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Race And Crime: Social Perceptions, Diana Teverovskaya

Honors College Theses

This study looked at whether White offenders are more likely to be socially accepted back into society as compared to their counterpart Black offenders, when both offenders commit the same crime. A sample of 120 Pace University undergraduate students were recruited. Acceptance of offenders was determined by using the Bogardus Social Distance Scale, which measures how much an individual would allow a criminal into their social circle. Participants received one of four fictional vignettes of either a White male or Black male committing one of two crimes: a white collar crime or a drug-related crime. It was found that, regardless …

What Fits The Crime: Does Factors Influence In A Person’S Judgment?, Amanda Vance

Undergraduate Psychology Research Methods Journal

The purpose and rationale for this experiment is to distinguish if factors such as race, prior offences, type of crime, level of seriousness of the crimes plays a role in a person’s judgment based on the type and severity of punishment. For this study participants were to state the type of punishment that the criminal were to be given for committing a certain crime. There were two independent variables used for the study, the independent variables were the race of the criminal was changed and if the criminal had prior offenses or were a first time offender. The hypothesis was …

Lethal Discrimination 2: Repairing The Remedies For Racial Discrimination In Capital Sentencing, J. Thomas Sullivan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

John Paul Stevens And Equally Impartial Government, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This article is the second publication arising out of the author's ongoing research respecting Justice John Paul Stevens. It is one of several published by former law clerks and other legal experts in the UC Davis Law Review symposium edition, Volume 43, No. 3, February 2010, "The Honorable John Paul Stevens."

The article posits that Justice Stevens's embrace of race-conscious measures to ensure continued diversity stands in tension with his early rejections of affirmative action programs. The contrast suggests a linear movement toward a progressive interpretation of the Constitution’s equality guarantee; however, examination of Stevens's writings in biographical context reveal …

When Prayer Trumps Politics: The Politics And Demographics Of Renewable Portfolio Standards, Joshua P. Fershee

Joshua P Fershee

This Article seeks to understand who supports renewable energy mandates (and why) by analyzing a variety trends found in political and socio-economic data by state, as well as by state renewable energy opportunities (or the lack of such opportunities). The review finds little shocking in the way of politics: Democratic states tend to favor mandates and Republican states tend not to have mandates. Somewhat surprisingly, the correlations among states with wind and solar resources (as well as most of the demographic data) ranged from limited to inconclusive. In religion, however, a strong trend developed. The states with higher Catholic populations …

Collateral Consequences Of Criminal Convictions: Confronting Issues Of Race And Dignity, Michael Pinard

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the racial dimensions of the various collateral consequences that attach to criminal convictions in the United States. The consequences include ineligibility for public and government-assisted housing, public benefits and various forms of employment, as well as civic exclusions such as ineligibility for jury service and felon disenfranchisement. To test its hypothesis that these penalties, both historically and contemporarily, are rooted in race, the article looks to England and Wales, Canada and South Africa. These countries have criminal justice systems similar to the United States’, have been influenced significantly by United States’ criminal justice practices in recent years, …

Getting A Fix On Cocaine Sentencing Policy: Reforming The Sentencing Scheme Of The Anti-Drug Abuse Act Of 1986, Alyssa L. Beaver

Fordham Law Review

The now-infamous “War on Drugs” campaign of the 1980s culminated in the adoption of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which included a provision for a one-hundred-to-one sentencing ratio of powder cocaine to crack cocaine. This ratio provides that the penalty for a crime involving five or ten grams of crack cocaine is equivalent to the sentence for a crime involving five hundred or one thousand grams of powder cocaine. This structure has led to a racial disparity in sentencing because African Americans are more often charged with a crack cocaine offense than Caucasians, who are usually indicted for powder …

The Process Is The Problem: Lessons Learned From United States Drug Sentencing Reform, Erik S. Siebert

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Conversation About Problem-Solving Courts: Take 2, Jane M. Spinak

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. Paul Butler’s Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hip Theory of Justice makes an important contribution to the debate about the crime policies that have produced this result. Butler began his career as a federal prosecutor who believed that the best way to serve Washington, D.C’s low-income African-American community was to punish its law-breakers. His experiences—including being prosecuted for a crime himself—eventually led him to conclude that America incarcerates far too many nonviolent offenders, especially drug offenders. Let’s Get Free offers a set of reforms for reducing …

