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Full-Text Articles in Law
Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J. J. Prescott, Benjamin David Pyle, Sonja B. Starr
Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J. J. Prescott, Benjamin David Pyle, Sonja B. Starr
Faculty Scholarship
People convicted of violent crimes constitute a majority of the imprisoned population but are generally ignored by existing policies aimed at reducing mass incarceration. Serious efforts to shrink the large footprint of the prison system will need to recognize this fact. This point is especially pressing at the time of this writing, as states and the federal system consider large-scale prison releases motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those convicted of violent crimes constitute a large majority of older prisoners, who are extremely vulnerable to the spread of the virus behind bars. Excluding them from protective measures will deeply undermine those …
Understanding Recent Spikes And Longer Trends In American Murders, Jeffery Fagan, Daniel Richman
Understanding Recent Spikes And Longer Trends In American Murders, Jeffery Fagan, Daniel Richman
Faculty Scholarship
On September 7, 2016, four of the nation’s newspapers of record weighed in on the connected crises in crime and policing. The New York Times revealed the tensions between the Mayor’s office in Chicago and several community and professional groups over a plan to overhaul Chicago’s police disciplinary board – a plan developed in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed teenager, Laquan McDonald, and the release of a video of that killing. The Wall Street Journal related a vigorous defense of New York City’s “broken windows” policing strategy – a strategy that has been a recurring source of …
Executions, Deterrence And Homicide: A Tale Of Two Cities, Franklin Zimring, Jeffrey Fagan, David T. Johnson
Executions, Deterrence And Homicide: A Tale Of Two Cities, Franklin Zimring, Jeffrey Fagan, David T. Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
We compare homicide rates in two quite similar cities with vastly different execution risks. Singapore had an execution rate close to 1 per million per year until an explosive twentyfold increase in 1994-95 and 1996-97 to a level that we show was probably the highest in the world. Then over the next 11 years, Singapore executions dropped by about 95%. Hong Kong, by contrast,has no executions all during the last generation and abolished capital punishment in 1993. Homicide levels and trends are remarkably similar in these two cities over the 35 years after 1973, with neither the surge in Singapore …
Self-Defense And The Psychotic Aggressor, George P. Fletcher, Luis E. Chiesa
Self-Defense And The Psychotic Aggressor, George P. Fletcher, Luis E. Chiesa
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter presents an authoritative overview of self-defense against the psychotic aggressor. More specifically, it examines whether one can justifiably kill a faultless, insane assailant to save himself or another from imminent and serious harm. It considers the disagreement among scholars as to whether the defensive response should be considered justified or merely excused, or whether the specific ground of acquittal should be self-defense or necessity. The chapter includes comments by some of the nation's top legal scholars from the field of criminal law, tackling topics such as proportionality, self-defense against wrongful attack, justification of homicide against innocent aggressors without …
Dangerous Games And The Criminal Law, Daniel B. Yeager
Dangerous Games And The Criminal Law, Daniel B. Yeager
Faculty Scholarship
This essay means to correct the ways in which the law of homicide deals with lucky winners or survivors of dangerous games that end in the deaths of unlucky (dead) "losers" or even unluckier non-participants. Drag racing and Russian roulette are my focus, not only because they are so frequently litigated, but also because most other (unlawful) excessive risk-taking ventures are not, grammatically, what we mean when we say "game." It is not so much my intention to evaluate the role that "moral luck" plays generally in the world or specifically in the criminal law. It is my position that …