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Judging Genes: Implications Of The Second Generation Of Genetic Tests In The Courtroom, Diane E. Hoffmann, Karen H. Rothenberg

Karen H. Rothenberg

The use of DNA tests for identification has revolutionized court proceedings in criminal and paternity cases. Now, requests by litigants to admit or compel a second generation of genetic tests – tests to confirm or predict genetic diseases and conditions – threaten to affect judicial decision-making in many more contexts. Unlike DNA tests for identification, these second generation tests may provide highly personal health and behavioral information about individuals and their relatives and will pose new challenges for trial court judges. This article reports on an original empirical study of how judges analyze these requests and uses the study results …

Race And The Doctrine Of Self Defense: The Role Of Race In Determining The Proper Use Of Force To Protect Oneself, Richard Klein

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Race And The Doctrine Of Self Defense: The Role Of Race In Determining The Proper Use Of Force To Protect Oneself, Richard Klein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

How (Not) To Think Like A Punisher, Alice G. Ristroph

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article examines the several and sometimes contradictory accounts of sentencing in proposed revisions to the Model Penal Code. At times, sentencing appears to be an art, dependent upon practical wisdom; in other instances, sentencing seems more of a science, dependent upon close analysis of empirical data. I argue that the new Code provisions are at their best when they acknowledge the legal and political complexities of sentencing, and at their worst when they invoke the rhetoric of desert. When the Code focuses on the sentencing process in political context, it offers opportunities to deploy both practical wisdom and empirical …

Appellate Review Of Sentences: Reconsidering Deference, Michael O'Hear

Michael O'Hear

For the past three decades, the national debate on sentencing policy has focused on the strengths and weaknesses of mandatory guidelines, with guidelines proponents arguing that unfettered judicial discretion at sentencing violates rule-of-law values. However, the number of states with mandatory guidelines, never a majority, has been declining in recent years, and even the federal system switched from mandatory to advisory guidelines in 2005. The trend away from mandatory guidelines has prompted renewed interest in the potential for appellate review of sentences to address rule-of-law concerns. But the appellate courts themselves have long resisted robust review on the ground that …

Modes Of Discretion In The Criminal Justice System, Roger Fairfax

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Debacle: How The Supreme Court Has Mangled American Sentencing Law And How Justice Sotomayor Might Help Fix It, Frank O. Bowman

Frank O. Bowman III

This Article argues that the line of Supreme Court Sixth Amendment jury right cases that began with McMillan v. Pennsylvania in 1986, crescendoed in Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker in 2004-2005, and continues in 2009 in cases such as Oregon v. Ice, has been a colossal judicial failure. First, the Court has failed to provide a logically coherent, constitutionally based answer to the fundamental question of what limits the Constitution places on the roles played by the institutional actors in the criminal justice system. It failed to recognize that defining, adjudicating and punishing crimes implicates both the …

The Politics Of Law And Film: Introduction To Symposium On Legal Outsiders In American Film, Jessica M. Silbey

Jessica Silbey

The articles collected in this Symposium Issue on Legal Outsiders in American Film are examples of a turn in legal scholarship toward the analysis of culture. The cultural turn in law takes as a premise that law and culture are inextricably intertwined. Common to the project of law and culture is how legal and cultural discourse challenge or sustain communities, identities and relations of power. In this vein, each of the articles in this Symposium Issue look closely at a film or a set of films as cultural objects which, when engaged critically, help us think about law as an …

The Neuropsychology Of Justifications And Excuses: Some Problematic Cases Of Self-Defense, Duress And Provocation, Theodore Y. Blumoff

Theodore Y. Blumoff

In a famous address to the Aristotelian Society, Professor J. L. Austin provided dictum that has become a part of the conventional wisdom in the jurisprudence of our criminal law. His thesis simultaneously acknowledges the evident moral distinction between justifications and excuses, on the one hand, and the tendency, on the other, for the two doctrines to overlap and confound. From the perspectives of moral philosophy and jurisprudence, the distinction is clear. Justifications are socially approved (or, at least, not disapproved); excuses are not approved, but they obtain because the actor’s conduct reflects a substantial (and therefore judicially acknowledged) cognitive …

