Women and Children Last: The Prosecution of Sex Traffickers as Sex Offenders and the Need for a Sex Trafficker Registry

Sex trafficking is a moral and legal tragedy that affects thousands in the United States and abroad. The U.S. State Department estimates that human traffickers bring between 14,500 and 17,500 persons annually into the United States for various avenues of exploitation, including involuntary servitude and forced prostitution. Human traffickers are highly organized into criminal syndicates that reap exponential profits exploiting vulnerable women and children. Individual states struggle to prosecute traffickers and must rely on federal prosecution of trafficking enterprises. International cooperation with local law enforcement is essential in combating trafficking, especially in the sex trade. This Article proposes that an international database be maintained to track the whereabouts of prosecuted traffickers, similar to the sex offender registry in the United States. Like the U.S. sex offender laws, which seek to dramatically decrease recidivism among sex offenders, an international registry could have a deterrent effect on trafficking. Limiting and monitoring the travel of convicted traffickers would be a new avenue that international law enforcement and governing bodies could use to contain the pernicious practice of trafficking

Deconstructing Innocence: Reflections from a Public Defender: Can student attorneys accept the paradigm of guilt and continue zealous representation?

I am a true believer. I was a public defender for nine years and represented thousands of guilty defendants without guilt or emotional angst. The public defender credo is to give zealous representation without consideration for the innocence or guilt of the client. As a clinical instructor I must impart ethical and diligent representation to my students.3 I found, however, when discussing cases during our weekly case rounds the paradigm of innocence would inevitably become a question for the student attorney. The students imputed guilt and innocence to be mutually exclusive. Imparting the ethical component of criminal defense – to be competent in having legal knowledge, skill and thoroughness of preparation – to the students was a job I was thoroughly prepared to teach. I found, however, that beyond ethical considerations of representing clients, I needed to deconstruct innocence. I wanted to present to students a paradigm that guilt or innocence is secondary to servicing the needs of the client and protecting the client’s rights through the maze of a convoluted and dispassionate court system. Creating a dialogue that evolved from loaded terms such as guilt, truth or innocence and creating representation where the focal point became servicing the needs of the client became my goal. This article examines the impact and the importance of the innocence movement and the unintended effects on criminal defense representation. Part I examines the impact of innocence in my juvenile clinic. Part II proceeds to examine the paradigm of the innocence movement and its impact on the criminal justice system. Part III examines the rise of Innocence Projects and the effect on clinical legal education. Part IV deconstructs the importance of innocence and the substantive and procedural problems with innocence. Part V concludes the article with an assertion of the importance of zealous representation regardless of innocence or guilt.

Little Girl Lost: Las Vegas Metro Police Vice Division and the Use of Material Witness Holds Against Teenaged Prostitutes

This article explores the Las Vegas Metro Police Vice Division routine use of material witness holds to detain young prostitutes. The Juvenile court places the girls on material witness holds seeking their cooperation in the prosecution of their traffickers and pimps. The girls languish in detention awaiting the outcome of the adult cases in which they are the central or only witness. The use of material witness holds is reviewed through the historical perspective of government response to prostitution and the history of material witness holds. The article then argues that the detention of the girls, sometimes without charges, is a form of secondary victimization. Many of the girls are from abusive homes and the system that is meant to protect them further victimizes them. The article surmises that the use of United Nations drafted protocols in dealing with trafficked women and children is a more humane approach. The women and children are not seen as persons who aided and abetted in their sexual exploitation but are seen as victims of human rights violations. The article concludes that the Las Vegas Metro should observe the international standards set forth by the United Nations and recognize a new paradigm in dealing with sex trafficking and sexual exploitation cases

Stimulus demand qualities and reinforcement as determinants of interrogative strategy

It was the purpose of this study to investigate the effectiveness of reinforcement and order of presentation of stimulus on question-asking strategy of nursery school, first-grade and third-grade children. It was hypothesized that the sophistication of interrogative strategies of the children would increase with age, that when the material was presented in an ordered form that the children would ask more constraint-seeking questions than when the material was randomly arranged. It was also hypothesized that when children were reinforced for asking constraint-seeking questions their use of such questions would increase. It was hypothesized that there would be no difference in the kind of interrogative strategies used by reflective and impulsive children and that intelligence would make no difference in the kinds of question-asking strategy employed by children. Subjects were 32 children each of nursery school, first-grade, and third-grade level. The Twenty Questions Procedure, originally employed by Mosher and Hornsby (1966), was used

Nevada Medical Residencies, 2021-2022

This fact sheet highlights medical residency data for the 2021 and 2022 graduating classes of the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) and the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) School of Medicine. This fact sheet highlights the number of residency program matches at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV and the UNR School of Medicine in 2021 and 2022 and reveals where Nevada medical school students pursue their residencies

Acreage of Foreign Owned Farmland in the Mountain West, 2020

This fact sheet examines foreign-owned farmland in the Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, as originally reported by the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farm Service Agency