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Due Process Junior: Competent (Enough) For The Court, Tigan Woolson

Journal of Law and Health

There are many reports presenting expert policy recommendations, and a substantial volume of research supporting them, that detail what should shape and guide statutes for juvenile competency to stand trial. Ohio has adopted provisions consistent with some of these recommendations, which is better protection than relying on case law and the adult statutes, as some states have done. However, the Ohio statute should be considered a work in progress.

Since appeals courts are unlikely to provide meaningful review for the substance of a juvenile competency determination, the need for procedures for ensuring that the determination is initially made in a …

Domestic Terrorism Classification In The United States V. Canada And The United Kingdom, Michelle Hayek

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

For the past two decades, discourse on terrorism (both global and domestic) has been commonplace throughout the international sphere. Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, many nations have followed suit in launching counterterrorism operations to identify and prevent attacks by both radical groups and lone actors. While the common narrative has focused on “why” terrorist actors commit heinous acts and “how” to best prevent future incidents from emerging, it is important to analyze the legal nuances between prosecuting domestic versus international terrorists. With the rise on “homegrown” domestic lone actors, nations have had to reevaluate and adapt counterterrorism statutes …

Abolishing The Evidence-Based Paradigm, Erin Collins

BYU Law Review

The belief that policies and procedures should be data-driven and “evidence-based” has become criminal law’s leading paradigm for reform. This evidence-based paradigm, which promotes quantitative data collection and empirical analysis to shape and assess reforms, has been widely embraced for its potential to cure the emotional and political pathologies that led to mass incarceration. It has influenced reforms across the criminal procedure spectrum, from predictive policing through actuarial sentencing. The paradigm’s appeal is clear: it promises an objective approach that lets data – not politics – lead the way and purports to have no agenda beyond identifying effective, efficient reforms. …

Countermajoritarian Criminal Law, Michael L. Smith

Pace Law Review

Criminal law pervades American society, subjecting millions to criminal enforcement, prosecution, and punishment every year. All too often, culpability is a minimal or nonexistent aspect of this phenomenon. Criminal law prohibits a wide range of common behaviors and practices, especially when one considers the various federal, state, and municipal levels of law restricting people’s actions. Recent scholarship has criticized not only the scope and impact of these laws but has also critiqued these laws out to the extent that they fail to live up to supermajoritarian ideals that underlie criminal justice.

This Article adds to and amplifies this criticism by …

Sexual Abuse Of Female Inmates In Federal Prisons, Brenda Smith

Congressional and Other Testimony

This Article discusses the modest aspirations of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (“PREA”) that passed unanimously in the United States Congress in 2003. The Article posits that PREA created opportunities for holding correctional authorities accountable by creating a baseline for safety and setting more transparent expectations for agencies’ practices for protecting prisoners from sexual abuse. Additionally, the Article posits that PREA enhanced the evolving standards of decency for the Eighth Amendment and articulated clear expectations of correctional authorities to provide sexual safety for people in custody.

The People's Advocate

DePaul Magazine

DePaul Magazine chats with Cook County Public Defender and DePaul alumnus Sharone Mitchell Jr. about his opinion on representing the underserved, the paths that shaped his career and the pursuit of justice for all.

Limits To Prison Reform, Sophie Angelis

UC Irvine Law Review

Central to prison reform is the idea that prisons can be humane. Abolitionist scholarship has raised one challenge to this idea, in the form of a structural critique. Prisons, on this account, are social institutions that reflect and reinforce inequality; reform does not disturb those broader injustices, and so cannot cure the problems with prisons. Yes, and prison reform has another problem: there are limits to how humane any prison can be. Prisons are, by definition, instruments of punishment that inflict extreme isolation and control, which are dehumanizing experiences. And reforming prisons is, in some ways, an aesthetic project …

Forks Over Knives: Predictive Inconsistency In Criminal Justice Algorithmic Risk Assessment Tools, Travis Greene, Galit Shmueli, Jan Fell, Ching-Fu Lin, Han-Wei Liu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Big data and algorithmic risk prediction tools promise to improve criminal justice systems by reducing human biases and inconsistencies in decision-making. Yet different, equally justifiable choices when developing, testing and deploying these socio-technical tools can lead to disparate predicted risk scores for the same individual. Synthesising diverse perspectives from machine learning, statistics, sociology, criminology, law, philosophy and economics, we conceptualise this phenomenon as predictive inconsistency. We describe sources of predictive inconsistency at different stages of algorithmic risk assessment tool development and deployment and consider how future technological developments may amplify predictive inconsistency. We argue, however, that in a diverse and …

