criminal justice

Georgia Law’s Community HeLP Clinic and Project South release report on harms from spike in state-federal jailhouse immigration enforcement

Negative effects of three Southern states’ collaboration with federal immigration officials are detailed in a report just published by the Community Health Law Partnership here at the University of Georgia School of Law and Project South, a 35-year-old, Atlanta-based nongovernmental organization.

Entitled Escalating Jailhouse Immigration Enforcement, the 52-page report focuses on “ICE holds” – the nonbinding request, placed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that local jails detain certain detainees. Based on records obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the report reveals that between fiscal years 2016 and 2018:

  • The number of ICE holds nearly quadrupled in Georgia, nearly tripled in South Carolina, and doubled in North Carolina.
  • On average, persons subject to ICE holds were held more than two weeks in Georgia, about three weeks in South Carolina, and more than a month in North Carolina.
  • In at least half of these more than 18,000 detainer cases, the person named was taken into ICE custody.
  • At least 189 persons, including at least 29 U.S. citizens, were erroneously detained.

Co-authors of the report were our Clinic’s Director, Georgia Law Professor Jason A. Cade, (pictured above), along with Priya Sreenivasan and Azadeh Shahshahani of Project South. Cade said:

“The findings in Escalating Jailhouse Immigration Enforcement should encourage state and local governments to take their own steps to disentangle local policing from immigration policy. Enacting laws and practices that decrease the fiscal and human costs of lengthy incarcerations that rip families apart – usually just following minor traffic violations – will also go a long towards reducing immigrant communities’ fear of interaction with law enforcement in these southern states.”

Numerous Georgia Law students enrolled in the Clinic made important contributions to various stages of this project, including initial data collection, legal research, and data analytics: Onur Yildirin, Sarah Mirza and Michael Aune in Spring 2018; Caitlin Felt, Carter Thomas and Roger Grantham in Spring 2019; and Andrea Aldana, Stroud Baker, Lisa Garcia, and Farishtay Yamin in Spring 2020.

The full report is available here.

Georgia Law Professor Amann marks Holocaust Remembrance Day with talk on women at Nuremberg trials

Women at the Nuremberg Trials was the title of a lecture delivered last week by Professor Diane Marie Amann, the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law.

Occurring on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Wednesday’s talk focused on several of the many women who took part in the Nuremberg proceedings, as lawyers and legal professionals, translators and interpreters, witnesses and journalists – in short, in nearly every post except judge.

Sponsor of the event was the Center on National Security and Human Rights Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Georgia Law Professor Amann’s “Glimpses of Women at the Tokyo Tribunal” in just-published book

Professor Diane Marie Amann, holder of the Emily & Ernest Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law, has published an essay entitled “Glimpses of Women at the Tokyo Tribunal.”

It appears in a new book, The Tokyo Tribunal: Perspectives on Law, History and Memory, produced by four editors: Professor Kerstin von Lingen, Universität Wien, Austria; Professor Philipp Osten, Keio University, Japan; and Dr. Viviane E. Dittrich and Jolana Makraiová, both of the International Nuremberg Principles Academy, Germany. 

These four took part last week in a launch discussion, archived at YouTube, along with two others among the book’s contributors: Professor Gerry Simpson, London School of Economics and Political Science, England; and Professor Yuma Totani, University of Hawai’i, United States.

Further contributing essays to The Tokyo Tribunal were, besides Amann, David M. Crowe, Diane Orentlicher, Kayoko Takeda, Robert Cribb, Donald M. Ferencz, Marina Aksenova, David Cohen, Narrelle Morris, Beatrice Trefalt, Sandra Wilson, Franziska Seraphim, Kuniko Ozaki, and Christoph Safferling.

