Digital Commons Network^™

White Paper: Effective Communication With Deaf, Hard Of Hearing, Blind, And Low Vision Incarcerated People, Tessa Bialek, Margo Schlanger

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Tens of thousands of people incarcerated in jails and prisons throughout the United States have one or more communication disabilities, a term that describes persons who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, low vision, deaf-blind, speech disabled, or otherwise disabled in ways that affect communication. Incarceration is not easy for anyone, but the isolation and inflexibility of incarceration can be especially challenging, dangerous, and further disabling, for persons with disabilities. Correctional entities must confront these challenges; persons with communication disabilities are overrepresented in jails and prisons and the population continues to grow. Federal antidiscrimination law obligates jails and prisons to …

Mich. Ruling Widens Sentencing Protections For Young Adults, Kimberly A. Thomas

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On July 28, the Michigan Supreme Court held that the mandatory imposition of a life-without-parole sentence on an 18-year-old violated the state constitution.

This decision expands the protections provided for young defendants by the U.S. Supreme Court in Miller v. Alabama and builds on a nascent trend that provides additional constitutional and statutory protections for young people over 17 years old who are charged with serious offenses.

Willard Hurst's Unpublished Manuscript On Law, Technology, And Regulation, Bj Ard, William J. Novak

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It is with a great deal of excitement ( and with thanks to so many contributing colleagues and collaborators over the years ) that we are able to present to the public for the first time a newly published work by one of the great originators of modem legal history and law and society scholarship-James Willard Hurst. Hurst published his last two books, Law and Markets in United States History and Dealing with Statutes, in 1982. And, fittingly, he published his last substantive article--.-a very short comment on "The Use of Case Histories"-in the Wisconsin Law Review in 1992. In …

Slamming The Courthouse Door: 25 Years Of Evidence For Repealing The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Andrea Fenster, Margo Schlanger

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Twenty-five years ago today, in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The “PLRA,” as it is often called, makes it much harder for incarcerated people to file and win federal civil rights lawsuits. For two-and-a-half decades, the legislation has created a double standard that limits incarcerated people’s access to the courts at all stages: it requires courts to dismiss civil rights cases from incarcerated people for minor technical reasons before even reaching the case merits, requires incarcerated people to pay filing fees that low-income people on the outside are exempt from, makes it hard to find …

Government Misconduct And Convicting The Innocent: The Role Of Prosecutors, Police And Other Law Enforcement, Samuel R. Gross, Maurice J. Possley, Kaitlin Jackson Roll, Klara Huber Stephens

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This is a report about the role of official misconduct in the conviction of innocent people. We discuss cases that are listed in the National Registry of Exonerations, an ongoing online archive that includes all known exonerations in the United States since 1989, 2,663 as of this writing. This Report describes official misconduct in the first 2,400 exonerations in the Registry, those posted by February 27, 2019.

In general, we classify a case as an “exoneration” if a person who was convicted of a crime is officially and completely cleared based on new evidence of innocence.

The Report is …

Litigating Federal Habeas Corpus Cases: One Equitable Gateway At A Time, Eve Brensike Primus

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Habeas corpus, also known as the Great Writ, was meant to be a “bulwark against convictions that violate fundamental fairness,” according to the Supreme Court. Yet today, federal courts provide relief in fewer than half of one percent of cases in which a non-capital state prisoner seeks relief through habeas. The Great Writ, it would seem, is no longer so great. In Litigating Federal Habeas Corpus Cases: One Equitable Gateway at a Time, Eve Brensike Primus examines the various procedural and substantive hurdles that have been erected in the past half century that make it nearly impossible for state prisoners …

Race And Wrongful Convictions In The United States, Samuel R. Gross, Maurice Possley, Klara Stephens

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African Americans are only 13% of the American population but a majority of innocent defendants wrongfully convicted of crimes and later exonerated. They constitute 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in “group exonerations.” We see this racial disparity for all major crime categories, but we examine it in this report in the context of the three types of crime that produce the largest numbers …

Conclusion, Thomas Green

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The contours of the story told in Part III represent a quite tentative historicization of the free will problem as that problem manifested itself in the world of modern American criminal jurisprudence. Turn the kaleidoscope a few degrees and a different pattern appears, but one has to start somewhere, and if the point is to provoke others to join in, better if the first player has stopped at a point where the image can yield interesting and satisfying results by nearly any alternative adjustment. I would venture to say, however, that my pattern shares certain important characteristics with nearly any …

Introduction, Andrew Thomas Green

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The free will problem inherent in the acts of blaming and punishing is age-old and well-known. It has largely to do with the notion of just desserts. Conventionally, most of us tend to believe that the attribution of guilt and the imposition of punishment are deserved only if it may fairly be said that the actor exercised some degree of free choice, or – as it is often put – could have chosen not to do what he or she did. Yet most of us also believe there are limits to freedom of choice in particular circumstances, and some question …