Designing For Justice: Pandemic Lessons For Criminal Courts, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

March 2020 brought an unprecedented crisis to the United States: COVID-19. In a two-week period, criminal courts across the country closed. But, that is where the uniformity ended. Criminal courts did not have a clear process to decide how to conduct necessary business. As a result, criminal courts across the country took different approaches to deciding how to continue necessary operations and in doing so many did not consider the impact on justice of the operational changes that were made to manage the COVID-19 crisis. One key problem was that many courts did not use inclusive processes and include all …

Closing The Door On Permanent Incorrigibility: Juvenile Life Without Parole After Jones V. Mississippi, Juliet Liu

Fordham Law Review

In April 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Jones v. Mississippi, its latest opinion in a line of cases addressing when, if ever, a child should be sentenced to life in prison with no hope of parole or release. Although Jones purported to resolve division among lower courts over the findings that a sentencing court must make about a child defendant’s character and prospects for reform and rehabilitation, the decision will likely lead to further disagreement among courts.

This Note argues that although the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence has protected children from harsh sentences, it has also opened a Pandora’s …

Greening Criminal Legal Deserts In Rural Texas, Pamela R. Metzger, Claire Buetow, Kristin Meeks, Blane Skiles, Jiacheng Yu

Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center

Texas’ rural communities urgently need more prosecutors and public defense providers. On average, Texas’ most urban areas have 28 lawyers for every 100 criminal cases, but rural areas only have five. Many rural prosecutor’s offices cannot recruit and retain enough staff. The Constitution’s promise of equal justice for all remains unfulfilled. Rural Texans charged with misdemeanors are four times less likely to have a lawyer than urban defendants. In 2021, only 403 rural Texas lawyers accepted an appointment to represent an adult criminal defendant. In 65 rural counties, no lawyer accepted an appointment. And the problem is getting worse. Since …

Ethical Ai In American Policing, Elizabeth E. Joh

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

We know there are problems in the use of artificial intelligence in policing, but we don’t quite know what to do about them. One can also find many reports and white papers today offering principles for the responsible use of AI systems by the government, civil society organizations, and the private sector. Yet, largely missing from the current debate in the United States is a shared framework for thinking about the ethical and responsible use of AI that is specific to policing. There are many AI policy guidance documents now, but their value to the police is limited. Simply repeating …

Rethinking Constitutionally Impermissible Punishment, Nadia Banteka, Erika Nyborg-Burch

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

In this Essay, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our understanding of constitutionally permissible punishment. We argue, first, that the protracted failure to act by those who have had authority to do so during this public health emergency created a high risk that incarcerated people would suffer severe illness—and even death—in violation of due process protections and the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Second, we suggest that a changed understanding of public safety in the context of detention and release during public health emergencies has the potential to shift the framework even after the emergency …

Crime Victimisation In India, Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Renuka Sane, Ajay Shah, Varsha Aithala

Books

This edited volume is a pioneering and comprehensive study of crime victimisation in India. Relying on the findings of four crime victimisation surveys conducted in India, it provides a unique basis for understanding crime in society. It considers the public’s fear of crime and perceptions of safety and security, focusing on their access to the police and how they view police effectiveness. This study provides critical data on the level of crime within particular spatial and temporal conditions which can supplement official statistics on crime published by the state, help systematically diagnose law and order issues and develop solutions for …

High Time For Change: The Legalization Of Marijuana And Its Impact On Warrantless Roadside Motor Vehicle Searches, Molly E. O'Connell

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

The proliferation of marijuana legalization has changed the relationship between driving and marijuana use. While impaired driving remains illegal, marijuana use that does not result in impairment is not a bar to operating a motor vehicle. Scientists have yet to find a reliable way for law enforcement officers to make this distinction. In the marijuana impairment context, there is not a scientifically proven equivalent to the Blood Alcohol Content standard nor are there reliable roadside assessments. This scientific and technological void has problematic consequences for marijuana users that get behind the wheel and find themselves suspected of impaired driving. Without …

