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Full-Text Articles in Law
Griffin V. Illinois: Justice Independent Of Wealth, Neil Sobol
Griffin V. Illinois: Justice Independent Of Wealth, Neil Sobol
Faculty Scholarship
More than sixty years ago in Griffin v. Illinois, Justice Hugo Black opined that equal justice cannot exist as long as “the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.” While Griffin dealt with the limited issue of the inability of a defendant to pay for an appellate transcript, the Supreme Court and legislatures would subsequently extend Black’s equal justice analysis to cases involving other forms of criminal justice debt assessed at trial, appeal, incarceration, and probation. Despite the promise of these judicial and legislative pronouncements, indigent defendants, relative to defendants with financial …
Drug Conspiracy Sentencing And Social Injustice, Emilie Kurth
Drug Conspiracy Sentencing And Social Injustice, Emilie Kurth
University of Colorado Law Review
The D.C. Circuit in United States v. Stoddard confronted a landmine of criminal and socioeconomic justice issues when it held that mandatory minimum sentences for drug conspiracy offenses should be imposed based on the amount of drugs attributable to the individual defendant (the individualized approach) as opposed to the amount of drugs attributable to the conspiracy as a whole (the conspiracy-wide approach). This decision reflects a nationwide circuit split implicating the courts and lawmakers' ideological balancing of the issues of justice, liberty, public safety, and equity. This Comment discusses Stoddard as well as the circuit split in its current form …