Criminal

The following op-ed, “You're under arrest, Mr. President, by HLS S.J.D. candidate Noah Weisbord appeared in the Feb. 12, 2009, edition of the International Herald Tribune.

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Those words, written by noted death penalty lawyer Bryan Stevenson ’85, were very much on the mind of Katie Wozencroft ’09 this summer, when she made the four-hour drive from Atlanta to an Alabama prison where condemned prisoners are executed.

Former CEO-turned-felon David Logan took his first step down the slippery slope of white collar crime as a city administrator in a small town in Minnesota, when he accepted a truck as a gift from two men who had a city contract.

Professor Carol Steiker '86 is an expert in criminal law and capital punishment. She recently argued a death penalty case before the Supreme Court, winning her argument and overturning a Texas death sentence. Here, she responds to a question about a recent Supreme Court ruling.

In a recent interview with Toby Stock, Dean of Admissions, Harvard Law School Assistant Professor Jeannie Suk discusses her article, "Criminal Law Comes Home," which examines how misdemeanor law regulates domestic violence.

This January, when the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor resumed in The Hague, much of the world was watching. So were 11 Harvard Law students—from about 20 feet away.

On May 16th, two HLS students, René A. Pfromm LL.M. '08 and Ines Wu '09, together with Stephan Sonnenberg '06, Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Program (HNMCP) clinical fellow and lecturer on law, delivered a one day workshop on negotiation in the context of genocide and mass atrocities.

In rural Liberia, locals have a method for determining if someone is guilty of witchcraft. They administer poison to the suspect. If he survives, he’s innocent. That’s the sort of anachronism that vexes Deborah Isser ’96, a senior program officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

While in Guatemala this winter, Therese Rohrbeck touched what remains of The Dream of Pope Gregory IX.

In his new book, “Is There a Right to Remain Silent? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11,” (Oxford University Press 2008), Professor Alan Dershowitz examines the status of the Fifth Amendment privilege in a post 9/11 “preventive” state.

Professor Carol Steiker ’86 formally took the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professorship of Law in a Langdell Hall ceremony yesterday, and celebrated the occasion with a lecture exploring the role of mercy in the criminal justice system.

Harvard Law School Professor Carol Steiker ’86, several students, and two HLS alumni celebrated a supreme victory on April 25 when the high court ruled that death sentences in three cases from Texas should be overturned. Steiker and several of her research assistants contributed to the defense of three individuals on death row, along with Jordan Steiker ’88 and Robert Owen ’89, co-directors of the University of Texas at Austin School of Law’s Capital Punishment Clinic.

When threatened in court by the leader of a death squad known for killing its victims with chainsaws, Brazilian prosecutor Raquel Ferreira Dodge was undeterred.

Over the past 30 years, feminists have struggled to make domestic violence a public issue. But in a recent Yale Law Journal article, Assistant Professor Jeannie Suk ’02 takes a critical look at the use of protection orders by a criminal justice system that may now be too involved in private life.

Neuman, formerly at Columbia, joined the Harvard Law faculty this summer as the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law. He is the author of “Strangers to the Constitution: Immigrants, Borders, and Fundamental Law” (Princeton University Press, 1996).

“Stay in role!” exhorts Professor Carol Steiker ’86, as some 90 students in her upper-level course Capital Punishment in America split into groups for an exercise in which they’ll argue whether a death sentence should be reversed due to ineffective assistance of counsel. “Don’t say, ‘If I were the lawyer, I would … ’”

When Navi Pillay LL.M. '82 S.J.D. '88 was growing up in South Africa, there was no international court in which apartheid could be prosecuted as a crime against humanity. Now there is--and she's on it.

BEFORE NUREMBERG…
Included in a recent HLS library exhibit, these illustrations from a 16th-century book show instruments of torture and a criminal on the way…

Kenneth Scott '79 makes sure there's no whitewash after ethnic 'cleansing'

Brandon Moon was a 25-year-old college student at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1988 when he was convicted of rape and sentenced to 75 years in prison. Last December, after 16 years behind bars, he was released following conclusive DNA testing that proved his innocence.