Toward A Sustainable Future: An Environmental Agenda For The Second Term Of The Obama Administration, David M. Uhlmann

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Much was at stake in the Presidential election of 2012, which was marked by heated debate over the trajectory of the economy, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and the fat of the President's health care plan. The candidates disagreed about nearly every issue from foreign policy and the war on terror to a woman's right to choose and same-sex marriage. Lost amid the din and never mentioned in the Presidential debates or most of the campaign speeches was another divisive topic: how our environmental laws and policies should address global climate change and chart a sustainable future for …

Exonerations In The United States, 1989-2012: Report By The National Registry Of Exonerations, Samuel R. Gross, Michael Shaffer

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This report is about 873 exonerations in the United States, from January 1989 through February 2012. Behind each is a story, and almost all are tragedies. The tragedies are not limited to the exonerated defendants themselves, or to their families and friends. In most cases they were convicted of vicious crimes in which other innocent victims were killed or brutalized. Many of the victims who survived were traumatized all over again, years later, when they learned that the criminal who had attacked them had not been caught and punished after all, and that they themselves may have played a role …

Kamisar, Yale, Jerold H. Israel

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Kamisar, Yale (1929- ). Law professor. Born in the Bronx, N.Y., to an immigrant, working-class family of modest means and limited educational background, Kamisar received academic scholarships that enabled him to attend New York University (B.A., 1950) and, after enlisting in the army during the Korean War and winning a Purple Heart, Columbia Law School (LLB., 1954).

Mallory V. United States, Yale Kamisar

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354 U.S. 449 (1957), argued 1 Apr. 1957, decided 24 June 1957 by vote of 9 to 0; Frankfurter for the Court. Although the power of the Supreme Court to overturn state convictions is limited to the enforcement of Fourteenth Amendment due process rights, the Court may formulate rules of evidence in the exercise of its “supervisory power” over the administration of federal criminal justice that go well beyond due process requirements. The best-known example is the McNabb-Mallory rule.

Miranda V. Arizona, Yale Kamisar

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384 U.S. 436 (1966), argued 28 Feb. 1966, decided 13 June 1966 by vote of 5 to 4; Warren for the Court, Clark, Harlan, White, and Stewart in dissent. The Warren Court's revolution in American criminal procedure reached its high point (or, depending upon one's perspective, its low point) on 13 June 1966. That day the Court handed down its opinion in Miranda, the most famous, and most bitterly criticized, confession case in the nation's history. To some, Miranda symbolized the legal system's determination to treat even the lowliest and most despicable criminal suspect with dignity and respect. But …

How And Why Labor Arbitrators Decide Discipline And Discharge Cases. An Empirical Examination., Theodore J. St. Antoine

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Often without attribution, the arbitration literature includes statements about how “most,” “many” or “some” arbitrators decide discipline and discharge cases. Elkouri & Elkouri is probably the best known source of such generalizations. Although statements like these are often consistent with conventional wisdom, empirical support is seldom provided. To illustrate, consider the first of three examples taken from the National Academy of Arbitrators’ The Common Law of the Workplace: Because industrial discipline is corrective rather than punitive, most arbitrators require use of progressive discipline, even when the collective agreement or employment contract is silent on the subject. Based on personal …

Face To Face With The Right Of Confrontation, Richard D. Friedman

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This article is an edited excerpt from the amicus curiae brief filed in Crawford v. Washington, heard before the United States Supreme Court on November 10, 2003. Prof. Friedman wrote the brief for the Court.

Still Unfair, Still Arbitrary -- But Do We Care?, Samuel R. Gross

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Keyword Address to the Twenty-Third Annual Law Review Symposium The Ultimate Pentalty: A Multifarious Look at Capital Punishment

Linking The Visions, Thomas A. Green

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Professor Thomas Green talks about his teaching and work.

Still Unfair, Still Arbitrary - But Do We Care?, Samuel R. Gross

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Welcome. It is a pleasure to see everybody at this bright and cheery hour of the morning. My assignment is to try to give an overview of the status of the death penalty in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I will try to put that in the context of how the death penalty was viewed thirty years ago, or more, and maybe that will tell us something about how the death penalty will be viewed thirty or forty years from now.

Introduction To Book Iv, Thomas A. Green

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The final volume of Blackstone's Commentaries sets forth a·lucid survey of crime and criminal procedure informed by those propositions concerning English law and the relations between man and state that characterize the entire work. Perhaps no area of the law so tested Blackstone's settled and complacent views as did the criminal law, particularly the large and growing body of statutory capital crimes. In the end, Blackstone failed to demonstrate that English criminal law reflected a coherent set of principles, but his intricate and often internally contradictory attempt nevertheless constitutes a classic description of that law, and can still be read …