Law Commons^™

Debiasing Criminal Justice, Sandra Guerra Thompson, Nicole Bremner Cásarez

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minnesota inspired a summer of protests in 2020, followed by a call for racial reckoning and a professed commitment to reform criminal justice. Many have condemned the “systemic racism” reflected in countless demographic measures. From killings of unarmed men by the police at the front end of the criminal justice system to incarceration rates at the back end, the statistics show stark disparities along racial lines. These disparities are held up as evidence of racial bias in the system.

Statements about racial bias may be intended as an indictment of a …

Rehabilitating Charge Bargaining, Nancy Amoury Combs

Faculty Publications

Nobody likes plea bargaining. Scholars worldwide have excoriated the practice, calling it coercive and unjust, among other pejorative adjectives. Despite its unpopularity, plea bargaining constitutes a central component of the American criminal justice system, and the United States has exported the practice to a host of countries worldwide. Indeed, plea bargaining has even appeared at international criminal tribunals, created to prosecute genocide and crimes against humanity--the gravest crimes known to humankind. Although all forms of plea bargaining are unpopular, commentators reserve their harshest criticism for charge bargaining because charge bargaining is said to distort the factual basis of the defendant's …

The Opioid Doctors: Is Losing Your License A Sufficient Penalty For Dealing Drugs?, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Publications

Imagine that a medical board revokes a doctor's license both because he has been peddling thousands of pills of opioids and also because he was caught with a few grams of cocaine. The doctor is a family physician, not a pain management specialist. Yet, during a one-year period he wrote more than 4,000 prescriptions for opioids--roughly eighteen scripts per day. Patients came from multiple states and from hundreds of miles away to get oxycodone prescriptions. And the doctor prescribed large quantities of opioids--up to 240 pills per month--to patients with no record of previously needing narcotic painkillers. Both federal and …

The Changing Role Of The American Prosecutor, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Theories Of Prosecution, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

For decades, legal commentators sounded the alarm about the tremendous power wielded by prosecutors. Scholars went so far as to identify uncurbed prosecutorial discretion as the primary source of the criminal justice system’s many flaws. Over the past two years, however, the conversation shifted. With the emergence of a new wave of “progressive prosecutors,” scholars increasingly hail broad prosecutorial discretion as a promising mechanism for criminal justice reform.

The abrupt shift from decrying to embracing prosecutorial power highlights a curious void at the center of criminal justice thought. There is no widely accepted normative theory of the prosecutorial role. As …

Defending Progressive Prosecution: A Review Of Charged By Emily Bazelon, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

"Progressive prosecutors" are taking over District Attorney's Offices across the nation with a mandate to reform the criminal Justice system from the inside. Emily Bazelon's new book, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, chronicles this potentially transformative moment in American criminal Justice.

This Essay highlights the importance of Charged to modern criminal justice debates and leverages its concrete framing to offer a generally applicable theory of prosecutor-driven criminal justice reform. The theory seeks to reconcile reformers' newfound embrace of prosecutorial discretion with long-standing worries, both inside and outside the academy, about the dangerous …

How Do We Know If Prosecutors Are Doing A Good Job?, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.