Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
Junk Science At Sentencing, Maneka Sinha
Junk Science At Sentencing, Maneka Sinha
Faculty Scholarship
Junk science used in criminal trials has contributed to hundreds of wrongful convictions. But the problem is much worse than that. Junk science does not only harm criminal defendants who go to trial, but also the overwhelming majority of defendants—over ninety-five percent—who plead guilty, skip trial, and proceed straight to sentencing.
Scientific, technical, and other specialized evidence (“STS evidence”) is used regularly, and with increasing frequency, at sentencing. Despite this, Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and its state equivalents—which help filter unreliable STS evidence at trials—do not apply at the critical sentencing stage. In fact, at sentencing, no meaningful admissibility …
Criminalization And Normalization: Some Thoughts About Offenders With Serious Mental Illness, Richard C. Boldt
Criminalization And Normalization: Some Thoughts About Offenders With Serious Mental Illness, Richard C. Boldt
Faculty Scholarship
Response to Professor E. Lea Johnston, Reconceptualizing Criminal Justice Reform for Offenders with Serious Mental Illness
Abstract
While Professor Johnston is persuasive that clinical factors such as diagnosis and treatment history are not, in most cases, predictive by themselves of criminal behavior, her concession that those clinical factors are associated with a constellation of risks and needs that are predictive of criminal system involvement complicates her efforts to maintain a clear boundary between the criminalization theory and the normalization thesis. Indeed, Professor Johnston’s article contains a brief section in which she identifies “possible justifications” for the specialized programs that are …