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Full-Text Articles in Law
Peer Review: Navigating Uncertainty In The United States Jury System, Anna Offit
Peer Review: Navigating Uncertainty In The United States Jury System, Anna Offit
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
This Article examines American prosecutors’ approaches to uncertainty during voir dire. At different points during trial preparation— and during jury selection itself—lawyers draw on multiple interpretive systems to make sense of ordinary citizens. Taking Assistant United States Attorneys in a federal jurisdiction in the Northeast United States as a case study, and drawing on ethnographic research, I focus on three systems prosecutors alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) use to evaluate jurors: (1) probabilistic and evaluative analogies, (2) juror-types generated from the details of criminal cases, and (3) local knowledge stemming from prosecutors’ relationships and experiences outside of the courtroom. I show …
Infinity Goes On Trial: Sanism, Pretextuality, And The Representation Of Defendants With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin
Infinity Goes On Trial: Sanism, Pretextuality, And The Representation Of Defendants With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin
Articles & Chapters
This paper, presented to the mid-winter meeting of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (Austin, TX, 2/18/16), explains why it is essential for lawyers representing criminal defendants with mental disabilities to understand the meanings and contexts of sanism - a largely invisible and largely socially acceptable irrational prejudice of the same quality and character of other irrational prejudices that cause (and are reflected in) prevailing social attitudes of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic bigotry - and pretextuality - the means by which courts regularly accept (either implicitly or explicitly) testimonial dishonesty, countenance liberty deprivations in disingenuous ways that bear …