The Effect of 8 U. S. C. 1324(d) in Transporting Prosecutions: Does the Confrontation Clause Still Apply to Alien Defendants

Cases prosecuted under 8 U.S.C. §1324 present special challenges for the Government and for defendants. Under §1324, it is a crime to transport or smuggle aliens into the United States. Prosecuting transporters or smugglers may present a challenge if a witness is unavailable. Even though transporting or smuggling always has witnesses—the alien(s) who hired the smuggler or transporter—not all witnesses have prolonged detentions, and some are returned to their native country. The transporter or smuggler may then assert their Sixth Amendment right. The Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause requires that in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to be confronted with the witnesses against him. Whether, and under what conditions, the absent witnesses’ hearsay deposition testimony is admissible in a §1324 defendant’s trial has courts divided. Because of the obligations placed on the government by the Confrontation Clause, §1324(d) cannot, by itself, resolve the tension between a defendant’s right to confrontation and the need to address both the logistical and human rights implications of detaining material witnesses. While Congress cannot abrogate the requirements of the Constitution, it can, and should, draft legislation that makes it easier for the government to comply with the requirements of the Constitution. Congress has the authority to expand the government’s options for detaining witnesses who can be persuaded to stay and authorize the government to take measures to bring witnesses back to the United States. Therefore, Congress should make it easier for the government to make any necessary efforts without unduly burdening the witnesses whose testimony it seeks

Writing in the Margins: Brennan, Marshall, and the Inherent Weaknesses of Liberal Judicial Decision-Making (essay)

From 1967, when Thurgood Marshall took his seat as Supreme Court Justice, until 1990, when William Brennan, Jr. vacated his seat, the two Justices formed one of the most consistent liberal voting blocs in the history of the Court. Both Justices were judicial activists who labored in the tradition of Legal Realism. Although both Brennan and Marshall recognized the interpretation and application of the law as purposeful exercises, they differed in their approach to the task. Marshall, for instance, appealed to social consensus stating that his views were supported by society. Furthermore, Marshall strongly believed that the Constitution is a living document which evolves and can bring about future change. Brennan, on the other hand, was a strong believer of natural law. Brennan supported the widely accepted position that a judge cannot solely rely on his or her personal views when making judicial decisions. Marshall, however, showed little sign of utilizing any version of natural law interpretation or reliance on transcendent values. Justice Brennan and Justice Marshall knew well that what is moderate, centrist, or in the best interest of the majority changes, and a society comes to demand different protections from its government and its founding document. Following Brennan and Marshall’s retirement, an increasingly conservative population elected conservative presidents who, in turn, placed more conservative Justices on the Court. By the early 1980s, the more liberal justices found themselves in the minority. Nonetheless, when society once again catches up, the jurisprudence of Brennan and Marshall will be there, waiting

Speaking the Language of Exclusion: How Equal Protection and Fundamental Rights Analyses Permit Language Discrimination (comment)

In the summer of 1995, the en banc Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Flores v. State upheld a lower court’s ruling to give a drunk-driving (DWI) offender a year in prison as opposed to probation. The trial judge denied the defendant probation due to his inability to speak English. The county in which the defendant was arrested and convicted did not provide a DWI rehabilitation program in Spanish, leading the judge to determine the defendant would not benefit from probation. In his appeal, Mr. Flores claimed the lower court violated his equal protection and due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, and his equality rights and due course of law rights under the Texas Constitution. The case invited the court to resolve federal and state confusion over the issue of language and to find constitutional protection for those unable to speak English. The court declined this invitation, instead applying the rigid classification scheme for assessing equal protection claims. Those like Mr. Flores face a combination of difficulties, as they are members of a group which cannot be identical to one based on race or national origin; furthermore, judges can deny state privileges rather than fundamental rights without violating due process theory. Had it accepted the case, the Court could have demonstrated the Fourteenth Amendment analysis can be more flexible than the formulaic one the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals applied. The Court could have reached this result by declaring language-based discrimination as suspect, either because language is presumptively related to national origin or because it is the basis of invidious discrimination. Alternatively, the Court could have taken seriously the rational-basis test, as even minimal scrutiny merited an examination of the fit between denying a probation request and the stated goal of meaningful rehabilitation

Coltharp Family Genealogical Collection - Accession 1651

The Coltharp Family Genealogical Collection consists of research conducted by Beverley Dean Peoples primarily on the Coltharp/Colthrop Family through the Henry Coltharp (1753-1835) line and John Campbell Coltharp (1825-1902) lines. The records consists of photocopies and typescript of deeds, marriage records, wills, newspaper articles and obituaries, letters, genealogical publications, and photographs. Also included are printouts from online genealogical material and email correspondence with other genealogists and family members concerning her research. Most of the research deals directly with the Coltharp Family, however there is some records related to a few allied families including: Bailey; Billue; Epps; Faris; Merritt; Potts; Wagner; Wilson;https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/manuscriptcollection_findingaids/2654/thumbnail.jp

INVESTIGATING THE MECHANISM OF BACTERIAL CELL DIVISION WITH SUPERRESOLUTION MICROSCOPY

The molecular mechanisms that drive bacterial cytokinesis are attractive antibiotic targets that remain poorly understood. The machinery that performs cytokinesis in bacteria has been termed the 'divisome' (see Chapter 1 for description). The most widely-conserved divisome protein, FtsZ, is an essential tubulin homolog that polymerizes into protofilaments in a nucleotide-dependent manner. These protofilaments assemble at midcell to form the ‘Z-ring’, which has been the prevailing candidate for constrictive force generation during cell division. However, it has been difficult to experimentally test proposed Z-ring force generation models in vivo due to the small size of bacteria (< 1 μm diameter for E. coli) compared to the diffraction-limited resolution of light (~ 0.3 μm). In this work, quantitative superresolution and time-lapse microscopy were applied to examine whether Z-ring structure and function indeed play limiting roles in driving E. coli cell constriction (Chapter 2). Surprisingly, these studies revealed that the rate of septum closure during constriction is robust to substantial changes in many Z-ring properties, including the GTPase activity of FtsZ, molecular density of the Z-ring, the timing of Z-ring disassembly, and the absence of Z-ring assembly regulators. Further investigation revealed that septum closure rate is instead highly coupled to the rate of cell wall growth and elongation, and can be modulated by coordination with chromosome segregation. Taken together, these results challenge the Z-ring centric view of constriction force generation, and suggest that cell wall synthesis and chromosome segregation likely drive the rate and progress of cell constriction in bacteria. These investigations were made possible by advancements in quantitative superresolution microscopy techniques (see Chapter 3 for overview). One major obstacle encountered during the course of this work, and shared by those utilizing localization-based superresolution microscopy techniques, was the overestimation of molecule numbers caused by fluorophore photoblinking. Thus, Chapter 4 describes a systematic characterization of the effects of photoblinking on the accurate construction and analysis of superresolution images. These characterizations enabled the development of a simple method to identify the optimal clustering thresholds and an empirical criterion to evaluate whether an imaging condition is appropriate for accurate superresolution image reconstruction. Both the threshold selection method and imaging condition criterion are easy to implement within existing PALM clustering algorithms and experimental conditions

Heard Like a Shout

A collection of short stories about people and about sound.Bachelor of Art

It is Time to Get Back to Basics on the Border

Abstract forthcoming