What We Can Learn About Appeals From Mr. Tillman's Case: More Lessons From Another Dna Exoneration, Giovanna Shay

Giovanna Shay

In 2006, Mr. James Calvin Tillman became the first person in Connecticut to be exonerated through the use of post-conviction DNA testing. He joined a group of DNA exonerees that currently numbers more than 200 nationwide. In many ways, Mr. Tillman’s case is a paradigmatic DNA exoneration—involving a cross-racial mistaken eyewitness identification, issues of race, and faulty forensic testimony. This article uses the published opinions affirming Mr. Tillman’s conviction—particularly his direct appeal to the Connecticut Supreme Court and his appeal from the state habeas proceeding—to reflect on the meaning of appellate and postconviction proceedings. Does Mr. Tillman’s exoneration reveal any …

Using Criminal Punishment To Serve Both Victim And Social Needs, Erin Ann O'Hara, Maria Mayo Robbins

Law and Contemporary Problems

In recent decades, the criminal-justice pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Criminal law is often described as covering disputes between the offender and the state. Victims are not direct parties to criminal proceedings, they have no formal right to either initiate or terminate a criminal action, and they have no control over the punishment meted out to offenders. In this state-centric system, victim needs have been left unsatisfied, giving rise to a politically powerful victims' rights movement that has had success in giving victims rights of access to prosecutors and rights to be heard in the courtroom. Here, O'Hara …

Parents, Children, And The Law Of Assault, Hamish Stewart

Dalhousie Law Journal

The debate concerning the constitutionality and the possible repeal of s. 43 of the Criminal Code, the so-called "spanking" provision, has raised an important issue: when a parent touches a child without the child's consent, under what conditions is the parent's conduct an assault? Supporters of the'repeal of s. 43 have suggested that parents are protected from inappropriate prosecutions by the exercise of prosecutorial discretion and by the common law defences of de minimis non curat lex and necessity But prosecutorial discretion is not a suitable substitute for a proper definition of the scope of criminal liability,and the defences ofde …

Dan Freed: My Teacher, My Colleague, My Friend, Ronald Weich

All Faculty Scholarship

At a recent meeting of the National Association of Sentencing Commissions, Yale professor Dan Freed was honored during a panel discussion titled "Standing on the Shoulders of Sentencing Giants," Dan Freed is indeed a sentencing giant. but he is the gentlest giant of all. It is hard to imagine that a man as mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and self-effacing as Dan Freed has had such a profound impact on federal sentencing law and so many other areas of criminal justice policy, Yet he has.

I've been in many rooms with Dan Freed over the years — classrooms, boardrooms, dining rooms, and others. …

Prosecutorial Regulation Versus Prosecutorial Accountability, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

No government official has as much unreviewable power or discretion as the prosecutor. Few regulations bind or even guide prosecutorial discretion, and fewer still work well. Most commentators favor more external regulation by legislatures, judges, or bar authorities. Neither across-the-board legislation nor ex post review of individual cases has proven to be effective, however. Drawing on management literature, this article reframes the issue as a principal-agent problem and suggests corporate strategies for better serving the relevant stakeholders. Fear of voters could better check prosecutors, as could victim participation in individual cases. Scholars have largely neglected the most promising avenue of …

Technology And The Crime Society: Rethinking Legal Protection, Bert-Jaap Koops

Bert-Jaap Koops

Building on existing insights of the risk society and the surveillance society, this article sketches the contours of the emerging crime society, where every form of human behaviour is perceived in terms of potential criminal risk and controlled by means of criminal law. It articulates the pivotal role of technology in the ever increasing footprint of criminal law, as it often facilitates criminalisation, expanding policing, preventative and architectural approaches, and pervasive surveillance. Criminal law is shifting from a last resort to a primary tool of social control: criminal risk governance. This paradigm shift goes hand in hand with a shift …