Here’s the abstract for Amann’s contribution (prior post):

Compared to its Nuremberg counterpart, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East has scarcely been visible in the seven decades since both tribunals’ inception. Recently the situation has changed, as publications of IMTFE documents have occurred alongside divers legal and historical writings, as well as two films and a miniseries. These new accounts give new visibility to the Tokyo Trial – or at least to the roles that men played at those trials. This essay identifies several of the women at Tokyo and explores roles they played there, with emphasis on lawyers and analysts for the prosecution and the defense. As was the case with my 2010 essay, “Portraits of Women at Nuremberg,” the discussion is preliminary, offering glimpses of the Tokyo women in an effort to encourage further research.

The Tokyo Tribunal volume, which was published by the Brussels-based Torkel Opsahl Academic Epublisher, may be downloaded as an e-book, or ordered in hard copy, here. It is also available at outlets such as Amazon.

It is the third book in the “Nuremberg Academy Series” produced by the International Nuremberg Principles Academy, located at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany. It was in Courtroom 400 of that building that a conference took place which launched this just-published volume.

(Cross-posted from Diane Marie Amann)

Georgia Law Professor Amann in symposium on next Prosecutor of International Criminal Court

In this post Professor Diane Marie Amann, the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center at the University of Georgia School of Law, discusses her recent international law commentary.

Caution in giving too much credit, or blame, to one individual formed the focus of my contribution to last week’s symposium on “The Next ICC Prosecutor.”

Entitled “Placing the Prosecutor within the International Criminal Justice Project,” my post appeared Friday at Opinio Juris, cosponsor along with Justice in Conflict of the online symposium.

My post began by welcoming the rich dialogue – in anticipation of December’s election of the 3d Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court – that had unfolded all week. Fueling that discussion were contributions from a couple dozen commentators on international criminal law: Ewan Brown, Danya Chaikel, David Crane, Geoff Dancy, Tom Dannenbaum, Christian De Vos, Elizabeth Evenson, Kate Gibson, James Goldston, Douglas Guilfoyle, Kevin Jon Heller, Mark Kersten, Patryk Labuda, Stephen Lamony, Luis Moreno Ocampo, Jonathan O’Donohue, Mariana Pena, Priya Pillai, William Schabas, Melinda Taylor, Valerie Oosterveld, Beth Van Schaack, and Kate Vigneswaran, Alex Whiting, and William H. Wiley.

My post then pointed to risks involved in “placing too much weight on the person and position of Prosecutor.” These included:

  • the risk of generating expectations, “inevitably doomed to disappoint”; and
  • the risk that “the very association of a complex project with a lone person or position” obscures the myriad ways that many other actors “play roles, in helping to construct perceptions of the project and in contributing, or not, to the project.”

My contribution is available in full here. For additional posts in the symposium, see list here.

(Cross-posted from Diane Marie Amann blog)

Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann on her article, in International Review of the Red Cross, on ICC OTP Policy on Children, accountability for conflict-related crimes against children

In this post Professor Diane Marie Amann, the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law, discusses her most recent article related to the effects on children of armed conflict and similar extreme violence.

Very pleased to announce the publication of my new article, “The Policy on Children of the ICC Office of the Prosecutor: Toward greater accountability for crimes against and affecting children.”

As indicated in the just-before-publication version that I’ve posted at SSRN, the International Review of the Red Cross placed this article online last month, on February 21. Currently, that published version is available to Cambridge Core subscribers at a First View page; once it appears in print, in a special issue on “Children and War,” it will be freely accessible at the Review‘s website.

Here’s the abstract:

The Policy on Children published by the International Criminal Court Office of the Prosecutor in 2016 represents a significant step toward accountability for harms to children in armed conflict and similar extreme violence. This article describes the process that led to the Policy and outlines the Policy’s contents. It then surveys relevant ICC practice and related developments, concluding that despite some salutary efforts, much remains to be done to recognize, prevent and punish the spectrum of conflicted-related crimes against or affecting children.

This article represents my latest effort to assist in raising awareness and developing strategies respecting children and conflict (prior posts). It’s an effort in which I’ve been deeply involved since my 2012 appointment as the International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s Special Adviser on Children in and affected by Armed Conflict.

Central to this effort was the multiyear process of researching and drafting, along with an Office of the Prosecutor working group and in consultation with others, of the document published in 5 languages and launched in November 2016 as the Policy on Children. Other aspects have included:

Happy to provide further details. And as always, comments welcome.

