Legal Eye for the Homicidal Guy

Last Thursday was game day in CrimLaw. I guess after a couple weeks of intense discussion about rape,* ProfCrim thought it would be good to lighten the mood with a little game about homicide. Yeah, that's just the kind of class it is.

In a well-planned exercise, ProfCrim handed everyone in the front row a poster describing a different crime. A few of the posters read as follows:

• My boyfriend tried to have sex w/me after I said no and I killed him.
• I drove home after drinking and killed a girl.
• I'm a police officer and I shot a burglary suspect in the back.
• I'm a hit person for the mob and for big bucks I killed one of the Sopranos.
• A guy called me a crossdresser and I killed him.
• I greased my son's steering wheel like I saw on Jackass and he had an accident and died.
• My dear mother asked me to kill her when her Alzheimer's made her a vegetable and I did.

These student/"criminals" stood in front of the class holding their posters so that the rest of us could read them, and then ProfCrim asked one student (the "Legal Eye") to grade the punishment each of these "Homicidal Guys" deserved (although they weren't all male). The grades were felony 1, 2, 3, or misdemeanor, following the guidelines set up on the Model Penal Code (MPC).

Out of a class of approx. 100, no one agreed w/the way the student ranked the crimes, showing what a difficult task such ranking really is, and what a big job lawyers and judges and legislators have in making distinctions between different types of killing. But speaking of killing, I continue to be surprised at how willing people seem to be to use the death penalty. Some of them seem wholly ignorant of the growing opposition to the death penalty (also here). My peers never cease to amaze me.

In other law school news, this weekend I finally spent the weekend studying like a real student. We turned in our first legal memo last week, and our next assignment has already begun. The issue: Whether our client is eligible and likely to be granted asylum in the U.S. I spent hours researching asylum law, but unfortunately most of that time was spent fighting with the online legal research services I love so much. At first glance, I prefer Westlaw because it's just easier for me to find things there, but for some reason Westlaw crashes Safari like nobody's business. So I had to turn to Lexis, where it's much more cumbersome to search in different databases. Is it even possible to search multiple databases at the same time via Lexis?

On the plus side, I discovered DEVONthink ("Your supplementary brain!") is a great legal research tool. Whenever I find something on Lexis that seems relevant to my topic, I just highlight, hit shift-command-0, and bang! that bit is copied into my DT database and automatically filed in the appropriate category (that's the gee-whiz cool part).

On the whole, I gained a new appreciation for legal research this weekend. There are a lot of cases out there, and it's no small or easy task to decide which are the best ones to apply to your case. Speaking of which, I've got an annotated outline to work on. Happy Monday, everyone!

* L-cubed has a nice little note about whether "no" means "no" (yes, it does), with links to opinions from Greg Easterbrook and Dahlia Lithwick.

Posted October 13, 2003 06:45 AM | law school