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Full-Text Articles in Law
Considering Caretakers: An Explicit Argument For Downward Departures During Federal Sentencing Mitigation For Caretakers Of Children, Danielle Sparber Bukacheski
Considering Caretakers: An Explicit Argument For Downward Departures During Federal Sentencing Mitigation For Caretakers Of Children, Danielle Sparber Bukacheski
University of Miami Law Review
The sentencing stage of the federal legal system provides defendants with an opportunity to articulate why the sentencing judge is justified in imposing less severe sentences. Yet, under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, sentencing judges have been restricted in the characteristics and background information that can be utilized when imposing a downward departure from the recommended Guidelines sentence. More specifically, there is great variability regarding the extent to which family-related circumstances can be utilized as justification for a downward departure due to the Sentencing Commission’s ambiguous language. Considering the damaging effects of incarceration on children when a caretaker is physically removed …
Juvenile Justice & Diminished Criminal Culpability, Mitchell F. Crusto
Juvenile Justice & Diminished Criminal Culpability, Mitchell F. Crusto
University of Miami Law Review
When regulating the bad, albeit illegal, choices made by minors, the law is conflicted. On the one hand, we have a clear national policy to ensure the safety of and to promote the positive development of our young people, yet we simultaneously criminalize minors who make bad choices. This conundrum raises a quintessential jurisprudential flaw in our legal system: We lack a unifying, overarching principle that guides the law’s relationship with minors. In a companion piece, I pose and explore such a unifying principle, which I coin as the “best interest of the minor” standard (“BIMS”). Consequently, this Article applies …
Energy Justice And Renewable Rikers, Rebecca Bratspies
Energy Justice And Renewable Rikers, Rebecca Bratspies
University of Miami Law Review
Unsustainable energy practices generate the lion’s share of global carbon emissions as well as staggering levels of deadly particulate pollution. Replacing the current dirty, fossil fuel-based system with affordable, clean energy is both a human rights imperative and a climate change necessity. This transition, which has already begun, creates the opportunity to do things differently. By confronting the structural racism embedded in existing energy structures, we can build a just transition rather than just a transition. This Article uses New York City’s Renewable Rikers project as a case study to explore how we might take advantage of the intersections between …
Can Covid-19 Teach Us How To End Mass Incarceration?, Amy Fettig
Can Covid-19 Teach Us How To End Mass Incarceration?, Amy Fettig
University of Miami Law Review
In this essay, the author argues that federal, state and local government response to the COVID-19 epidemic in prisons and jails was largely incompetent, inhumane, and contrary to sound public health policy, resulting in preventable death and suffering for both incarcerated people and corrections staff. However, the lessons learned from these failures provide a roadmap for policy priorities and legal reform in our ongoing need to decarcerate and end the era of mass incarceration, including: (1) rolling back extreme sentences, recalibrating sentences generally and providing for “second look” mechanisms to those currently serving sentences beyond 10 years; (2) ensuring that …
Debt Bondage: How Private Collection Agencies Keep The Formerly Incarcerated Tethered To The Criminal Justice System, Bryan L. Adamson
Debt Bondage: How Private Collection Agencies Keep The Formerly Incarcerated Tethered To The Criminal Justice System, Bryan L. Adamson
Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy
This Article examines the constitutionality of statutes which allow courts to transfer outstanding legal financial obligations to private debt collection agencies. In Washington State, the clerk of courts can transfer the legal financial obligation of a formerly incarcerated person if he or she is only thirty days late making a payment. Upon transfer, the debt collection agencies can assess a “collection fee” of up to 50% of the first $100.000 of the unpaid legal financial obligation, and up to 35% of the unpaid debt over $100,000. This fee becomes part of the LFO debt imposed at sentencing, and like that …
Replacing Death With Life? The Rise Of Lwop In The Context Of Abolitionist Campaigns In The United States, Michelle Miao
Replacing Death With Life? The Rise Of Lwop In The Context Of Abolitionist Campaigns In The United States, Michelle Miao
Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy
On the basis of fifty-four elite interviews[1] with legislators, judges, attorneys, and civil society advocates as well as a state-by-state data survey, this Article examines the complex linkage between the two major penal trends in American society during the past decades: a declining use of capital punishment across the United States and a growing population of prisoners serving “life without the possibility of parole” or “LWOP” sentences. The main contribution of the research is threefold. First, the research proposes to redefine the boundary between life and death in relation to penal discourses regarding the death penalty and LWOP. LWOP …
Bioethics, Law, And The Opioid Crisis: Revisiting The Concept Of Incarceration Versus Rehabilitation, Zachary J. Krauss
Bioethics, Law, And The Opioid Crisis: Revisiting The Concept Of Incarceration Versus Rehabilitation, Zachary J. Krauss
Bioethics in Faith and Practice
The opioid crisis has taken America by storm and is causing more deaths each year than ever originally anticipated. Our current approach to addressing the opioid crisis involves two separate approaches, one from the medical/rehabilitation side of the problem, and one from the criminal justice side. This article serves as a revisiting of the discussion of the intricate balance that must be reached between rehabilitation and incarceration in order to adequately address the problem.
“We Are Still Citizens, Despite Our Regrettable Past” Why A Conviction Should Not Impact Your Right To Vote, Jaime Hawk, Breanne Schuster
“We Are Still Citizens, Despite Our Regrettable Past” Why A Conviction Should Not Impact Your Right To Vote, Jaime Hawk, Breanne Schuster
Seattle Journal for Social Justice
No abstract provided.
Buying Into Prisons, And Selling Kids Short, Lizbet Simmons
Buying Into Prisons, And Selling Kids Short, Lizbet Simmons
The Modern American
No abstract provided.
The Process Is The Problem: Lessons Learned From United States Drug Sentencing Reform, Erik S. Siebert
The Process Is The Problem: Lessons Learned From United States Drug Sentencing Reform, Erik S. Siebert
University of Richmond Law Review
No abstract provided.