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Anchoring Lifeline Criminal Jurisprudence: Making The Leap From Theory To Critical Race-Inspired Jurisprudence, Danardo S. Jones

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article takes as a starting point the claim that anti-Black racism permeates Canadian society and finds expression in our institutions, most notably the criminal justice system. Indeed, anti-Black racism in criminal justice and its impact on Black lives are not credibly in dispute. Thus, what should concern legal scholars is the staying power or permanence of racism. In other words, should Canadian legal scholars ‘get real’ about the intractability of race? Or can anti-Black racism be effectively confronted by developing legal and evidentiary tools designed to fix, rather than dismantle, the current system? Put another way, this article aims …

The War On Drugs, Moral Panics, And The Groundhog Day Effect: Confronting The Stereotypes That Perpetuate The Cycle Of Disparity, Tasha Withrow

The Mid-Southern Journal of Criminal Justice

There has been a specter haunting America for over 400 years. That specter is an insidious and destructive beast that has found its way into every crevice and layer of all American institutions. Racism, racial stereotypes, racial stigma, biases, and White supremacy has infiltrated every power structure since the foundation of America and has created a system of social control that has perpetually oppressed, marginalized, and disenfranchised generations of people of color. One of the most catastrophic by-products generated from America’s historic racist ideology has been that of the over-criminalization of people of color for drug crimes justified by discriminatory …

Antiracist Remedial Approaches In Judge Gregory’S Jurisprudence, Leah M. Litman

Articles

This piece uses the idea of antiracism to highlight parallels between school desegregation cases and cases concerning errors in the criminal justice system. There remain stark, pervasive disparities in both school composition and the criminal justice system. Yet even though judicial remedies are an integral part of rooting out systemic inequality and the vestiges of discrimination, courts have been reticent to use the tools at their disposal to adopt proactive remedial approaches to address these disparities. This piece uses two examples from Judge Roger Gregory’s jurisprudence to illustrate how an antiracist approach to judicial remedies might work.

Racial Bias Still Exists In Criminal Justice System? A Review Of Recent Empirical Research, Yu Du

Touro Law Review

The debate on whether racial bias is still embedded in the criminal justice (CJ) system today has reached its plateau. One recent article in the Washington Post has claimed an overwhelming evidence of racial bias in the CJ system. Whereas some scholars argue that racial disparity is an epitome of real crime rates, others indicate that implicit and/or explicit racial bias against Blacks held by law enforcement agents persists in the system. This review considers both supporting arguments and relevant counterarguments. After evaluating empirical and rigorous research during the past five years, the review maintains that racial bias still exists …

Affirmative Action And The Criminal Law, Paul Butler

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Debt Bondage: How Private Collection Agencies Keep The Formerly Incarcerated Tethered To The Criminal Justice System, Bryan L. Adamson

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article examines the constitutionality of statutes which allow courts to transfer outstanding legal financial obligations to private debt collection agencies. In Washington State, the clerk of courts can transfer the legal financial obligation of a formerly incarcerated person if he or she is only thirty days late making a payment. Upon transfer, the debt collection agencies can assess a “collection fee” of up to 50% of the first $100.000 of the unpaid legal financial obligation, and up to 35% of the unpaid debt over $100,000. This fee becomes part of the LFO debt imposed at sentencing, and like that …

Confessions, Convictions And Controversy: An Examination Of False Confessions Leading To Wrongful Convictions In The United States Throughout History, Kirandeep Kaur

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Down To The Last Strike: The Effect Of The Jury Lottery On Criminal Convictions, Scott Kostyshak, Neel U. Sukhatme

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

How much does luck matter to a criminal defendant in a jury trial? We use rich data on jury selection to causally estimate how parties who are randomly assigned a less favorable jury (as proxied by whether their attorneys exhaust their peremptory strikes) fare at trial. Our novel identification strategy uniquely captures variation in juror predisposition using data unobserved by the econometrician but observed by attorneys. Criminal defendants who lose the “jury lottery” are more likely to be convicted than similarly-situated counterparts, with a significant increase (18-20 percentage points) for Black defendants. Our results are robust to alternate specifications and …

