Law Commons^™

An Overlooked Key To Reversing Mass Incarceration: Reforming The Law To Reduce Prosecutorial Power In Plea Bargaining, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

The need to “do something” about mass incarceration is now widely recognized. When President Obama announced plans to reform federal criminal legislation, he focused on the need to change how we handle non-violent drug offenders and parole violators. Previously, former Attorney General Eric Holder announced policies to make federal prosecutors “smart on crime.” These changes reflect, as President Obama noted, the increasing bipartisan consensus on the need for reform and the need to reduce our incarceration rates. However, proposals about what to reform, such as President Obama’s, tend to focus on some parts of criminal sentencing and on prosecutorial behavior …

Lessons Learned From Ferguson: Ending Abusive Collection Of Criminal Justice Debt, Neil L. Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

On March 4, 2015, the Department of Justice released its scathing report of the Ferguson Police Department calling for “an entire reorientation of law enforcement in Ferguson” and demanding that Ferguson “replace revenue-driven policing with a system grounded in the principles of community policing and police legitimacy, in which people are equally protected and treated with compassion, regardless of race.” Unfortunately, abusive collection of criminal justice debt is not limited to Ferguson. This Article, prepared for a discussion group at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference in July 2015, identifies the key findings in the Department of Justice’s report …

What's Law Got To Do With It? Plea Bargaining Reform After Lafler And Frye, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium article responds to the question, what's left of the law in the wake of ADR? The article addresses this question in the context of the criminal justice system in the United States. As with civil cases, few criminal cases go to trial. Negotiated agreements through plea bargaining have been the predominate form of case resolution since at least the mid-twentieth century. Plea bargaining, as with other forms of alternative dispute resolution, is an informal process that operates largely outside the formal legal system. Plea bargains are rarely negotiated on the record in open court. Instead, they are usually …

A Free Start: Community-Based Organizations As An Antidote To The Mass Incarceration Of Women Pretrial, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

In 1973, the feminist newsmagazine Off Our Backs featured a segment on women in jail awaiting trial in Washington, D.C. Many of the women faced minor charges, such as soliciting prostitution, but remained in detention because they could not afford to pay even very low amounts of monetary bail. The magazine interviewed Myrna Raeder, then a fellow at Georgetown, and other attorneys involved in a class action suit against D.C. corrections, who argued that low-income women were unjustly subjected to the punitive effects of pretrial detention, in violation of their due process rights. Raeder reported to the newsmagazine, “as a …

Changing Punishments For Property Offenses, To Change The Lives Of Women In Need, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

This year the Supreme Court denied certiorari to Cecelia Cathleen Rodriguez, a 61- year old woman from Oklahoma sentenced to life in prison. Her crime was theft of two purses from a department store. Ms. Rodriguez hoped that the Supreme Court would see fit to upend her conviction or declare her sentence excessive. Ms. Rodriguez's family reported to the state court that she has struggled with heroin addiction since the 1960s, leading to numerous arrests on petty charges. The majority of her extensive record was composed of petty thefts, drug possession, and other nonviolent offenses. The stolen bags in this, …

The Law And Economics Of Fluctuating Criminal Tendencies And Incapacitation, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analyses of criminal law are frequently and heavily criticized for being unable to explain many criminal law rules and doctrines that people find intuitively just. Existing economic models cannot properly explain, for instance, why criminal law distinguishes between (i) repeat offenders and first-time offenders, (ii) murder and voluntary manslaughter, and (iii) remorseful and non-remorseful offenders.

In this Article, I propose a new and richer economic theory of crime that captures the rationales behind these practices, and potentially behind many other important criminal law principles and doctrines. Unlike an overwhelming majority of previous economic analyses, my theory accounts not only …

Clarity And Confusion: Rico's Recent Trips To The United States Supreme Court, Randy D. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The complicated structure of the Racketeer and Corrupt Organization Act has bedeviled courts courts and litigants since its adoption four decades ago. Two questions have recurred with some frequency. First, is victim reliance an element of a civil RICO claim predicated on allegations of fraud? Second, what is the difference between an illegal association-in-fact and an ordinary civil conspiracy? In a series of three recent cases, the United States Supreme Court brought much needed clarity to the first question. But in another recent case, the Court upended decades of circuit-court precedent holding that an actionable association-in-fact must be embody a …

Hélène Cixous's The Perjured City: Nonprosecution Alternatives To Collective Violence, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

In instances of collective violence — apartheid in South Africa, mass killings in Rwanda, and other crimes against humanity such as slavery — what response provides justice? How can justice be achieved under such a system? Legal justice through prosecution would be unjust. This opens the possibility of nonprosecution alternatives involving forgiveness. Hélène Cixous’s play about forgiveness as an alternative to criminal prosecution, The Perjured City: Or, the Awakening of the Furies, was written in response to an actual case of failed justice in France, known as the Bad Blood Scandal. The play provides a model of forgiveness and a …

The Insanity Defense In Juvenile Delinquency Proceedings, Maxine M. Harrington, Ann O'Regan Keary

Faculty Scholarship

The insanity defense in delinquency proceedings poses an important legal dilemma concerning the rights of children in the juvenile justice system. Indeed, beyond the purely legal concerns of the rights of an accused juvenile, the concept of criminal responsibility in the context of juvenile court proceedings raises perhaps an even more important issue of what is the best model for dealing with mentally ill juvenile offenders, both from the juvenile's viewpoint and that of society as a whole. It is our opinion that not only does the insanity defense have an appropriate role in juvenile proceedings, but that legal as …