Seventh Circuit Week in Review (With a Brief Digression on Criminal Justice Federalism)

The Seventh Circuit issued only one new criminal opinion in the past week.  In United States v. Robinson, the defendant’s ex-girlfriend (Evans) reported to a Milwaukee police officer that Robinson had a gun in his home, a charge that was later confirmed after the officer obtained a warrant to search Robinson’s residence.  Robinson was then convicted in federal court of being a felon in possession of a firearm.  On appeal, he argued that the cop who applied for the search warrant should have disclosed that Evans had recently been charged with disorderly conduct for threatening Robinson with a knife.  In Robinson’s view, had the judicial officer known the history of conflict between Evans and Robinson, the officer would have discounted the credibility of Evans’ allegation that Robinson had a gun and declined to issue the search warrant.  At a minimum, Robinson argued that he was entitled to a hearing on the matter under Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154 (1978).

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Legal and Other Obstacles to Community Rebuilding Efforts in New Orleans

At yesterday’s faculty workshop, Professor John Lovett of Loyola-New Orleans gave an eye-opening presentation on his latest scholarship, entitled “The Winding Road to Recovery: Observations on Property Relations Three Years After Hurricane Katrina.” Professor Lovett detailed the devastation to single-family and multi-family housing in New Orleans. He then explained how different governmental programs — responsible for billions of dollars earmarked for rebuilding and repopulation efforts — have failed or had limited success.

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Why Don’t We Punish People Who Kill in Self-Defense?

My colleague Janie Kim has a fascinating new article on SSRN called The Rhetoric of Self-Defense. In the article, she explores a surprising difficult problem in criminal law theory: why we don’t punish people who kill in order to save themselves from deadly attacks. I say “surprisingly difficult” because the self-protection defense is a well-established, noncontroversial aspect of criminal law. Compared to, say, the insanity defense, self-protection provokes little deep-seated opposition. Indeed, some purported self-defenders (like Bernhard Goetz, pictured above) have become folk heroes of sorts. Given its intuitive appeal and widespread support, the self-protection defense must rest on a firm theoretical foundation, right?

It turns out, though, that the dominant strands of criminal law theory have a hard time providing a compelling justification for the defense.

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