The Colourful Truth: The Reality Of Indigenous Overrepresentation In Juvenile Detention In Australia And The United States, Rachel Thampapillai

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Criminal Justice System And Latinos In An Emerging Latino Area, Betina Cutaia Wilkinson

Latino Public Policy

The topic of my study is Latinos’ attitudes and experiences with the criminal justice system in an emerging Latino area. There is an extensive amount of research on African Americans’ experiences and views of the criminal justice system yet our knowledge of Latinos’ experiences with the criminal justice system is quite scant. Still, a few studies have provided some foundation for our understanding of this topic. We know that immigrant policing is associated with Latinos’ reduced trust in government agencies and its programs (Cruz Nichols et al. 2018a). Restrictive immigration policies negatively impact Latinos’ physical and mental health (Cruz Nichols …

Equal Protection And White Supremacy, Paul Butler

Northwestern University Law Review

The project of using social science to help win equal protection claims is doomed to fail if its premise is that the Supreme Court post-McCleskey just needs more or better evidence of racial discrimination. Everyone—including the Justices of the Court—already knows that racial discrimination is endemic in the criminal justice system. Social science does help us to understand the role of white supremacy in U.S. police and punishment practices. Social science also can help us understand how to move people to resist, and can inform our imagination of the transformation needed for equal justice under the law.

Rethinking The Boundaries Of "Criminal Justice", Benjamin Levin

Publications

This review of The New Criminal Justice Thinking (Sharon Dolovich & Alexandra Natapoff, eds.) tracks the shifting and uncertain contours of “criminal justice” as an object of study and critique.

Specifically, I trace two themes in the book:

(1) the uncertain boundaries of the “criminal justice system” as a web of laws, actors, and institutions; and

(2) the uncertain boundaries of “criminal justice thinking” as a universe of interdisciplinary scholarship, policy discourse, and public engagement.

I argue that these two themes speak to critically important questions about the nature of criminal justice scholarship and reform efforts. Without a firm understanding …

The Scale Of Misdemeanor Justice, Megan T. Stevenson, Sandra G. Mayson

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to provide the most comprehensive national-level empirical analysis of misdemeanor criminal justice that is currently feasible given the state of data collection in the United States. First, we estimate that there are 13.2 million misdemeanor cases filed in the United States each year. Second, contrary to conventional wisdom, this number is not rising. Both the number of misdemeanor arrests and cases filed have declined markedly in recent years. In fact, national arrest rates for almost every misdemeanor offense category have been declining for at least two decades, and the misdemeanor arrest rate was lower in 2014 than …

The Duty To Charge In Police Use Of Excessive Force Cases, Rebecca Roiphe

Cleveland State Law Review

Responding to the problems of mass incarceration, racial disparities in justice, and wrongful convictions, scholars have focused on prosecutorial overcharging. They have, however, neglected to address undercharging—the failure to charge in entire classes of cases. Undercharging can similarly undermine the efficacy and legitimacy of the criminal justice system. While few have focused on this question in the domestic criminal law context, international law scholars have long recognized the social and structural cost for nascent democratic states when they fail to charge those responsible for the prior regime’s human rights abuses. This sort of impunity threatens the rule of law and …

The Stereotyped Offender: Domestic Violence And The Failure Of Intervention [Batterer Intervention Program (Bip) Standards Data, As Of 2015], Carolyn B. Ramsey

Research Data

These 19 comparative data tables relating to state and local certification standards for batterer intervention programs (BIPs), as of 2015, are electronic Appendices B-T to Carolyn B. Ramsey, The Stereotyped Offender: Domestic Violence and the Failure of Intervention, 120 Penn. St. L. Rev. 337 (2015), available at http://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles/56/. Appendix A is not reproduced here because it simply contains citations to the state and local standards, but it is published with the journal article.

