Safe Havens

Chapter 7 seeks also to identify crime of moral turpitude safe havens that are generally applicable to all or many crimes of moral turpitude, which are called “general moral turpitude safe havens.”  See § § 7.106-7.107, infra.

            Since the immigration statutes do not define “crime of moral turpitude,” the courts have taken a common law or case-by-case approach to defining what is and what is not a CMT.  The most comprehensive work to collect all CMT cases holding a given conviction is or is not a CMT is N. Tooby, J. Rollin, and J. Foster, Crimes of Moral Turpitude (2005).

            The chief value of Crimes of Moral Turpitude is that it serves to collect and organize the immigration and federal court decisions defining crimes of moral turpitude, including all decisions handed down since 1940, and all of the most important decisions of all courts defining the term decided prior to that date.

Crimes of Moral Turpitude, through a variety of means, makes it possible quickly to locate all decisions relevant to a specific moral turpitude question, and thus to save counsel a great deal of time in their research.  These means include a detailed table of contents, a detailed subject-matter index, and an indexed Table of Decisions attached to Crimes of Moral Turpitude as Appendix C.

This revised and expanded Second Edition of Crimes of Moral Turpitude is the first revision in the three years since the work was originally published, and offers a number of important improvements:

(1)  The CMT Chart, Appendix A, has been thoroughly reorganized to provide more accurate index headings and more cross-references, making it far easier to find the case on point; it has also been expanded to include all new decisions from 2002 to the present covering what is and is not a crime of moral turpitude.

(2)  An extensive new chapter (Chapter 3) has been added giving a detailed analysis of the effect of a crime of moral turpitude on all the various forms of immigration status and relief.

(3)  Another completely new chapter (Chapter 10) has been added covering the usefulness of various forms of post-conviction relief in eliminating convictions of crimes of moral turpitude.

(4)  The book as a whole has been revised and rewritten where necessary to sharpen the analysis and incorporate new decisions relevant to its subject matter.

Crimes of Moral Turpitude is kept current every month at http://www.CriminalAndImmigrationLaw.com where case law updates are posted monthly.

            It has not been possible to incorporate the entire contents of Crimes of Moral Turpitude in the present volume.  What has been done is the following:

            (1)  All 165 or so favorable judicial decisions holding a particular conviction is not a CMT, i.e., CMT Safe Havens, have been included in Chapter 8, organized according to the type of crime involved.

            (2)  The CMT cases have been reviewed, to distil a number of safe haven principles applicable to groups of CMT offenses, and a list of CMT general safe havens has been given in Chapter 7.  See § § 7.106-107, infra.

In other words, this book on Safe Havens seeks to include all specific and general CMT safe havens.  Thus, counsel can review the general CMT safe havens in Chapter 7, and the collection of all specific cases defining individual CMT safe havens in Chapter 8, and find some safe haven principle or case as a target CMT safe haven for the particular client’s case.  Then, counsel can attempt to construct a record of conviction that will give the client the greatest possible assurance that the safe haven disposition adopted will be held by the immigration or federal courts to be indeed a safe haven, because it is indistinguishable from one or more of the safe havens identified in this book.