The Fourth Amendment And The Problem Of Social Cost, Thomas P. Crocker

Northwestern University Law Review

The Supreme Court has made social cost a core concept relevant to the calculation of Fourth Amendment remedies but has never explained the concept’s meaning. The Court limits the availability of both the exclusionary rule and civil damages because of their “substantial social costs.” According to the Court, these costs primarily consist of letting the lawbreaker go free by excluding evidence or deterring effective police practices that would lead to more criminal apprehension and prosecution. But recent calls for systemic police reform by social movements have a different view of social cost. So too do calls for reforming qualified immunity. …

Decarceration's Inside Partners, Seema Tahir Saifee

Fordham Law Review

This Article examines a hidden phenomenon in criminal punishment. People in prison, during their incarceration, have made important—and sometimes extraordinary—strides toward reducing prison populations. In fact, stakeholders in many corners, from policy makers to researchers to abolitionists, have harnessed legal and conceptual strategies generated inside the walls to pursue decarceral strategies outside the walls. Despite this outside use of inside moves, legal scholarship has directed little attention to theorizing the potential of looking to people on the inside as partners in the long-term project of meaningfully reducing prison populations, or “decarceration.”

Building on the change-making agency and revolutionary ideation inside …

January 6, Ambiguously Inciting Speech, And The Overt-Acts Rule, Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

A prosecution of Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol would have to address whether the First Amendment protects the inflammatory remarks he made at the “Stop the Steal” rally. A prosecution based solely on the content of Trump’s speech—whether for incitement, insurrection, or obstruction—would face serious constitutional difficulties under Brandenburg v. Ohio’s dual requirements of intent and likely imminence. But a prosecution need not rely solely on the content of Trump’s speech. It can also look to Trump’s actions: his order to the remove the magnetometers from the entrances to the rally and …

An Algorithmic Assessment Of Parole Decisions, Hannah Lacqueur, Ryan W. Copus

Faculty Works

Objectives: Parole is an important mechanism for alleviating the extraordinary social and financial costs of mass incarceration. Yet parole boards can also present a major obstacle, denying parole to low-risk inmates who could safely be released from prison. We evaluate a major parole institution, the New York State Parole Board, quantifying the costs of suboptimal decision-making.

Methods: Using ensemble Machine Learning, we predict any arrest and any violent felony arrest within three years to generate criminal risk predictions for individuals released on parole in New York from 2012–2015. We quantify the social welfare loss of the Board’s suboptimal decisions by …

Embracing Crimmigration To Curtail Immigrant Detention, Pedro Gerson

UC Irvine Law Review

Immigration advocates have long objected to both the constitutionality and conditions of immigration detention. However, legal challenges to the practice have been largely unsuccessful due to immigration law’s “exceptionality.” Placing recent litigation carried out against immigration detention during the COVID-19 pandemic within the context of the judiciary’s approach to immigration, this Article argues that litigation is an extremely limited strategic avenue to curtail the use of immigration detention. I then argue that anti-immigration detention advocates should attempt to incorporate their agenda into criminal legal reform and decarceration efforts. This is important for both movements. Normatively, immigration detention raises comparable issues: …

Reforming Canada's Cruel And Unusual Approach To Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentencing, Shelby Hayes

Master of Laws Research Papers Repository

Following the introduction of the Safe Streets and Communities Act, mandatory minimum penalties (MMPs) were greatly expanded in Canadian criminal law. This expansion has been controversial, particularly in the context of drug crime. Through the lens of proposed legislation, Bill C-5, this paper presents the arguments both for and against the use of MMPs in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, with a particular focus on their potential to produce cruel and unusual punishment. Ultimately, this paper argues that, on account of their many downfalls, MMPs should have no place in Canadian drug law.

Expanded Criminal Defense Lawyering, Jenny Roberts, Ronald Wright

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This review collects and critiques the academic literature on criminal defense lawyering, with an emphasis on empirical work. Research on criminal defense attorneys in the United States has traditionally emphasized scarcity of resources: too many people facing criminal charges who are “too poor to pay” for counsel and not enough funding to pay for the constitutionally mandated lawyers. Scholars have focused on the capacity of different delivery systems, such as public defender offices, to change the ultimate outcomes in criminal cases within their tight budgetary constraints. Over the decades, however, theoretical understandings of the defense attorney’s work have expanded to …

My Three Criminal Justice Careers, Brisa Sanchez

Undergraduate Scholarly Works

This undergrad research paper is about the basics of the three components of criminal justice careers and the careers and salaries they do for a living.

