Criminal Law

Federal habeas corpus can appear to many as a convoluted minefield.

Imagine that a convicted felon in Illinois is pulled over by the police. He hasn’t smoked all day. Stuffed in his coat pocket, however, is a baggy containing marijuana residue—a remnant from several days prior.

In 2019, Turkiye Halk Bankasi A.S. (“Halkbank”)—a commercial bank majority-owned by the Turkish government—was indicted for its participation in a scheme to launder billions of dollars of Iranian oil and natural gas proceeds in violation of U.S. sanctions against the Iranian government and related entities.

This Comment contends that the preponderance standard for flight risk is unconstitutional and interpretively incorrect. In cases involving similar government restrictions on physical liberty, the Supreme Court has generally required at least a “clear and convincing evidence” standard to comport with due process.

In August 2021, the Honorable Miranda M. Du, Chief Judge for the district court of the District of Nevada, struck down 8 U.S.C § 1326, the federal criminal statute that addresses “illegal reentry” into the United States.

After the Golden State Killer was arrested and sentenced in 2018, interest in investigative genetic genealogy spiked.

Inspired by the Supreme Court’s embrace of developmental science in a series of Eighth Amendment cases, “kids are different” has become the rallying cry, leading to dramatic reforms in our response to juvenile crime designed to eliminate the incarceration of children and support their successful transition to adulthood. The success of these reforms represents a promising start, but the “kids are different” approach is built upon two flaws in the Court’s developmental analysis that constrain the reach of its decisions and hide the true implications of a developmental approach.

The area of law colloquially known as compassionate release—which allows prisoners to seek sentence reductions or early release from incarceration under limited circumstances—garnered heightened attention at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This Comment argues that this broad domestic application of the wire fraud statute shields courts from asking whether the statute applies extraterritorially. Further, this Comment argues that courts’ domestic application of the wire fraud statute is sufficiently broad as to begin to resemble extraterritoriality because courts can almost always find sufficient domestic activity to apply the wire fraud statute.

Our modest goal in this Introduction is to assemble some baseline empirics concerning both private violence and state coercion to provide a context for the pieces that follow. In so doing, we aim to mitigate the need for “scene setting” by each paper in the Symposium. Readers of the Symposium will find here a synoptic guide to some basic facts about the distribution and extent of criminal violence, as well as socioeconomic conditions and police activity, in Chicago.