Anchoring Lifeline Criminal Jurisprudence: Making the Leap from Theory to Critical Race-Inspired Jurisprudence

This article takes as a starting point the claim that anti-Black racism permeates Canadian society and finds expression in our institutions, most notably the criminal justice system. Indeed, anti-Black racism in criminal justice and its impact on Black lives are not credibly in dispute. Thus, what should concern legal scholars is the staying power or permanence of racism. In other words, should Canadian legal scholars ‘get real’ about the intractability of race? Or can anti-Black racism be effectively confronted by developing legal and evidentiary tools designed to fix, rather than dismantle, the current system? Put another way, this article aims to move from describing a well-known phenomenon—the existence of anti-Black racism in the criminal justice system—to identifying radical approaches to confront and subvert it. In that vein, this article will explore a critical question: how can we make the leap from CRT to CRT-inspired, lifeline criminal jurisprudence? Cet article prend comme point de départ l’affirmation selon laquelle le racisme anti-Noir imprègne la société canadienne et trouve son expression dans nos institutions, plus particulièrement dans le système de justice pénale. En effet, le racisme anti-Noir dans la justice pénale et son impact sur la vie des Noirs ne sont pas contestés de manière crédible. Par conséquent, ce qui devrait préoccuper les juristes, c’est le caractère durable ou permanent du racisme. En d’autres termes, les juristes canadiens doivent-ils se rendre à l’évidence que la race est un problème insoluble? Ou bien peut-on lutter efficacement contre le racisme anti-Noir en élaborant des outils juridiques et probatoires conçus pour réparer, plutôt que démanteler, le système actuel? En d’autres termes, cet article vise à passer de la description d’un phénomène bien connu—l’existence du racisme anti-Noir dans le système de justice pénale—à l’identification d’approches radicales pour le combattre et le subvertir. Dans cette veine, cet article explorera une question critique : comment faire le saut de la TRC à une jurisprudence pénale inspirée de la TRC, qui soit une ligne de vie

A Constitutional Case for Extending the Due Process Clause to Asylum Seekers: Revisiting the Entry Fiction After \u3ci\u3eBoumediene\u3c/i\u3e

In the last two decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has actively grappled with balancing the interests of immigrant detainees and the federal government in the context of prolonged immigration detention by reconciling the statutory framework with constitutional guarantees of due process. The Court has focused on how prolonged detention without an opportunity for an individualized custody determination poses a serious constitutional threat to an alien’s liberty interest. The Court’s jurisprudence has focused, however, on aliens who have effected an entry into the United States. The constitutional entitlements of nonresidents who are detained upon presenting themselves at the border have so far been excluded from this new immigration narrative and continue to be governed by a more than halfcentury-old precedent establishing the “entry fiction” and acceding to the plenary power of the Executive. This Note focuses on a discrete category of aliens, namely nonresident arriving aliens seeking asylum who are detained pursuant to section 235 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). These aliens stand on a different legal footing than other categories of aliens detained under the INA because they are subject to the entry fiction doctrine, which has manifest ramifications for not only their legal status but also the degree of constitutional protections they are entitled to. This Note discusses how developments in the extraterritorial application of the Constitution inform the entry fiction doctrine in the context of extending procedural protections to asylum seekers detained upon entry into the United States. This Note shows how the functional approach to extraterritoriality articulated in Boumediene v. Bush alters the legal landscape and affords an opportunity to extend due process protections to nonresident arriving aliens. Cognizant of the limitations imposed by the plenary power doctrine, this Note does not argue for extending the complete panoply of procedural protections to section 1225(b) detainees; instead it focuses on how a discrete remedy— bond hearings—would help alleviate the procedural deficiencies in the statutorily prescribed procedure. In so doing, this Note departs from the approach that has currently been adopted by lower courts by positing that recent Supreme Court precedent provides a very strong constitutional basis for extending procedural protections to section 1225(b) detainees, and it would be remiss to rely solely on Clark v. Martinez-inspired constitutional avoidance arguments

Arbitrary Detention? The Immigration Detention Bed Quota

When President Obama took office in 2009, Congress through appropriations linked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) funding to “maintaining” 33,400 immigration detention beds a day. This provision, what this Article refers to as the bed quota, remains in effect, except now the mandate is 34,000 beds a day. Since 2009, DHS detentions of non-citizens have gone up by nearly 25 percent. To accommodate for this significant spike over a relatively short period of time, the federal government has relied considerably on private prison corporations to build and operate immigration detention facilities. This Article takes a comprehensive look at the Congressional immigration detention bed quota. It details its legislative history, and the relationship between the quota and private prisons in the immigration detention system. It situates the provision in a conversation about quotas generally, both in the law enforcement context and also in relation to the significance of quotas in U.S. immigration law historically. The Article then examines the bed quota through the lens of foundational as well as present-day jurisprudence on immigration detention and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It also analyzes the quota through international human rights law, particularly the protections related to arbitrary detention and vulnerable migrants. The Article concludes with policy considerations that caution against Congress imposing the immigration detention bed quota