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Internal And External Challenges To Culpability, Stephen J. Morse
Internal And External Challenges To Culpability, Stephen J. Morse
All Faculty Scholarship
This article was presented at “Guilty Minds: A Virtual Conference on Mens Rea and Criminal Justice Reform” at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. It is forthcoming in Arizona State Law Journal Volume 53, Issue 2.
The thesis of this article is simple: As long as we maintain the current folk psychological conception of ourselves as intentional and potentially rational creatures, as people and not simply as machines, mental states will inevitably remain central to ascriptions of culpability and responsibility more generally. It is also desirable. Nonetheless, we are in a condition of unprecedented internal challenges to …
Judicial Responses To Age And Other Mitigating Evidence: An Exploratory Case Study Of Juvenile Life Sentences In Pre-Miller Cases, José B. Ashford, Katherine Puzauskas, Robert Dormady
Judicial Responses To Age And Other Mitigating Evidence: An Exploratory Case Study Of Juvenile Life Sentences In Pre-Miller Cases, José B. Ashford, Katherine Puzauskas, Robert Dormady
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
This study describes how judges in Maricopa County, Arizona responded to age and other mitigation evidence in imposing “life” versus “natural life” sentences for juvenile offenders convicted of homicide in pre-Miller cases. Maricopa County was selected for this case study because of its history of adhering to “restrictive interpretations” of various kinds of mitigation evidence and because of the characteristics of this county’s local court community. The study employed a mixed-methods design consisting of a content analysis of relevant case documents and a quantitative analysis of the findings from the qualitative analyses of legal case documents. It examined 82% …
Theorizing Failed Prosecutions, Jon B. Gould, Victoria M. Smiegocki, Richard A. Leo
Theorizing Failed Prosecutions, Jon B. Gould, Victoria M. Smiegocki, Richard A. Leo
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
Over the last twenty years, the scholarly field of erroneous convictions has skyrocketed, with multiple articles and books exploring the failures that convict the innocent. However, there has been comparatively little attention to the other side of the coin, failed prosecutions, when the criminal justice system falls short in convicting the likely perpetrator. In this Article, we take up an analysis of failed prosecutions, simultaneously seeking to define its breadth and explain its relation to erroneous convictions. We explore potential hypotheses for the existence of failed prosecutions and then compare those theories to a set of failed prosecutions compiled from …