Do Ugly Criminals Receive Harsher Sentences? An Analysis Of Lookism In The Criminal Justice System, Kelly Beck

Business and Economics Honors Papers

For many years, researchers have attempted to find a link between beauty and labor market outcomes. Although many important findings have been noted in these studies, the beauty analysis utilized was a subjective measurement. This subjective method, while important, may have external factors creating bias in the rating itself. In this study, the impact of beauty is applied to criminals and their sentences. Using a computer based symmetry measurement tool, an objective beauty measurement will be utilized. This study will seek to uncover whether or not criminals who are less attractive, measured through facial symmetry, receive harsher prison sentences than …

Procedures For Public Law Remediation In School-To-Prison Pipeline Litigation: Lessons Learned From Antoine V. Winner School District, Catherine Y. Kim

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Defensible Defense?: Reexamining Castle Doctrine Statutes, Benjamin Levin

Publications

Recent years have seen a proliferation of so-called “castle doctrine” statutes – laws that provide home dwellers with more expansive self-defense protections if they resort to lethal force in confrontations with intruders. The passage of such laws and subsequent uses of the defense have captured the public imagination, prompting significant media attention, as well as skeptical and critical scholarship from the legal academic community.

Considering the current prevalence of castle laws and the often polarized nature of the debate concerning their application, this Article argues that it is important to excavate the doctrine from the culture wars rhetoric in which …

Taking A Stand In A Not-So-Perfect World: What’S A Critical Supporter Of Problem-Solving Courts To Do?, Corey Shdaimah

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Net-Widening On Minority And Indigent Drug Offenders: A Critique Of Drug Courts, Joel Gross

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Ricci V. Destefano: A Masculinities Theory Analysis, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This Article applies masculinity theory to explore the aspects Ricci v. Destefano and its political reverberations. Empirical evidence showed that virtually all written tests have a disparate impact on minorities, that a neighboring city had reached less discriminatory results using a different weighting system, and that other fire departments used assessment centers to judge firefighters' qualifications for promotions. While the black male and all female firefighters were made invisible by the case and the testimony, the fact that Ricci's and Vargas' testimony lionized a particularly traditional form of heterosexual masculinity was also invisible. While the command presence required of a …

Race Audits, Robin A. Lenhardt

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court’s race jurisprudence suffers from a stunning lack of imagination where possibilities for meaningful local government involvement in combating structural racial inequality are concerned. Cases such as Parents. and Ricci limit dramatically the freedom that localities have to address racial inequity within their borders. Instead of constraints on local efforts in the race context, Professor Lenhardt argues that what we need, if persistent racial inequalities are ever to be eliminated, is greater innovation and experimentation. In this article, Professor Lenhardt thus introduces an extra-judicial tool called the race audit, which would permit individual cities or a regional …

A Defensible Defense?: Reexamining Castle Doctrine Statutes, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Recent years have seen a proliferation of so-called “castle doctrine” statutes – laws that provide home dwellers with more expansive self-defense protections if they resort to lethal force in confrontations with intruders. The passage of such laws and subsequent uses of the defense have captured the public imagination, prompting significant media attention, as well as skeptical and critical scholarship from the legal academic community. Considering the current prevalence of castle laws and the often polarized nature of the debate concerning their application, this Article argues that it is important to excavate the doctrine from the culture wars rhetoric in which …

Slavery In The White Psyche : How Contemporary White Americans Remember And Making Meaning Of Slavery : A Project Based Upon Independent Investigation, Ryan Nelson Parker

Theses, Dissertations, and Projects

This qualitative study explored how contemporary white Americans remember and make meaning of U.S. slavery and assessed if there is psychological conflict in relationship to slavery. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 participants who identify as "white" and were born and raised in the United States. Participants were asked to reflect on their memories of learning about, talking about, and knowing about the history of slavery; to share their internal representations of slavery and how they imagine their familial, personal, and imagined relationship with slavery; to report their beliefs about the impact of slavery on themselves personally and on contemporary …

Teaching The Tensions, Angela P. Harris

Angela P Harris

No abstract provided.