Newsroom: The Jail Trap: Mass Incarceration In Ri, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Reducing Racial And Ethnic Disparities In Jails: Recommendations For Local Practice, Jessica M. Eaglin, Danyelle Solomon

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

People of color are overrepresented in our criminal justice system. One in three African American men born today will be incarcerated in his lifetime. In some cities, African Americans are ten times more likely to be arrested when stopped by police. With the national debate national focused on race, crime, and punishment, criminal justice experts are examining how to reduce racial disparities in our prisons and jails, which often serve as initial entry points for those who become entangled in the criminal justice system.

This report, which relies on input from 25 criminal justice leaders, pinpoints the drivers of racial …

Economic Interest Convergence In Downsizing Imprisonment, Spearit

Articles

This Essay employs a variation of the “interest convergence” concept to examine the competing interests at stake in downsizing imprisonment in the United States. In the last few decades, the country has become the world leader in both incarceration rates and number of inmates. Reversing these trends is a common goal of multiple parties, who advocate prison reform under different rationales. Some advocate less imprisonment as a means of tempering the disparate effects of imprisonment on individual offenders and the communities to which they return. Others support downsizing based on conservative values that favor reduced government size, spending, and interference …

Blind Injustice: The Supreme Court, Implicit Racial Bias, And The Racial Disparity In The Criminal Justice System, Tyler Rose Clemons

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” This statement by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2007 is alluring in both its grammatical symmetry and its logical simplicity. Yet it encapsulates the naiveté of the view of racial discrimination currently held by the majority of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Chief Justice Roberts’s assertion contains the implied assumption that the only racial discrimination that exists—or at least the only kind that matters under the Constitution—is explicit and susceptible to conscious control. Decades of …

Is Color Blind Justice Also Culturally Blind? The Cultural Blindness In Justice, Shiv Narayan Persaud

Journal Publications

As diverse ethnic groups continue to experience numeric growth and societal grounding in America, their advocacies for culturally competent representation within the legal system cannot be ignored or underplayed. Undoubtedly, some professions such as mental and physical health, and their related sectors, have developed and continue to integrate cultural competencies into their respective practices. Others such as the legal profession seem to lag in their advocacies and promotion of culturally competent practices.

In the criminal justice system, where discretionary legal decision-making authority is commonplace and may grossly affect the civil liberties of the citizenry, a paucity of standards requiring cultural …

Lethal Discrimination, J. Thomas Sullivan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Felon Disenfranchisement And The Systemic Racism Of The Criminal Justice System, Matthew D. Itkin

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Retrying Race, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Race Prosecutors, Race Defenders, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Prosecuting Violence/Reconstructing Community, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

For two centuries, the private violence of American history has paraded into courts for public trial. Often dramatized by the spectacle of rape and murder, the public trials of private violence increasingly are seen to decide the fates of both the accused and the victim of crime. The fate of community, whether the community of the victim, the accused, or the public, seems at first blush untouched by such trials. Like victims and their families, however, communities struck by violence suffer profound loss. That loss is expressed in the destruction of public discourse, reason, and citizenship. This public ruin is …

(Er)Race-Ing An Ethic Of Justice, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Prosecuting Race, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

Theoreticians and practitioners in the American criminal justice system increasingly debate the role of racial identity, racialized narratives, and race-neutral representation in law, lawyering, and ethics.

This debate holds special bearing on the growing prosecution and defense of acts of racially motivated violence. In this continuing investigation of the prosecution and defense of such violence, Professor Alfieri examines the recent federal prosecution of five white New York City police officers charged with assaulting Abner Louima, a young male Haitian immigrant, in 1997. Professor Alfieri presents a race conscious, community-oriented model of prosecutorial discretion guided by constitutional precepts, citizenship ideals, professionalism …

Race Trials, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Race-Ing Legal Ethics, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.