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Full-Text Articles in Law
Lost In A Legal Thicket, Paul H. Robinson
Lost In A Legal Thicket, Paul H. Robinson
All Faculty Scholarship
This op-ed piece argues that criminal law recodification is badly needed in the states and the federal system, but that prosecutors stand out as the group who appear to regularly oppose it.
Newsroom: Horwitz On Mandatory Minimum Sentences, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Newsroom: Horwitz On Mandatory Minimum Sentences, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Life of the Law School (1993- )
No abstract provided.
Blinding Prosecutors To Defendants' Race: A Policy Proposal To Reduce Unconscious Bias In The Criminal Justice System, Shima Baughman, Sunita Sah, Christopher T. Robertson
Blinding Prosecutors To Defendants' Race: A Policy Proposal To Reduce Unconscious Bias In The Criminal Justice System, Shima Baughman, Sunita Sah, Christopher T. Robertson
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
Racial minorities are disproportionately imprisoned in the United States. This disparity is unlikely to be due solely to differences in criminal behavior. Behavioral science research has documented that prosecutors harbor unconscious racial biases. These unconscious biases play a role whenever prosecutors exercise their broad discretion, such as in choosing what crimes to charge and when negotiating plea bargains. To reduce this risk of unconscious racial bias, we propose a policy change: Prosecutors should be blinded to the race of criminal defendants wherever feasible. This could be accomplished by removing information identifying or suggesting the defendant’s race from police dossiers shared …
Judicial Participation In Plea Bargaining: A Dispute Resolution Perspective, Rishi Batra
Judicial Participation In Plea Bargaining: A Dispute Resolution Perspective, Rishi Batra
Faculty Articles
There is a common perception that judges do not or should not play a role in the criminal plea bargaining discussions between prosecutors and defense counsel. However, in many state jurisdictions, judicial participation is allowed or even encouraged by statute or by case law. This Article briefly summarizes some of the issues with the plea bargaining process, including how structural issues with the way defense counsel are appointed and compensated, along with the power of prosecutors, makes good representation for defendants less likely. By then performing a fifty-state survey of rules for judicial participation in plea bargaining, the Article explicates …
Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime, David M. Uhlmann
Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime, David M. Uhlmann
Articles
In January 1991, just four weeks after joining the Justice Department’sEnvironmental Crimes Section as an entry-level attorney, I traveled to NewOrleans to attend an environmental enforcement conference. The conferencewas attended by hundreds of criminal prosecutors and civil attorneys from theJustice Department, as well as enforcement officials from the EnvironmentalProtection Agency (“EPA”). It was a propitious time for environmental protec-tion efforts in the United States. Less than two months earlier, President GeorgeH. W. Bush had signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, culminating aremarkable twenty-year period that created the modern environmental law sys-tem in the United States. My new office, …