Criminal Law in Focus, Second Edition

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The timely Second Edition of Criminal Law in Focus by Alex D. Kreit presents a modern approach to this first-year course that reflects criminal law in practice. Post-Case Follow-Up questions spotlight important topics, such as prosecutorial discretion and plea bargaining. Contemporary cases articulate legal doctrine and address newsworthy issues of current debate. Lucid narration helps students navigate around the differences and tensions between various jurisdictional approaches to defining crimes and defenses. 

Offenses such as homicide and sexual assault, the focus of traditional criminal law casebooks, are considered alongside offenses that figure more prominently in legal practice, such as drug possession and property crimes. In addition to standard justificatory theories of punishment (retribution and utilitarianism), students also review scholarship, data, and cases suggesting that punishment can be a tool of social control as evidenced by discriminatory practices in law enforcement. 

Professors and students will benefit from:

• Straightforward explanations of doctrinal points that support independent learning and afford professors more time to cover more cases, issues, and types of crimes
• Incisive coverage of crimes that highlights how key concepts such as mens rea, actus reus, causation, justification, and excuse are interpreted and applied in practice
• Case Previews that introduce each principal case, providing a snapshot of the dispute and a concise list of questions to focus students on the legal questions at issue in the case
• Post-Case Follow-Ups that follow each principal case provide additional legal and policy perspective
• Real Life Applications that ask students to consider how the actions, decisions, and implications of one case could apply to similar scenarios in practice
• Coverage of both traditional and modern theories of punishment that address students’ exposure to discrepancies of discrimination in law enforcement and incarceration
• Legal scholarship and empirical studies that illuminate topics of contemporary discourse and debate

New to the Second Edition: 

• Additional emphasis on statutory interpretation
  • Interpreting statutes that are silent as to mens rea
  • Interpreting statutes where there is uncertainty about which elements are modified by an included mental state
  • The Rule of lenity and the strict construction of statutes
  • Void for Vagueness
• Recent developments in the law  
  • The criminalization of homelessness
  • The legalization of marijuana
  • Causation and parental liability for a child’s violent acts
  • The distinction between misdemeanors from felonies
• Updated discussion of law and policy
  • Reducing incarceration levels
  • The role of race in the assessment of reasonableness in self-defense
  • Stash house sting investigations
  • Drug decriminalization
• Updated discussion of socio-political trends
  • The prison abolition movement
  • Calls to defund the police
• Major new cases
  • City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, on whether anti-camping ordinances that criminalize sleeping in public violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment
  • Massachusetts v. Narvaez, on issues of interpreting centuries-old statutes when applied to a novel setting
  • Johnson v. Mississippi, on what additional evidence beyond physical proximity to contraband is sufficient to prove constructive possession
  • Allen v. Georgia, on whether a homicide defendant who discovered his significant other in a car with another man was entitled to a jury instruction on adequate provocation
  • Hines v. Georgia, applying the inherently dangerous felony test to uphold a felony murder conviction in the case of an accidental shooting while hunting
  • Michigan v. Crumbley, upholding denial of a mother and father’s motion to dismiss involuntary manslaughter charges that were based on their failure to exercise reasonable parental care to prevent their son from intentionally harming others
  • United States v. Ferguson, applying the substantial step test in an attempted kidnapping prosecution
  • United States v. Garcia-Rodriquez, considering the appeal of a woman who was convicted of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine for accompanying her husband on cross-country car trip
  • Ruan v. United States, interpreting the Controlled Substances Act’s mental state requirements with respect to physicians charged with dispensing controlled substances
  • Wooden v. United States, applying the Armed Career Criminal Act’s “different occasions” provision and consideration of the rule of lenity