Go On! Trafficking conference today

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest) Blogreaders in the Twin Cities take note:
Today the University of Minnesota Law School is hosting the 2010 International Congress on Human Trafficking. Experts in areas like human trafficking, international criminal law, international children’s issues, and victimized populations will examine:
► Trafficking for labor, drugs, sex, and military purposes;
► The vulnerability of children to traffickers in the wake of international disasters; and
► Methods to combat this problem.
Organizing this conference is Michele Bratcher Goodwin, Everett Fraser Professor of Law at Minnesota. A 2d conference, on organ trafficking, is to be held next month in Brazil.
Among the many who will take part today are 2 of IntLawGrrls' guests/alumnae, Luz Estella Nagle (Stetson) and L. Song Richardson (DePaul).
Conference details here.

Guest Blogger: L. Song Richardson

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome L. Song Richardson (right) as today's guest blogger.

A specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and prosecutorial ethics, Song is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University College of Law, and this semester she's a visiting professor at Boston College Law School. Song earned her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was on the board of the Yale Journal of International Law, and her B.A. in psychology from Harvard College. While at Harvard she earned distinction for her classical piano performances, which included performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Before entering academia, Song was a Skadden Arps Public Interest Fellow with the National Immigration Law Center, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. As a state and federal public defender and private practitioner of criminal defense, she represented defendants in numerous white collar, serious felony, and capital cases. That expertise is evident in Song's guest post below, which exposes a defect in foreign evidence-gathering mechanisms and proposes a solution to the problem.

Song dedicates her post to Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (1924-2005) who, as Song writes,

in 1968, became the first African American woman elected to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. She became an international figure as a vocal critic of the war in Vietnam and, throughout her career, tirelessly championed numerous issues including civil rights, women’s rights and the rights of the urban poor.

In addition, as prior IntLawGrrls posts have noted, Chisholm ran for the highest office in the United States. In her most concerted campaign she entered several Presidential primaries (below left), and received 151.95 delegate votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. In 1984 Chisholm was trounced in a bid for the Democratic nomination for Vice President by another woman, Geraldine A. Ferraro. Chisholm was not the 1st African American person nominated for President at a major-party convention. As we've posted, that milestone was reached in 1888 by Frederick Douglass, who'd also run for Vice President in 1872 on a minor-party ticket headed by a woman, Presidential candidate Victoria Claflin Woodhull. Nor was Chisholm the 1st woman nominated for President at a major-party convention; as we've also posted, 8 years earlier Margaret Chase Smith had made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican Presidential nod. Nonetheless, the placement in IntLawGrrls' foremothers list at right of this 1st African American woman to have her name placed in nomination is especially apt on this day of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

Heartfelt welcome!

Toward parity in foreign evidence gathering

Many thanks to IntLawGrrls for inviting me to contribute this guest post on my article recently published in the Berkeley Journal of International Law, entitled “Convicting the Innocent in Transnational Criminal Cases: A Comparative Institutional Analysis Approach to the Problem.” The article examines how the fair adjudication of transnational criminal cases in the United States is negatively affected by Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties, typically called MLATs.
MLATs are bilateral treaties negotiated by the United States -- treaties that require foreign nations to provide U.S. prosecutors with evidence located within their jurisdictions upon U.S. government request. When it negotiated the treaties, the United States included language that explicitly prevents defendants from obtaining foreign evidence under the treaties. Thus, MLATs create transnational compulsory process solely for prosecutors.
Inequities in evidence-gathering capabilities affect the accuracy of criminal trials. Without parity in compulsory process accuracy and fairness norms -- norms like punishing the guilty and freeing the innocent -- can be illusory.

Resolution of this disparity in foreign evidence gathering is difficult in light of Congress' relative indifference and the lasting reverberations of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, the danger of inaccurate verdicts and wrongful convictions that may result highlights the need to resolve this flawed transnational adjudication process -- specifically, its evidentiary method. Failure to do so results in cognizable deprivations to our system of criminal justice in general and to defendants in particular.

In the article, I utilize a comparative institutional analysis framework to identify the domestic institution best suited to achieve the norm of parity in transnational cases. When I began the project, I believed that a strong right to compulsion parity would best protect the twin goals of accuracy and fairness in transnational criminal adjudications. However, applying the framework revealed a potentially counterintuitive, negative result from this seemingly attractive option. Strong compulsory process rights could undermine accuracy norms, because under that approach, the executive would be forced to renegotiate existing MLATs to include explicit compulsion parity between defendants and prosecutors. If foreign nations objected, however, the parties would be left to rely upon the evidence-gathering market that had existed prior to MLATs. This market provided neither side reliable access to material and relevant evidence from foreign nations.

Surprisingly, then, provision of a strong right to compulsory process could make prosecution of the guilty more difficult and thus increase the risk that an innocent person would be wrongfully convicted.

Ultimately I conclude that a moderate right to compulsion parity would provide the best solution to remedy the compulsion disparity in transnational evidence gathering. Under this approach, courts would make case-by-case determinations on whether to order the government to request defense evidence utilizing an MLAT. A moderate right would leave MLATs intact, thereby avoiding serious foreign policy concerns, and it also would provide the best safeguard for protecting the innocent and convicting the guilty in transnational criminal cases. My hope is that courts will adopt the moderate rights approach, a framework for which I've set out in “Due Process for the Global Crime Age: A Proposal,” recently published in the Cornell International Law Journal.

(credit for May 2006 photo of ceremony in which Molly Bordonaro, then U.S. Ambassador to Malta, and Charles Deguara, Malta's Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice and Home Affairs, signed the U.S.-Malta MLAT, which the U.S. Senate approved this past September)