Authoruclalaw

Illegal Entry as Crime, Deportation as Punishment: Immigration Status and the Criminal Process

In Padilla v. Kentucky, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment required counsel to advise clients pleading guilty that conviction might result in deportation. The Court rested its decision on the idea that this information was important to the client’s decisionmaking process. However, the Court did not explore a stronger reason for developing a more precise understanding of a...

The Right to Deportation Counsel in Padilla v. Kentucky: The Challenging Construction of the Fifth-and-a-Half Amendment

The U.S. Supreme Court’s pathbreaking decision in Padilla v. Kentucky seems reasonably simple and exact: Sixth Amendment norms were applied to noncitizen Jose Padilla’s claim that his criminal defense counsel was ineffective due to allegedly incorrect advice concerning the risk of deportation. This was a very significant move with virtues of both logic and justice. It will likely prevent many...

Padilla and the Delivery of Integrated Criminal Defense

The traditional starting point for Sixth Amendment jurisprudence is the individual defense attorney, acting alone. Padilla v. Kentucky, however, replaced the image of the lawyer as a heroic and individualistic figure with an image of the lawyer as a team manager consulting with other professionals to provide integrated legal services. Public defender organizations already experiment with various...

Undocumented Criminal Procedure

For more than two decades, criminal procedure scholars have debated what role, if any, race should play in the context of policing. Although a significant part of this debate has focused on racial profiling, or the practice of employing race as basis for suspicion, criminal procedure scholars have paid little attention to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned this practice in a...

Litigation at Work: Defending Day Labor in Los Angeles

Local opposition to day laborers is built upon a standard diagnosis of the day labor “problem” and a common approach to its “remedy.” The diagnosis views day labor as a public nuisance that imposes negative externalities on a locality by disrupting normal patterns of business, traffic, and pedestrian exchange. The remedy involves the enactment of new land use regulations, known as...

Doing Time: Crimmigration Law and the Pitfalls of Haste

Crimmigration law wastes one of the law’s most valuable tools: time. It eschews the temporal gauges that criminal law and immigration law rely on to evaluate who should be included or expelled from society. Instead, crimmigration law narrows the decision whether to exclude or expel the noncitizen from the nation to a single moment in time: the moment of the crime that makes the noncitizen...

Local Immigration Prosecution: A Study of Arizona Before SB 1070

Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 has focused attention on whether federal law preempts the prosecution of state immigration crime in local criminal courts. Absent from the current discussion, however, is an appreciation of how Arizona’s existing body of criminal immigration law—passed well before SB 1070 and currently in force in the state—functions on the ground to regulate migration. Drawing on...

The Discretion That Matters: Federal Immigration Enforcement, State and Local Arrests, and the Civil–Criminal Line

This Article starts by analyzing the conventional wisdom, crystallized in the Ninth Circuit’s 1983 decision in Gonzales v. City of Peoria, that state and local law enforcement officers do not require express federal authorization to make arrests for criminal violations of federal immigration law. This view, I explain, is based on overreliance on the line between civil and criminal. Even if a...

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