Pure Consumption Cases under the Federal “Crackhouse” Statute
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The federal “crackhouse” statute, 21 USC § 856, makes it a felony to “knowingly open, lease, rent, use, or maintain any place . . . for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance.” This Comment focuses on what it means for a defendant to open or maintain a place “for the purpose of . . . using” a controlled substance under § 856(a)(1).
I would like to thank Professor Adam Davidson for his thoughtful advice and insight; the staff and editors of The University of Chicago Law Review, especially Ryan Jain-Liu, Devika Albert, Zoë Ewing, and Shruti Baxi, for their invaluable feedback; the clients of the Philadelphia Capital Habeas Unit for inspiring this argument; and Jonathan Hess, for everything else.
The Eighth Amendment has long been understood to bar state-inflicted torture. Yet a fundamental paradox persists: The same circumstances that constitute torture sufficient to authorize an individual's capital sentence are routinely present on death row. Drawing on a systematic analysis of state definitions of torture utilized in capital proceedings, this Comment proposes a resolution to this paradox, arguing for the creation of a new, state-informed torture standard consistent with the Supreme Court’s evolving standards of decency framework and better suited to address the diffuse, structural nature of death row conditions than the Court’s existing Eighth Amendment criteria.
Each year, more than half of criminal defendants subject to the career offender sentencing enhancement are those with prior drug convictions. Because the goal of the Sentencing Guidelines is to “inject transparency, consistency, and fairness” into federal sentencing, clarity on how courts should assess decriminalized drug offenses as § 4B1.1 predicates is needed to restore uniformity to the system and satisfy the Guidelines’ original goals. This Essay calls upon the Sentencing Commission to clarify its intent, place time limits on decriminalized drug predicates for § 4B1.1, and restore greater uniformity to the system.
I thank John MacDonald for helpful comments. I do not thank him for the unhelpful ones.
The law and political economy (LPE) movement claims concern for marginalized communities as a motivation for its crime agenda. However, efforts to defund police, elect progressive prosecutors, and eliminate prisons are likely to generate large costs for the very communities LPE scholars say they care about. Existing empirical analyses demonstrate that Black individuals benefit disproportionately from the deterrence provided by police. This Essay also provides new evidence that progressive prosecutors have put Black people in lethal danger. Finally, it argues that there are reasons to believe that decarceration would not be costless for the Black community.