Prosecutorial Nonenforcement And Residual Criminalization, Justin Murray

Articles & Chapters

In recent years a small but influential group of locally elected prosecutors committed to criminal justice reform have openly refused to enforce various criminal laws—laws prohibiting marijuana possession, sentence enhancements, laws authorizing the death penalty, and much more—because they see those laws as unjust and incompatible with core reform objectives. Condemned by many on the political right for allegedly usurping the legislature’s lawmaking role and praised by many on the left for bypassing dysfunctional state legislatures in favor of local solutions, these prosecutorial nonenforcement policies are commonly said to have the same effect as nullifying, or even repealing, the laws …

Criminal Court System Failures During Covid-19: An Empirical Study, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

How did the criminal legal system respond to the early months of pandemic in 2020? This article reports the results of a unique national survey of judges, defense lawyers, and prosecutors that gives a snapshot of how the criminal legal system responded to the COVID-19 in the first five chaotic months. Criminal courts in the United States rely on in-person proceedings and formal and informal in-person communications to manage caseloads. The survey results detail, in ways not previously fully understood, how crucial these in-person communications are and how ill-prepared the criminal courts and legal professionals were to deal with the …

Crisis Intervention Team Training And Use Of Force On Persons With Mental Illnesses, Xavier Aguirre

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The criminological literature on the effects of Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) among police in handling of crisis situations involving persons with mental illness (PMI) has emerged as a critical in modern policing. This study seeks to add to the literature on policing persons with mental illness by investigating the effects of CIT training, officer characteristics, and crisis incidences in the Seattle, Washington Police Department. There are two models that is used for this study. The first model focuses on the aforementioned factors in predicting police to use force in such incidents. The second model focus on officer dispositions. The data …

Categorically Caged: The Case For Extending Early Release Eligibility To Inmates With Violent Offense Convictions, Jenna M. Codignotto

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Susan Farrell faced both physical and sexual abuse from her husband before he was killed in 1989. Although Ms. Farrell maintained her innocence and urged that it was her son who killed her husband, she was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy charges, resulting in a life sentence without parole. After serving thirty years of her sentence at the Michigan Department of Corrections, Ms. Farrell’s tragic life met a no less tragic end. In April 2020, one month after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Ms. Farrell seized in her cell for forty-five minutes before dying from the virus. She …

United States V. Safehouse: The Future Of Supervised Consumption Sites In Maine And Beyond, Jeff P. Sherman

Maine Law Review

People who use drugs are dying at an unprecedented rate. However, many of these deaths can be prevented. When a person experiencing an opioid overdose is timely treated with naloxone and oxygen the overdose is reversed. Access to a supervised consumption site—a place where people can use pre-obtained drugs in the safety and presence of others—ensures that when a person overdoses, they receive this life-saving treatment. In response to a proposed supervised consumption site in Philadelphia, the Department of Justice sued to prevent it from opening. The government claimed that the facility, called “Safehouse,” would violate 21 U.S.C. § 856(a)(2) …

What's My Age Again?: Adolescent Development And The Case For Expanding Original Juvenile Court Jurisdiction And Investing In Alternatives For Emerging Adults Involved In Maine's Justice System, Christopher M. Northrop, Jill M. Ward, Jonathan J. Ruterbories, Jess N. Mizzi

Maine Law Review

While many aspects of Maine’s Juvenile Justice system are ripe for reform, this Article advocates for improving the system’s response to one group of offenders often overlooked by policymakers: emerging adults. The Supreme Court, in Roper v. Simmons, stated that “[t]he qualities that distinguish juveniles from adults do not disappear when an individual turns 18.” In fact, studies have shown that criminal conduct attributable to the unstable and impulsive nature of the adolescent mind continues well into a person’s mid-twenties. These eighteen to twenty-five-year-old offenders, termed “emerging adults” by researchers, experience much of the same developmental and physiological challenges as …

The Victim/Offender Overlap And Criminal System Reform, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.