Phoenix Criminal Defense Guest Blog Post - Mental Illnesses in the Courtroom:

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When someone has visited a bar to have a few drinks before making the dangerous decision to drive home, any accident they cause as a result of negligence will be their fault.  They made the initial choice to go for a drink and then drive home afterwards, as opposed to catching a taxi or getting a friend to come and pick them up.  Therefore, in any legal case involving such circumstances, the drunk driver is almost always at fault; they made an ill-thought-out choice and must face the consequences after sobering up and coming to terms with the damage they have done.

But what about those who have inadvertently caused an accident because they suffer from a mental illness?  What if someone who is not in total control of their intellectual faculties fails to understand that they did something morally wrong?  For example, in many mass shootings across the U.S. in recent years, the perpetrators have almost universally suffered from some kind of mental illness and chosen to plea insanity, including James Eagan Holmes, the perpetrator of the 2012 shooting in an Aurora theater.

Message from the 2013-2014 Executive Board

This past year has been an exciting one for the newly revamped Criminal Law Practitioner, formerly known as the Criminal Law Brief.  We are proud to begin fostering our new mission of providing practitioners with timely and practical articles.  Our Spring 2014 Issue will be published, both online and in hard copy, at the beginning of June.  Thank you to those who have supported us throughout the year, to the authors who took a chance on us, and to the members of this publication who essentially doubled their responsibilities this year to ensure a successful transition.

We are honored to pass along the torch to the incoming 2014-2015 Executive Board, all of whom, without hesitation, will take this publication to the next level.

Raleigh Mark, 3L, Editor-in-Chief

Robert Nothdurft, Jr., 3L, Executive Editor

Annie Berry, 3L, Managing Editor

Janissia Orgill, 2L, Publications Editor

Jonathan Yunes, 2L, Associate Publications Editor

Omeed Assefi, 2L, Articles Editor

Trevor Addie, 2L, Blog Editor

We are also pleased to announce the incoming 2014-2015 Senior Editors:

Ife Afolayan, 3L

Michael Bayern, 3L

Cassandre Plantin, 3L

Stephane Plantin, 3L

Next week will begin publishing blog posts on our summer blog schedule, new posts will be published every Tuesday.  You can follow the blog by email and receive new posts as they are published.  

Thank you to everyone who helped make the Criminal Law Practitioner’s first year so successful.

- 2013-2014 Executive Board

Part II: A New Look at the Civil Rights Movement: A Review of Susan D. Carle’s Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915

Susan D. Carle, a law professor at American University Washington College of Law, aptly describes the burgeoning progress of the civil rights movement in her book: Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice.[1]  Carle takes her readers through the intricate and at times overlooked progressions of the early rallying attempts of organizations such as the National Urban League (NUL), the Afro-American League (AAL), the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the Niagara Movement. She paints a well-rounded picture of the preliminary work that went into the creation and intricate inner-workings of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and ultimately the impactful Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.

           

Part I: A New Look at the Civil Rights Movement: A Review of Susan D. Carle’s Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915

When you think about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, initial thoughts focus on the 1960s and the political turmoil that was going on during that time frame.  It was the post-Reconstruction era and despite African Americans’ new freedoms, they were still being treated as second-class citizens and being denied their rights.  The focus of the Civil Rights Movement was about achieving legal equality and abolishing racial discrimination, particularly in the southern states.  Immediate national organizations that come to mind are the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Black Panthers Party, and famous people of the era were Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.  However, many people fail to take notice that the Civil Rights Movement began long before the 1960s.  

In Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915, Susan D. Carle takes us back in time through a historical and strategic study of past national organizations that laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement that we learned about in history class.[1]  Specifically, she takes us through the early years of the Civil Rights Movement by focusing on important, but forgotten, figures and the late nineteenth and early twentieth century organizations that helped shape the ideas and plans that the NAACP, the National Urban League (NUL), and civil rights leaders used successfully.