Group #7 Civil Consequences of Criminal Cases
• Family Restoration Units
Carla Laroche, Washington & Lee University School of Law
Parents who are incarcerated or have endured long prison sentences have a high rate of termination of their parental rights, also known as the civil death penalty. In the United States, twenty-seven states have statutes that allow courts to impose a civil death penalty when a parent has a long-term sentence. States should create and implement family restoration units (FRUs), like conviction integrity units (CIUs), to review parental rights termination decisions, especially when the parents are released earlier than their original sentence, to decide whether these decisions are in the best interest of the children.
Across the country, prosecutors have developed CIUs to investigate whether criminal cases and convictions were handled correctly and whether prosecutors should seek modification or dismissal of said convictions. Further, Congress and state legislatures have passed laws allowing people to be released from prison earlier than their originally imposed sentence. While these steps are needed and indicate progress, they do not return the time people in prison lost while incarcerated and the termination of their parental rights that may have occurred because of their criminal convictions. Using family restoration units would force states to review these decisions to terminate parental rights.
• The New Pornography Wars
Julie Dahlstrom, Boston University School of Law
The world’s largest online pornography conglomerate, MindGeek, has come under fire for the publishing of “rape videos,” child pornography, and nonconsensual images on its website, Pornhub. In response, civil plaintiffs have crafted new, creative legal actions against MindGeek and other platforms under federal anti-trafficking laws. In pleadings, they also argued that third parties, particularly payment processing companies and capital management firms, “knowingly benefited” from online harms and should face broad civil liability. Similar expansions of trafficking have also emerged in criminal prosecutions of pornography producers.
This article argues that these new applications of federal anti-trafficking laws have profound implications for the future of online pornography. Like the “pornography wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, these developments seek to give new voice to victims of online harms in federal courts, providing avenues to expansive civil damages and the right to take down images. These cases are redolent of venerable feminist debates though they raise new questions about the scope of the third-party liability, statutory liability, and the First Amendment. This article, though cautiously supportive, argues that this trend, while widely heralded by advocates, is not without potential cost. It may, for example, mask important questions about civil liberties, internet freedom, and sexual expression. Therefore, this article concludes with suggestions for judicious evolution of trafficking frames in these realms.