Clogged Conduits: A Defendant’s Right to Confront His Translated Statements
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I would like to thank Jenna Liu, Jack Brake, Alex Moreno, Miranda Coombe, and the rest of The University of Chicago Law Review editors and staff for their thoughtful feedback. I would also like to thank the attorneys in the DVSJA Practice at Appellate Advocates for introducing me to this area of law and advocating tirelessly for incarcerated survivors.
In this Comment, Zoë Lewis Ewing evaluates the implementation of the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA), a New York law passed in 2019 to provide shortened sentencing ranges for domestic violence survivors convicted of crimes. It identifies an inconsistency in sentencing courts’ application of the law’s causation standard, which requires that a petitioner’s experience of domestic violence be a “significant contributing factor” to their criminal conduct. Some courts interpret the prong narrowly, while others apply a broad causation standard. This Comment argues that courts should opt for the latter approach and consider causation in the DVSJA satisfied if domestic violence was “sufficiently significant to have likely helped bring about the criminal conduct.”
I would like to thank Maria Sofia Peña, Joseph Oten, Zoë Ewing, Karan Lala, John Cooper, Chloe Li, Helen Chamberlin, Quinten Rimolde, Jonathan Tao, Luke Henkel, Jackson Cole, Robert Dohrman, Hana Ferrero, Miranda Coombe, and all the other wonderful editors and staff of The University of Chicago Law Review for their insightful feedback and careful editing. I would also like to thank my family for their unconditional support.
In this Comment, Sabrina Huang argues that courts should eliminate the subjective malice requirement for Fourth Amendment malicious prosecution claims. She draws on other constitutional torts that arise during encounters with actors in the criminal justice system to show that a plaintiff-friendly objective standard is more appropriate than a subjective standard. If courts are unwilling to eliminate the malice requirement, the Comment proposes an alternative to the requirement: a burden-shifting test. The intended effects of both proposals are to expand relief to more litigants across jurisdictions, harmonize Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, and deter police and prosecutorial misconduct.
Thank you to Tyler Ashman and Liam Haffey for providing helpful feedback and assistance on this Case Note.
The Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause allows successive criminal prosecutions for the same conduct so long as they are pursued by separate sovereigns (such as two different states). This Case Note examines Illinois law to argue that state statutes are a useful, though imperfect, means of addressing the dual sovereignty doctrine. It argues further that the details of statutory language are highly consequential to whether states can scale back dual sovereignty in practice.