Rewarding Prosecutors For Performance, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Prosecutorial discretion is a problem that most scholars attack from the outside. Most scholars favor external institutional solutions, such as ex ante legislation or ex post judicial and bar review of individual cases of misconduct. At best these approaches can catch the very worst misconduct. They lack inside information and sustained oversight and cannot generate and enforce fine-grained rules to guide prosecutorial decisionmaking. The more promising alternative is to work within prosecutors' offices, to create incentives for good performance. This symposium essay explores a neglected toolbox that head prosecutors can use to influence line prosecutors: compensation and other rewards. Rewards …

The Method And Role Of Comparative Law, Edward J. Eberle

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond Retroactivity To Realizing Justice: A Theory On The Principle Of Legality In International Criminal Law Sentencing, Shahram Dana

Shahram Dana

Only the innocent deserve the benefits of the principle of legality. This statement naturally offends our notions of justice. It would be unacceptable for courts of criminal justice to institutionalize such an approach. Yet, in the context of prosecuting mass atrocities, genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, international criminal courts appear to be resigned to such a principle, if not openly embracing it. Although ranking among the most fundamental principles of criminal law, nulla poena sine lege (no punishment without law) receives surprisingly little attention in international criminal justice. Indeed, that it may be considered the 'poor cousin' of …

An Empirical Examination Of The Factors Associated With The Commutation Of State Death Row Prisoners’ Sentences Between 1986 And 2005, John D. Kraemer

John D Kraemer

Commutation is usually a death row prisoner’s last hope of evading his or her capital sentence. However, unlike many other stages of the death penalty process, little research focuses on the factors that affect decisions to commute or allow a death sentence to go forward, and that which has been conducted utilizes data which is now nearly a decade old. This paper seeks to examine personal and demographic factors associated with commutation decisions and to resolve incon- sistent findings in the prior research. Using the statistical method of multiple logistic regression, this paper finds statistically significant disparities in the odds …

A Call To Action: Concrete Proposals For Reducing Widespread Animal Suffering In The United States, Dana M. Campbell

Animal Law Review

No abstract provided.

Republicanism And Crime, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

These are but two of the difficult questions that arise when one examines the claim that crime is a public wrong. I take it, though, that their difficulty is an indication of the importance of thinking through the presuppositions and implications of this conception of crime, not a reason to abandon it. A thorough 'thinking through' is too large and complex a task for this chapter, but it is possible to make a case here for the right way to proceed with such an undertaking. That right way, in my view, is to look to the republican tradition of political …

Defending Demaree: The Ex Post Facto Clause's Lack Of Control Over The Federal Sentencing Guidelines After Booker, Daniel M. Levy

Fordham Law Review

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines violated a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial because they allowed a judge to depart from a mandatory range based on facts not presented to a jury. As a solution, the Court modified the Guidelines to be “advisory,” yet curiously held that sentences were still subject to appellate review for reasonableness. Given this tension, U.S. courts of appeals are split on whether the Guidelines are “laws,” subject to the Ex Post Facto Clause of the U.S. Constitution. This Note argues that the Guidelines are advisory, given …

The Witness Who Saw, He Left Little Doubt: A Comparative Consideration Of Expert Testimony In Mental Disability Law Cases, Michael L. Perlin, Astrid Birgden, Kris Gledhill

Articles & Chapters

The question of how courts assess expert evidence - especially when mental disability is an issue - raises the corollary question of whether courts adequately evaluate the content of the expert testimony or whether judicial decision making may be influenced by teleology (‘cherry picking’ evidence), pretextuality (accepting experts who distort evidence to achieve socially desirable aims), and/or sanism (allowing prejudicial and stereotyped evidence). Such threats occur despite professional standards in forensic psychology and other mental health disciplines that require ethical expert testimony. The result is expert testimony that, in many instances, is at best incompetent and at worst biased. The …