(Cross-posted from Diane Marie Amann blog)

Georgia Law Professor Brown authors biography of internationally known rights lawyer, Ramsey Clark

The work of an internationally known civil rights and criminal defense lawyer is the subject of a new Stanford University Press biography by Professor Lonnie T. Brown Jr., who holds the A. Gus Cleveland Distinguished Chair of Legal Ethics and Professionalism and is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor here at the University of Georgia School of Law.

Defending the Public’s Enemy: The Life and Times of Ramsey Clark examines the life of a man – due to celebrate his 92d birthday later this month – who followed his 2 years of service as Attorney General, the United States’ top law enforcement officer, with decades as the legal representative of a range of individuals and groups at odds with US policies. His foreign clients included the Palestine Liberation Organization, Qaddafi’s Libya, an accused Rwandan génocidaire, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević – and as detailed in Chapter 11, Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq for nearly a quarter-century before he was deposed, captured, convicted by a tribunal, and executed.

Professor Brown’s book details these cases and others, and explores – in chapters enriched by interviews with Clark and his colleagues – what has motivated Clark to pursue this career path.

Australian Broadcasting Co. features Georgia Law Professor Dennis and new coauthored book, “Rap Lyrics on Trial”

A just-published article at ABC News, a digital publication of the Australian Broadcasting Co., features Georgia Law Professor Andrea L. Dennis (right), who holds the law school’s John Byrd Martin Chair of Law.

The article poses this headline question:  “Can violent rap lyrics be evidence of criminality or does the law misunderstand music’s biggest genre?” In seeking an answer, ABC music & pop culture reporter Paul Donoughue focuses on the new book Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America (The New Press 2019), which Dennis, a criminal law expert, has coauthored with University of Richmond Liberal Arts Professor Erik Nielson.

The ABC article notes that the coauthors identified more than “500 cases in the US alone of rap lyrics being used in criminal trials, at times leading to inappropriate or wrongful convictions,” and continues:

“Few would say Johnny Cash’s famous lyric ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’ was evidence of the country singer’s murderous leanings, they write.

“‘It is quite clear to us that this [rap] is the only fictional art form that is used in this way,’ Professor Dennis said, adding that race was an essential factor in the story.

“There are very limited examples of it being appropriate, Professor Dennis said. For example, when a lyric accurately describes a specific crime.

“‘Usually, what’s happening is the lyrics are somewhat generic — talking about general crime or very common types of behaviour that almost any rap artist might talk about,’ she said.”

Donoghue further compares the U.S. situation to that in Australia, where speech protections are less strong but where no similar prosecution has yet taken place.

The full Australian article is available here; Dennis’ book, here.

2019 Global Governance Summer School concludes with briefings at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court

THE HAGUE – On this final day of the 2019 Global Governance Summer School, students visited two preeminent international tribunals — the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court — for high level briefings. They were also treated to a visit from Dr. Kaitlin Ball (JD ’14), a Georgia Law alumna who recently finished a PhD at Cambridge and is living in Europe.

The group started the day at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an audience with Hendrik Denys, law clerk to the Honorable Joan Donoghue, the American judge on the International Court of Justice. Mr. Denys, an alumnus of our partner school, KU Leuven, spoke with students about the history of the Peace Palace, the structure and procedure of the Court, and several representative decisions of the ICJ’s jurisprudence. He also provided advice for preparing a career in international law.

In the afternoon, the group visited the International Criminal Court (ICC), located on the dunes near The Hague’s North Sea coast. Student first had a meeting with Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, for whom our summer school’s co-director, Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann, serves as Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict. Bensouda described her own path to practicing international criminal law. While acknowledging the barriers to achieving justice, she expressed the urgency of continuing the effort, on behalf of global society as well as the victims of international crimes.

The second audience at the ICC was with the Honorable Kimberly Prost of Canada, who serves as a Judge in the Trial Division. Judge Prost discussed the history of the Court and the many of the challenges facing it. She also emphasized the important concept of complementarity in regards to the ICC’s relationship to national courts.

