Criminal Law

Facebook and Sex Offenders

Posted on May 08, 2008
Facebook is joining efforts by other online social networking websites by trying to limit sex offender access to the website: Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, is adding more than 40 new safeguards to protect young users from...

Fear of Pedophiles

Posted on May 07, 2008
Dan Filler at The Faculty Lounge continues to post about sex crime issues with an interesting bit about how the government plays on the fear of pedophiles. Filler was writing in response to this online ad. Here is what he...

DNA Evidence in 9th Circuit Appeal

Posted on May 07, 2008
The 9th Circuit vacated the sexual assault conviction of a man because the prosecution exaggerated the reliability of the DNA evidence. From the LA Times: A Nevada man sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting a young girl should...

Legal Update on R. Kelly Trial

Posted on May 06, 2008
After much anticipation and an incredibly long wait, the R. Kelly proceedings are finally underway. However, coverage has been hard to come by because of the heavy-handed restrictions put in place by the judge handling the case. EvidenceProf has the....

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New Mexico Cult Leader Arrested on Sex Crime Charges

Posted on May 06, 2008
While not currently the biggest criminal law story regarding a religious compound, a leader in New Mexico has been arrested on sex crime charges. It seems like a bad time to be in a religious compound. From CNN: The leader...

A Poorly Drafted Sex Crime Law and "Rape by Fraud"

Posted on May 05, 2008
Eugene Volokh (who has been doing a lot of great blogging about sex crime issues lately) has the story of a law which would unintentionally criminalize adultery in Massachusetts: That's what would happen under a proposed statute that's being promoted...

Carnival Against Sexual Violence 46

Posted on May 05, 2008
It went up last week at abyss2hope. As always, here is the legal section: In The Survivor Manual: Detective speaks about Report It. posted at Allegory of the Cave, we get a discussion of a police officer's comments about what...

I'm Out of Town

Posted on May 01, 2008
Normal blogging will resume on Monday.

Around the Web

Posted on May 01, 2008
The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting article entitled: What Are the Ages of Consent Throughout the Western World? The article focuses primarily on the Western World: "the U.S., Europe West of the Iron Curtain, plus the Western Anglosphere, which is...

New on SSRN

Posted on April 30, 2008
There a couple interesting new sex-crime related articles up on SSRN. First, there is an article by Jenny Roberts at Syracuse titled The Myth of Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions: Involuntary Commitment of Sexually Violent Predators. The article is forthcoming...

Are There any Lawyers on Staff for Law & Order: SVU

Posted on April 30, 2008
Given the subject matter of this blog, it probably isn't surprising that I have been a regular viewer of Law & Order: SVU. For a while, it was the best of the various Law & Order shows. The show often...

Was "Rocket" a Sex Criminal?

Posted on April 29, 2008
While the statute of limitations has long since passed, the allegations being made against Roger Clemens indicate that he may have committed statutory rape. If he did have sexual relations with Mindy McCready when she was only 15 years old,...

Around the Web

Posted on April 28, 2008
The Stanford Daily has an article covering law professor Jeffrey Fisher, who recently argued Kennedy v. Louisiana before the U.S. Supreme Court. According to Fisher, "[t]his was definitely one of the very biggest [cases] that I?ve done, in terms of...

Age of Consent

Posted on April 28, 2008
After Rick Hills posted this insightful post at Prawfsblawg about strange results of American age of consent law, I took the opportunity to talk about the oddities described in Hills's post. I'm not sure if Hills's post also inspired Eugene...

Horrible Incest and Rape Case in Austria

Posted on April 28, 2008
The media has been focusing a lot on this truly horrific incest and rape case: Authorities in Austria are trying to piece together the details of how a 73-year-old man managed to keep his daughter imprisoned in a windowless cellar...

Around the Web

Posted on April 25, 2008
An Indiana state court judge rejected a request by a convicted sex offender to be allowed to watch his son play baseball in a city park. The man completed his sexual battery sentence in 1996 and no longer was required...

Military Contractor Rape

Posted on April 24, 2008
The Nation has the story of a horrible set of rapes by military contractors in Iraq in Afghanistan: As news broke of the rape of yet another US military contractor employee in Iraq [see "Another KBR Rape Case" at thenation.com],...

Teenage Sex and Stupidity

Posted on April 24, 2008
Rick Hills posts two recent cases which illustrate how American law often addresses teenage (or adolescent) sexuality in unusual ways: Item #1: Two teenagers -- a sixteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy -- took racy pictures of themselves with their...

Around the Web

Posted on April 23, 2008
The San Jose Mercury News has an interesting story which discusses how Oakland police are now treating child prostitutes as victims, instead of criminals. The article also mentions that the Oakland Police Department has been awarded a $300,000 federal grant...

Sex Crimes Make for Good TV

Posted on April 23, 2008
It's seems as though Law & Order isn't the only TV show that uses stories "ripped from the headlines." As Dahlia Lithwick at Convictions notes, Boston Legal just broadcast its version of the Kennedy v. Louisiana case: Anyone happen to...

When Podiatrists Attack

Posted on April 23, 2008
From the files of strange sex crimes, here is the latest addition from Illinois: A podiatrist who practiced on Chicago's South Side was found guilty Monday of sexually assaulting an elderly woman after she sought treatment for a sprained ankle...

Around the Web

Posted on April 22, 2008
Grits for Breakfast reports that Oklahoma authorities have "charged a western Oklahoma sheriff with coercing and bribing female inmates so he could use them in a sex-slave operation run out of his jail." The Sheriff resigned just as state prosecutors...

Maryland Court of Appeals Reverses Maouloud Baby Decision

Posted on April 22, 2008
Right after I started this blog, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals issued an opinion in Maryland v. Maouloud Baby. The court held that a person couldn't withdraw consent from a sex act once that sex act had begun. The...

Around the Web

Posted on April 21, 2008
The New York Times reports that the judge in the Texas polygamous sect case has ordered all 416 children seized by authorities to be "held in protective custody by the state pending further investigation into whether they had been abused,...

Missouri Can't Wait

Posted on April 21, 2008
While all of us wait to see if the Supreme Court will uphold the statute in Kennedy, Missouri is chomping at the bit to adopt a capital child rape statute: Emphasizing that the most heinous crimes deserve the harshest penalty,...

More on the Powers Case

Posted on April 21, 2008
Ilya Somin added another post at Volokh Conspiracy to the discussion of whether the AWA registration provisions run afoul of the Commerce Clause after Raich: In my earlier post on the federal district court decision striking down a part of...

Carnival Against Sexual Violence 45

Posted on April 21, 2008
It went up last week at abyss2hope. Here is the legal section: In Voluntary intoxication as a defence to rape posted at Criminal Letters, we get a discussion of the trial of Marek Mierzwa where he was found not guilty...

Florida District Court Strikes Down Registry Provisions of AWA on Commerce Clause Grounds

Posted on April 20, 2008
I never blog on weekends, but since everyone else is beating me to the punch on a big story that I was going to blog about on Monday, I had to chime in. The title of the post says it...

CLEAR Initiative Symposium - Sex Crimes Panel Live Blog

Posted on April 18, 2008
My comments are in italics. Everything else can be attributed in paraphrase to the speaker. First up is Terri Mascherin: She says they cheated by putting "sex crimes" in the title and says that is probably why most of the...

New Article at Stateline

Posted on April 18, 2008
Stateline has done a fantastic job covering sex offender law issues in the past. Here is the latest article by John Gramlich concerning crackdowns on sex offenders: From California to North Carolina, a flood of litigation has accompanied an expansion...

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