, from “plain error” review on appeal, to excusing appeal waivers, the scope of cognizable claims under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, the postconviction statute for federal prisoners, and the “Savings Clause” that permits resort to habeas corpus rather than § 2255. That standard requires a judge to ask whether a reasonable decisionmaker would more likely than not reach the same result. However, the use of the miscarriage of justice standard with respect to claims of sentencing error remains quite unsettled. In this Article, I provide a taxonomy of types of innocence of sentence claims, and describe how each has developed, focusing on federal courts. I question whether finality should play the same role regarding correction of errors in sentences, and I propose that a single miscarriage of justice standard apply to all types of sentencing error claims, when not considering on appeal under reasonableness review. Finally, I briefly describe how changes to the sentencing process or sentencing guidelines could also reflect certain concerns with accuracy.

 

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Criminal Law at the Crossroads: Turn to Accuracy – Article by Dan Simon

From Volume 87, Number 3 (March 2014)
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It is customary at the USC Gould School of Law to commemorate the publication of books authored by members of the faculty. A while before the publication of In Doubt: The Psychology of Criminal Justice, Dean Robert Rasmussen summoned me to discuss a way to commemorate its release. The conversation quickly converged on the idea that rather than hold an event to celebrate the publication of the book, we should seize the opportunity to hold an earnest discussion about the core issues raised in it: What has brought the criminal justice process to its current state, and more importantly, where should the process go from here? In that vein, we invited leading figures working at the forefront of these questions to participate in a conference: Criminal Law at the Crossroads. We also invited the speakers to submit their papers for publication in a special Symposium by the same name, and they responded graciously. It is an honor to pen the opening article of this Symposium.

 

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