Law Commons^™

Law Enforcement Organization Relationships With Prosecutors, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Although police departments and prosecutor’s o􀁽ces must closely collaborate, their organizational roles and networks, and the distinctive perspectives of their personnel, will inevitably and regularly lead to forceful dialogue and disruptive friction. Such friction can occasionally undermine thoughtful deliberation about public safety, the rule of law, and community values. Viewed more broadly, however, these interactions promote just such deliberation, which will become even healthier when the dialogue breaks out of the closed world of criminal justice bureaucracies and includes the public to which these bureaucracies are ultimately responsible. This chapter explores such organizational interactions and their value.

The Intersection Between Young Adult Sentencing And Mass Incarceration, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This Article connects two growing categories of academic literature and policy reform: arguments for treating young adults in the criminal justice system less severely than older adults because of evidence showing brain development and maturation continue until the mid-twenties; and arguments calling for reducing mass incarceration and identifying various mechanisms to do so. These categories overlap, but research has not previously built in-depth connections between the two.

Connecting the two bodies of literature helps identify and strengthen arguments for reform. First, changing charging, detention, and sentencing practices for young adults is one important tool to reduce mass incarceration. Young adults …

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

Faculty Scholarship

In 2014, many states revisited disproportionately high sentencing schemes for low-level property offenses. Voters in states across the country rallied in favor of reductions in penalties for low-level, nonviolent property offenses, such as theft, check fraud, and larceny. Bipartisan efforts to ease the financial burden of incarceration have lead to criminal justice reforms in states like California, Oregon, and Mississippi. Advocates for women in the criminal justice system have embarked on campaigns to frame reforms as not just a cost-cutting measure, but also as a moral imperative.

For many women, primarily women with little money, relatively low-value property offense convictions …

Overcriminalization For Lack Of Better Options: A Celebration Of Bill Stuntz, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

The unity of Bill Stuntz's character – his profound integrity – makes it easy to move from a celebration of his friendship (which I’ve treasured since we first met back in 1985) to one of his scholarship, for creativity, wisdom, and humility are strengths not just of Bill himself but of his work. Even as his broad brush strokes have fundamentally advanced our understanding of the interplay between substantive criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice institutions over time, Bill's work – like Bill himself – welcomes and endures sustained engagement. Humility is appropriate for me, too, as I offer …

Building Pathways Of Possibility From Criminal Justice To College: College Initiative As A Catalyst Linking Individual And Systemic Change, Susan P. Sturm, Kate Skolnick, Tina Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Across the United States, communities, especially marginalized and low income communities, face challenges resulting from the “school-to-prison pipeline”—a continuum of conditions increasing the probability that people from such marginalized communities, particularly black men, will find themselves in prison rather than college.1 Dismantling this pipeline has become a significant national focus of advocates and policy makers. In New York City, a network has emerged in the last ten years to focus on building a new pipeline from criminal justice to college. This network focuses on rebuilding the lives of the over 70 thousand people who have fallen into the school-to-prison pipeline. …

Post-Modern Meditations On Punishment: On The Limits Of Reason And The Virtues Of Randomization, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter presents an authoritative overview of punishment, with particular emphasis on the limits of reason and the virtue of randomization. It includes comments by some of the nation's top legal scholars from the field of criminal law, tackling topics such as the Enlightenment ideal of social engineering through punishment and the role of chance in the administration of criminal justice.

Less Is Better: Justice Stevens And The Narrowed Death Penalty, James S. Liebman, Lawrence C. Marshall

Faculty Scholarship

In a recent speech to the American Bar Association, Justice John Paul Stevens "issued an unusually stinging criticism of capital punishment." Although he "stopped short of calling for an end to the death penalty," Justice Stevens catalogued a number of its "'serious flaws,'" including several procedures that the full Court has reviewed and upheld over his dissent – selecting capital jurors in a manner that excludes those with qualms about the death penalty, permitting elected state judges to second-guess jurors when they decline to impose the death penalty, permitting states to premise death verdicts on "victim impact statements," tolerating sub-par …

Crime, Law, And The Community: Dynamics Of Incarceration In New York City, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Random Family (LeBlanc 2003) tells the story of a tangled family and social network of young people in New York City in which prison threads through their lives since childhood. Early on, we meet a young man named Cesar, who sold small amounts of crack and heroin in the streets near his home in the Bronx. During one of his many spells in jail, Cesar sees his father pushing a cafeteria cart in the Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York City’s jail. Cesar had not seen his father in many years, but he was not very surprised to see him …

A Broken System, Part Ii: Why There Is So Much Error In Capital Cases And What Can Be Done About It, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Andrew Gelman, Valerie West, Garth Davies, Alexander Kiss

Faculty Scholarship

There is growing awareness that serious, reversible error permeates America’s death penalty system, putting innocent lives at risk, heightening the suffering of victims, leaving killers at large, wasting tax dollars, and failing citizens, the courts and the justice system.

Our June 2000 Report shows how often mistakes occur and how serious it is: 68% of all death verdicts imposed and fully reviewed during the 1973-1995 study period were reversed by courts due to serious errors.

Analyses presented for the first time here reveal that 76% of the reversals at the two appeal stages where data are available for study were …

A Broken System: Error Rates In Capital Cases, 1973-1995, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

There is a growing bipartisan consensus that flaws in America's death-penalty system have reached crisis proportions. Many fear that capital trials put people on death row who don't belong there. Others say capital appeals take too long. This report – the first statistical study ever undertaken of modern American capital appeals (4,578 of them in state capital cases between 1973 and 1995) – suggests that both claims are correct.

Capital sentences do spend a long time under judicial review. As this study documents, however, judicial review takes so long precisely because American capital sentences are so persistently and systematically fraught …