Articles Posted in Criminal Law and Justice

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In the past year there has been what appears to be a constant drumbeat, seemingly almost weekly and sometimes daily, of reports of mass shootings and deaths by firearms throughout the United States. There are also statistics. A recent study reported by the BBC indicates there has been a steady increase by year in the number of gun deaths in the U.S. between 2014 and 2021 with the exception of a small dip in 2020. Reliable published statistics for 2022 have been difficult to locate due to the fact that 2022 is the current year but according to the Gun Violence Archive there have been 225 mass shootings, 14 mass murders, and 19,350 total number of gun violence deaths (all causes) that have occurred as of June 11, 2022.

While there has long been an ebb and flow of general concerns regarding gun violence and mass shootings in America, the high level of recent reporting mentioned earlier raises the question: Has gun violence and particularly mass shootings in the United States increased to the point where it can now be reasonably asserted that this issue has now become a crisis in America?

The Congressional Research Service defines mass shootings as “multiple firearm homicide incidents involving four or more victims at one or more locations close to one another”. The FBI definition is essentially the same but in the United States there are several different, but common, other definitions of mass shootings. For a more extended discussion see Richard Berk’s analysis of this topic, What is Mass Shooting? What Can Be Done?, on the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Criminology website.

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The people at The Jury Expert are excited about moving to a new platrorm, WordPress, where they can incorporate a new look and possibly some new features as well. Below is their e-mail announcing the change and providing links so you can see for yourselves. Take a look:

The e-mail:

We are too excited to wait until our next issue to get this announcement out! The Jury Expert has moved to a WordPress platform and we are ready for our close-up. We invite you to visit and see how much easier it is to find what you’re looking for on our new site. One of the benefits of our new platform is we can use categories (see the right-hand side of the webpage for the category drop-down menu) to help you find what you need.

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To view the full-text of cases you must sign in to FindLaw.com. All summaries are produced by Findlaw
March 21-25, 2011.

United States First Circuit, 03/22/2011
US v. Werra, No. 09-1593
Conviction and sentencing of defendant is reversed because stop-and-frisk conducted on him after law enforcement officers forced their way into a house occupied by a group of unrelated individuals to execute an arrest warrant violated the Fourth Amendment rights of defendant, where he was not the subject of the warrant.

United States Fourth Circuit, 03/25/2011
US v. Masciandaro, No. 09-4839
Conviction and sentencing of defendant for carrying or possessing a loaded handgun in a motor vehicle, under 36 C.F.R. section 2.4(b), is affirmed where the general federal savings statute, 1 U.S.C. Section 109, denies defendants an automatic entitlement to the benefit of post-arrest changes in the law.

United States Ninth Circuit, 03/21/2011
Smith v. Almada, No. 09-55334
In an appeals arising out of the arrest and trial of the appellant for arson, summary judgment in favor of the appellee is affirmed where failure to disclose evidence during criminal trial did not prejudice appellant.
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TITLE: The Fear Within

SUBTITLE: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial AUTHOR: Scott Martelle PUBLICATION DATE: May 2011

PUBLISHER: Rutgers University Press PAGE COUNT: 320 pp.

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The following is a link to a a listing of towns in Union County New Jersey and the number of gangs reported to be established in each town, even many of the smaller ones. One reason for publishing this post is that we suspect this particular article may point to a very small representation of a much larger problem throughout the nation that should concern us all.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/01/nj_gangs_have_presence_in_all.html?appSession=82694619262727

David Badertsher

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We are pleased to presnet the following review of Cross Examination Handbook: Persuasion, Strategies and Techniques by Ronald H. Clark and others as acknowledged below. The review was prepared by our Senior Law Librarian for Public Access, Theodore Pollack

Title: Cross-Examination Handbook: Persuasion, Strategies, and Techniques

Author: Ronald H. Clark, George R. Dekle, Sr., William S. Bailey

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A recently released U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics Study presents data on the number of adults under some form of correctional supervision at the end of the year 2009. The Report discussing the Study was released on December 21, 2010; it is part of the Correctional Population of the United States Series, published annually. For more information see the Bureau of Justice Statistics Press Release accompanying the Report For additional information including links to accompanying spread sheet data click here.

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David Badertscher

The New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library (New York County) is pleased to announce a major enhancement regarding access to those Temporary Commission on Revision of New York Penal Law and Criminal Code (1961-1970) papers held by the New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library (New York County). During the past year we in the library have been working with professional interns, archivists, and especially Philip Yow and his web design team at the State of New York Unified Court System to find ways to preserving these materials, many of which were beginning to deteriorate significantly. After confronting various obstacles, technical and otherwise, we settled on digitizing the material as a number of separate and searchable pdf files and then placing all of them on the library website with an overlay of google searchability. Although this may not be perfect it does make the documents accessible on the web in a cost effective manner.

A word of further explanation. these papers primarily consisting of documents submitted to and documents produced by the Temporary Commission on Revision of Penal Laws and Criminal Code (1961-1970) were collected by our former Administrative Judge Peter Mcquillan who served on the staff of the Commission. Justice Mcquillan left the Papers in my custody when he retired and we first put up an index to the papers on the web and now the full text of these materials. In addition we have included The Proposed New York Criminal Procedure Law of 1969 because in addition to the text of the proposed law, it includes valuable additional materials related to the work of the Commission and derivation tables for use in comparing the current Code with the earlier Code. Special permission was obtained from Thomson Reuters before publishing the latter segment.

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Until a few weeks ago before receiving a telephone call I had never heard of Ron Arons. During that call Mr. Arons explained that he had been following postings on this blog and wondered if I would be interested in reviewing two of his books. After some discussion I agreed to either review them myself or ask some of my colleagues to review them for posting on the Criminal Law Library blog, with the understanding that the books provided for reviewing would be added to the library collection of the New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library of New York County and not given to me personally.

We are fortunate that two colleagues, both experienced book reviewers, were available and eager to take on these assignments. Pepper Hedden who has worked with me on special projects and reviews materials regularly for the Law Library Association of Greater New York (LLAGNY) will graduate December 2010 from St. John’s University with an MLS degree. She is a reference librarian in the law library of the New York County District Attorney’s office and is reviewing The Jews of Sing Sing the first of Mr. Arons’ books listed below. Ted Pollack who is reviewing Wanted! U.S. Criminal Records: Sources & Research Methodology, also by Mr. Arons, is the Senior Law Librarian at the New York County Public Access Law Library. Ted continues to review legal materials for both the New York Law Journal and the Library Journal.

Since I am not writing any of the reviews below I will only say that as a law librarian who is always looking for useful sources of criminal records, I have already found Mr. Arons book Wanted! U.S. Criminal Records: Sources & Research Methodology useful in identifying criminal records in other jurisdictions. Unfortunately I have not yet found time to read The Jews of Sing Sing–but I will. Now on to the book reviews:

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