Students also had the opportunity to view the confirmation of charges against Al Hassan, who is suspected of war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in 2012 and 2013 in Timbuktu, Mali. During the portion of the hearing that time permitted the group to observe, students heard from one of the Legal Representatives of the Victims, who emphasized the impact of the alleged crimes.

All in all, it was a great day, a successful trip, and we look forward to returning next year!

Georgia Law Professor Jason Cade publishes on sanctuaries in Northwestern Law journal, presents work at Fordham Law colloquium

This month, University of Georgia School of Law Professor Jason A. Cade published his latest article on immigration law in the Northwestern University Law Review, and also presented the article at a Fordham University School of Law conference.

The article, entitled “Sanctuaries as Equitable Delegation in an Era of Mass Immigration Enforcement,” appears at 113 Nw. U. L. Rev. 433 (2018).

Cade presented the work at Fordham Law’s 2018 Cooper Walsh Colloquium, a scholarly gathering that explored “Remodeling Sanctuary: Urban Immigration in a New Era.”

Cade teaches Immigration Law and directs the law school’s Community Health Law Partnership Clinic. His scholarship explores intersections between immigration enforcement and criminal law, the role of prosecutorial discretion in the modern immigration system, and judicial review of deportation procedures.

Here’s the abstract of his newly published article:

Opponents of—and sometimes advocates for—sanctuary policies describe them as obstructions to the operation of federal immigration law. This premise is flawed. On the better view, the sanctuary movement comports with, rather than fights against, dominant new themes in federal immigration law. A key theme—emerging both in judicial doctrine and on-the-ground practice—focuses on maintaining legitimacy by fostering adherence to equitable norms in enforcement decision-making processes. Against this backdrop, the sanctuary efforts of cities, churches, and campuses are best seen as measures necessary to inject normative (and sometimes legal) accuracy into real-world immigration enforcement decision-making. Sanctuaries can erect front-line equitable screens, promote procedural fairness, and act as last-resort circuit breakers in the administration of federal deportation law. The dynamics are messy and contested, but these efforts in the long run help ensure the vindication of equity-based legitimacy norms in immigration enforcement.

The full article is available here.

Global Governance Summer School: Hague briefings begin with International Criminal Court

THE HAGUE – Our 2018 Global Governance Summer School has moved to this Dutch capital for several days of briefings at international organizations devoted to securing accountability and reparations for violations of international law. Today centered on the International Criminal Court, a permanent organization that began operating at The Hague in 2002. Its founding charter, the Rome Statute of the ICC, was adopted 20 years ago this month.

Our Georgia Law students, who spent last week at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, first visited Leiden Law School‘s Hague campus, where two international lawyers – Niamh Hayes and Leiden Law Professor Joe Powderly – talked with them about a range of issues (left). These included the development of international criminal law, practical and academic career opportunities for young lawyers interested in the area, and the advantages gained by working in The Hague on the “inside” of international criminal law issues.

The rest of the day was spent at the ICC’s Permanent Premises, located on the dunes near The Hague’s North Sea coast. Highlights of the visit included:

► A meeting with Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (top), for whom our summer school’s co-director, Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann, serves as Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict. Bensouda described her own path to practicing international criminal law. While acknowledging the barriers to achieving justice, she expressed the urgency of continuing the effort, on behalf of global society as well as the victims of international crimes.

► An audience with Judge Geoffrey A. Henderson (left) of Trinidad and Tobago, who was elected to the ICC in 2013 and serves in the Trial Division. Henderson emphasized the challenges of judging in a context that brings together the civil and common law systems, and offered encouragement that engaged students can change the world.

► A presentation on the work of lawyers in the court’s Registry from Elizabeth Little, Special Assistant to the Registrar, Special Assistant to the Registrar, and an overview of the court’s work from ensuring the right to family life of the accused to assisting the indigent select defense counsel.

Together, these presentations made for an informative and inspiring day in court.