Digital Commons Network^™

Police Or Pirates? Reforming Washington's Civil Asset Forfeiture System, Jasmin Chigbrow

Washington Law Review

Civil asset forfeiture laws permit police officers to seize property they suspect is connected to criminal activity and sell or retain the property for the police department’s use. In many states, including Washington, civil forfeiture occurs independent of any criminal case—many property owners are never charged with the offense police allege occurred. Because the government is not required to file criminal charges, property owners facing civil forfeiture lack the constitutional safeguards normally guaranteed to defendants in the criminal justice system: the right to an attorney, the presumption of innocence, the government’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, …

Dismissals As Justice, Anna Roberts

Faculty Publications

More than a third of our states have given judges a little-known power to dismiss prosecutions, not because of legal or factual insufficiency, but for the sake of justice. Whether phrased as dismissals “in furtherance of justice” or dismissals of de minimis prosecutions, these exercises of judicial power teach two important lessons.

First, judges exercising these dismissals are rebutting the common notion that in the face of over-criminalization and over-incarceration they are powerless to do more than rubber-stamp prosecutorial decision making. In individual cases, they push back against some of the most problematic aspects of our criminal justice system: its …

Blaming As A Social Process: The Influence Of Character And Moral Emotion On Blame, Janice Nadler

Faculty Working Papers

For the most part, the law eschews the role of moral character in legal blame. But when we observe an actor who causes harm, legal and psychological blame processes are in tension. Procedures for legal blame assume an assessment of the actor's mental state, and ultimately of responsibility, that is independent of the moral character of the actor. In this paper, I present experimental evidence to suggest that perceptions of intent, foreseeability, and possibly causation can be colored by independent reasons for thinking the actor is a bad person, and are mediated by the experience of negative moral emotion. Our …

Moral Character, Motive, And The Psychology Of Blame, Janice Nadler, Mary-Hunter Morris Mcdonnell

Faculty Working Papers

Blameworthiness, in the criminal law context, is conceived as the carefully calculated end product of discrete judgments about a transgressor's intentionality, causal proximity to harm, and the harm's foreseeability. Research in social psychology, on the other hand, suggests that blaming is often intuitive and automatic, driven by a natural impulsive desire to express and defend social values and expectations. The motivational processes that underlie psychological blame suggest that judgments of legal blame are influenced by factors the law does not always explicitly recognize or encourage. In this Article we focus on two highly related motivational processes – the desire to …

The Challenge Of Motive In The Criminal Law, Elaine M. Chiu

Faculty Publications

The purchase of illegal drugs by an undercover police officer is commonly known as a “buy and bust” operation. In the twenty-first century, the stakes in the longstanding war on drugs are high as law enforcement and national security agencies join forces to confront the disturbing ties between terrorism and illegal narcotics. In addition to being a weapon in the arsenal of law enforcement, the buy and bust operation also tells an interesting story about motive in the criminal law. This article uses the simple street sale to demonstrate how the criminal law suffers from its ambivalent attitude towards the …

The Rhetoric Of Motive And Intent, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

This article offers a critical analysis of the traditional maxim that motive is irrelevant to criminal liability. It retraces the history of this principle to show how its meaning has changed and its validity has declined over time. Originally promoted by reformers, the irrelevance of motive maxim derived meaning from their efforts to codify criminal law. In this context, the irrelevance of motive stood for two related reforms: (1) legislators should condition criminal liability on expectations of harm rather than desires, and (2) courts should require proof of statutory mental elements. With the success of codification, however, the irrelevance of …

Meaning And Motive In The Law Of Homicide (Reviewing Samuel H. Pillsbury, Judging Evil: Rethinking The Law Of Murder And Manslaughter), Guyora Binder

Book Reviews

Many criminal law scholars have criticized the Model Penal Code’s restrictive conception of culpability as awareness of risk, and have sought to incorporate motives and desires into culpoability analysis. In his excellent book Judging Evil, Samuel Pillsbury has applied this richer conception of culpability to homicide law. The result is a comprehensive theory of homicide liability, unified by an effort to predicate liability on deficient moral reasoning rather than merely awareness of risk. This review essay explicates and commends Pillsbury’s theory but also criticizes one crucial deficiency. Pillsbury shrinks from one of the most obvious but potentially most controversial implications …

Bargaining For Testimony: Bias Of Witnesses Who Testify In Exchange For Leniency , Spencer Martinez

Cleveland State Law Review

This note explores the risk that a criminal witness will lie on the stand when he testifies pursuant to a cooperation agreement. Section II is a history of cooperation agreements and how the permissible scope of such agreements has been curbed in the interests of defendants' rights. Section III examines the practice as it exists today, and how, in spite of the risk of perjury, state and federal prosecutors are being given increasing discretion in drafting cooperation agreements. In section IV, the "safeguards" available to the defendant which test the veracity of allegedly-biased testimony are discussed. The conclusion is that …

Comment On Justification And Excuse, Jerome Hall

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.