What’S Wrong With Victims’ Rights In Juvenile Court?: Retributive V. Rehabilitative Systems Of Justice, Kristin N. Henning

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While scholars have written extensively about the victims’ rights movement in capital and criminal cases, there has been very little discussion about the intersection of victims’ rights and the juvenile justice system. Statutes that allow victims to attend juvenile hearings and present oral and written impact statements have shifted the juvenile court’s priorities and altered the way judges think about young offenders. While judges were once primarily concerned with the best interests of the delinquent child, victims’ rights legislation now requires juvenile courts to balance the rehabilitative needs of the child with other competing interests such as accountability to the …

Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Rape, Feminism, And The War On Crime, Aya Gruber

Publications

Over the past several years, feminism has been increasingly associated with crime control and the incarceration of men. In apparent lock step with the movement of the American penal system, feminists have advocated a host of reforms to strengthen state power to punish gender-based crimes. In the rape context, this effort has produced mixed results. Sexual assault laws that adopt prevailing views of criminality and victimhood, such as predator laws, enjoy great popularity. However, reforms that target the difficulties of date rape prosecutions and seek to counter gender norms, such as rape shield and affirmative consent laws, are controversial, sporadically-implemented, …

Liability Insurance At The Tort-Crime Boundary, Tom Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores how liability insurance mediates the boundary between torts and crime. Liability insurance sometimes separates these two legal fields, for example through the application of standard insurance contract provisions that exclude insurance coverage for some crimes that are also torts. Perhaps less obviously, liability insurance also can draw parts of the tort and criminal fields together. For example, professional liability insurance civilizes the criminal law experience for some crimes that are also torts by providing defendants with an insurance-paid criminal defense that provides more than ordinary means to contest the state’s accusations. The crime-tort separation in liability insurance …

American Oresteia: Herbert Wechsler, The Model Penal Code, And The Uses Of Revenge, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

The American Law Institute recently revised the Model Penal Code's sentencing provisions, calling for a renewed commitment to proportionality based on the gravity of offenses, the "blameworthiness" of offenders, and the "harms done to crime victims." Already, detractors have criticized this move, arguing that it replaces the Code's original commitment to rehabilitation with a more punitive attention to retribution. Yet, missing from such calumny is an awareness of retribution's subtle yet significant role in both the drafting and enactment of the first Model Penal Code (MPC). This article recovers that role by focusing on the retributive views of its first …

Texas Law's Life Or Death Rule In Capital Sentencing: Scrutinizing Eight Amendment Violations And The Case Of Juan Guerrero, Jr., John Niland, Riddhi Dasgupta

St. Mary's Law Journal

The United States Supreme Court has never explained the Eighth Amendment’s impact in noncapital cases involving a mentally retarded or brain-injured defendant. The Court has not provided guidance to legislatures or lower courts concerning the acceptable balancing of aggravating and mitigating factors and the role that mitigating factors must play in the sentencing decision. A definitive gap exists between the protections afforded to a criminal defendant facing a life sentence as opposed to those confronted with the death penalty. The Court requires sentencing procedures to consider aggravating and mitigating factors, including mental retardation and brain damage, when imposing a death …

A Fair Trial, Not A Perfect One: The Early Twentieth-Century Campaign For The Harmless Error Rule, Roger Fairfax

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

From just after the turn of the twentieth century through World War II, there was a great deal of activity around criminal justice reform. Much like today, many commentators in the early twentieth century considered the American criminal justice system to be broken. With regard to all of its phases-substance, sentencing, and procedure-the criminal justice system was thought to be inefficient and ineffective, and it failed to inspire the confidence of the bench, bar, or public.

Against this backdrop, a group of reformers sought to address the shortcomings of early twentieth-century criminal justice-during what I consider the "Golden Age" of …