Criminal Law Outline- Nussbaumer- January-May 2012
· Overview of Criminal Law
o What is a crime?
§ A social harm in that the injury suffered involves a breach and violation of the public rights and duties due to the whole community in its social aggregate capacity.
· For this reason, crimes in the United States are prosecuted by public attorneys representing the community at large, and not privately retained council.
· Life and liberty can be at stake in a criminal case, which is to be contrasted with tort law, in which only money is at stake.
o Sources of Criminal Law
§ Common Law
· Judge-made law that, in the United States, evolved from the British common law imported at the time of colonization.
§ Statutes
· Post-Enlightenment, legislatures became the main lawmaking body in the realm of criminal law. Modernly, statutory law has almost completely replaced common law in the area of crimes. However, statutes are still interpreted in light of the common law, and common law is used to fill gaps in the statutes.
§ Model Penal Code (MPC)
· A model for the codification of criminal offenses compiled and published by the American Law Institute that serves as the basis for an overwhelming amount of modern statutory criminal law as well as a resource for judicial interpretation of criminal law.
o Two competing theories that govern criminal law
§ Utilitarian- holds that the justification of practice depends only on its consequences, that is, the purpose of all laws is to maximize the net happiness of society.
· General deterrence- a criminal is punished in order to convince the general community to forego criminal conduct in the future.
· Specific deterrence- a criminal’s punishment is meant to deter future misconduct by that specific criminal. Must occur in two ways:
o Incapacitation: Imprisonment prevents crimes from occurring during the time of segregation
o Intimidation: Punishment reminds the criminal that if he returns to a life of crime, he will experience more punishment
· Utilitarianism continually looks forward at the “downstream” effects that the court’s actions will have on society.
§ Retributive- holds that punishment is justified when it is deserved. It is deserved when the wrongdoer freely chooses to violate society’s rules. To a retributivist, the wrongdoer should be punished even if it will not result in a reduction of crime.
· Retributivism is backward looking and justifies punishment solely based on the moral culpability of the individual defendant.
o Two elements of any crime
§ Actus reus- The voluntary act that causes the social harm, Latin for “guilty act”
§ Mens rea- The mental state of the actor upon which the moral culpability of the actor in relation to the crime is often determined. Literally, Latin for “guilty mind”
§ “Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea” – An act does not make a person guilty, unless the mind be guilty.
· Homicide
o Corpus Delicti
§ Two elements
· Death of a person as a result of
· The criminal agency of another
o “Criminal agency” means that it was the result of a crime, which means that natural causes, accidents, and suicide must be ruled out.
§ Corpus delicti is the first element of any homicide. If it is not first proved, there is no action to be brought to court.
· Hicks v. Sheriff: A victim went missing and was later found dead in the desert. Hicks (D) had multiple ties to the victim and the circumstantial evidence linked him to the death, including an out of court confession. However, the case was dismissed because corpus delicti was never proved- there was never any proof brought to the court that the victim’s death was a result of criminal agency. Absent corpus delicti, the rest of the evidence was irrelevant.
o Note: Out of court confessions are not admissible to court unless corpus delicti can be proved without them. Once corpus delicti is proved, however, the confessions are admissible. The policy rationale behind this is that out of court confessions are frequently unreliable and it would be dangerous to use them as the foundation of the crime itself.
§ Either element of corpus delicti can be proved through circumstantial evidence
· Death
o We do not need a body to prove death.
§ The policy rationale behind this is that many criminals would escape liability simply by destroying the body
o Warmke v. Commonwealth: A mother is traveling with her illegitimate baby on foot, seen by witnesses. Crosses a bridge, drops the baby off of the bridge to the river below. The baby’s hat is found by the river but the baby is never heard from again. The evidence is ruled sufficient to establish death of the baby, since no baby could survive a fall off of a bridge into a river in the winter.
· Criminal Agency
o When you have a body, you can use the body as well as the circumstantial evidence to prove criminal agency
o Downey v. People: Police are called to the scene on an embankment near a road, where a woman is dead and the husband, in delirium, has confessed. Since his confession is inadmissible, the circumstances surrounding the death, such as the fact that her cause of death was asphyxia by strangulation and pressure to the throat, her body was laid out neatly, she was struck in the back of the head with defensive bruises and scratches, and the husband was covered in his wife’s blood, were enough to prove c
ible for the same reasons. (Majority view).
§ State v. Grugin: Man finds out that his young daughter was raped by his son in law. When the man confronts him, son in law says “I’ll do what I please” and the man kills him. Court rules that words that paint a picture are sufficient. (Minority view)
· Involuntary: Criminal negligence
o Disregard of a high risk of danger that the actor either knew or that a reasonable person would have known.
o State v. Hardie: Hardie waves what he believes is an inoperative handgun at his neighbor, intending to scare her. The gun fires and kills her. He didn’t knowingly disregard a very high risk to her life, since he believed that the gun did not work. However, he did not act with the care and prudence of a reasonable man, therefore, he is still liable.
o People v. Rodriguez: Mother leaves her children alone in her home at night. The house burns down and her youngest child dies. Court rules that mere negligence isn’t enough to establish manslaughter- they must still be able to determine that the risk she disregarded was high. In this case, they rule that it was not.
o Commonwealth v. McLaughlin: A man was drinking but not heavily intoxicated, driving down a road at night at a safe speed but without lights and did not sound his horn. A family of three was walking in the middle of the road, where he did not expect them to be. He applied his brakes and attempted to swerve. He hit them and caused the death of two and injury to one. He stopped and rushed them to the hospital. It’s not murder because he didn’t disregard a very high risk. He was obviously coherent, and the family was walking where no one could have foreseen them to be. However it is manslaughter because a reasonable, prudent person would not drive at night, intoxicated, with no lights.
o Edwards v. State: A man voluntarily became very intoxicated, knowing that he had to drive a busy highway to get home. On the highway, he hit a police officer who was outside of his car on the shoulder of the road, and was so drunk that he didn’t even know what he had hit and kept going. This is easily depraved heart murder, because at that level of voluntary intoxication, the risk is very high.
