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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Incremental Retributive Impact Of A Death Sentence Over Life Without Parole, Michael L. Radelet
The Incremental Retributive Impact Of A Death Sentence Over Life Without Parole, Michael L. Radelet
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In this paper, the author takes a closer look at retribution, which is the primary justification for the death penalty today in the United States and the main component of the additional punishment imposed by the death penalty over and above life imprisonment without parole (LWOP). While all criminal punishments, to varying degrees, punish both the inmate and his or her family, this paper argues that the death penalty’s added punishment over LWOP often punishes the family just as much as the inmate, and after the execution the full brunt of the punishment falls on the family. This added impact …
Portmanteau Ascendant: Post-Release Regulations And Sex Offender Recidivism, J. J. Prescott
Portmanteau Ascendant: Post-Release Regulations And Sex Offender Recidivism, J. J. Prescott
Articles
The purported purpose of sex offender post-release regulations (e.g., community notification and residency restrictions) is the reduction of sex offender recidivism. On their face, these laws seem well-designed and likely to be effective. A simple economic framework of offender behavior can be used to formalize these basic intuitions: in essence, post-release regulations either increase the probability of detection or increase the immediate cost of engaging in the prohibited activity (or both), and so should reduce the likelihood of criminal behavior. These laws aim to incapacitate people outside of prison. Yet, empirical researchers to date have found essentially no reliable evidence …
Criminal Sanctions In The Defense Of The Innocent, Ehud Guttel, Doron Teichman
Criminal Sanctions In The Defense Of The Innocent, Ehud Guttel, Doron Teichman
Michigan Law Review
Under the formal rules of criminal procedure, fact finders are required to apply a uniform standard of proof in all criminal cases. Experimental studies as well as real world examples indicate, however, that fact finders often adjust the evidentiary threshold for conviction in accordance with the severity of the applicable sanction. All things being equal, the higher the sanction, the higher the standard of proof that fact finders will apply in order to convict. Building on this insight, this Article introduces a new paradigm for criminal punishments-a paradigm that focuses on designing penalties that will reduce the risk of unsubstantiated …
Do Sex Offender Registries Make Us Less Safe?, J. J. Prescott
Do Sex Offender Registries Make Us Less Safe?, J. J. Prescott
Articles
State legislatures enacted sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws with the explicit and exclusive aim of reducing sex offender recidivism. The general idea that we ought to “regulate” released offenders — of any type — to reduce the likelihood of their returning to crime is an attractive one, at least in theory. Criminal recidivism generates significant social harm. Nevertheless, despite their now-widespread use, SORN laws became the norm without any systematic study of their consequences. Admittedly, the logic underlying these laws seems at first difficult to gainsay: if a known sex offender poses even a small risk to a …
Do Sex Offender Registration And Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior?, J. J. Prescott, Jonah E. Rockoff
Do Sex Offender Registration And Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior?, J. J. Prescott, Jonah E. Rockoff
Articles
Sex offenders have become the targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime legislation in the U.S. Two key innovations in recent decades have been registration and notification laws which, respectively, require that convicted sex offenders provide valid contact information to law enforcement authorities, and that information about sex offenders be made public. Using the evolution of state law during the 1990s and 2000s, we study how registration and notification affect the frequency of reported sex offenses and the incidence of such offenses across victims. We find evidence that registration reduces the frequency of sex offenses by providing …
Sentence Reduction As A Remedy For Prosecutorial Misconduct, Sonja B. Starr
Sentence Reduction As A Remedy For Prosecutorial Misconduct, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
Current remedies for prosecutorial misconduct, such as reversal of conviction or dismissal of charges, are rarely granted by courts and thus do not deter prosecutors effectively. Further, such all-or-nothing remedial schemes are often problematic from corrective and expressive perspectives, especially when misconduct has not affected the trial verdict. When granted, these remedies produce windfalls to guilty defendants and provoke public resentment, undermining their expressive value in condemning misconduct. To avoid these windfalls, courts refuse to grant any remedy at all, either refusing to recognize violations or deeming them harmless. This often leaves significant non-conviction-related harms unremedied and egregious prosecutorial misconduct …
Deconstructing International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller
Deconstructing International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller
Michigan Law Review
After nearly fifty years of post-Nuremberg hibernation, international criminal tribunals have returned to the world stage with a vengeance. The Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ("ICTY") in 1993 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ("ICTR") in 1994. Hybrid domestic-international tribunals have been established in Sierra Leone (2000), East Timor (2000), Kosovo (2000), Cambodia (2003), Bosnia (2005), and Lebanon (2007). And, of course, the international community's dream of a permanent tribunal was finally realized in 2002, when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court ("ICC") entered into force. This unprecedented proliferation of international …
Social Science And The Evolving Standards Of Death Penalty Law, Samuel R. Gross, Phoebe C. Ellsworth
Social Science And The Evolving Standards Of Death Penalty Law, Samuel R. Gross, Phoebe C. Ellsworth
Book Chapters
Unlike many of the topics covered in this book, death penalty litigation involves a wide variety of empirical issues. The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides that "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted." But what is a "cruel and unusual punishment?" It could be a punishment that is morally unacceptable to the American people, like cutting off noses or hands. Following the other clauses of the amendment, it could be a punishment that is excessive, in that a lesser penalty would achieve the same ends. For example, if a …
Classic Revisited: Penal Theory In Paradise Lost, Jillisa Brittan, Richard A. Posner
Classic Revisited: Penal Theory In Paradise Lost, Jillisa Brittan, Richard A. Posner
Michigan Law Review
Milton's great poem can be enjoyed as a supernatural adventure story in the epic tradition-indeed almost as a science-fiction fantasy. An incredibly powerful supernatural figure-call him Father-lives on planet Heaven somewhere in outer space, surrounded by lesser supernatural beings, called Angels. Father begets Son asexually, and declares his intent to give him vice regal authority. Infuriated at Son's being promoted over him, the foremost Angel, L leads a third of the Angels in violent rebellion against Father and Son. At first it seems the rebels will best the loyal Angels. But Father sends in Son to defeat the rebels all …
Password Theft: Rethinking An Old Crime In A New Era, Daniel S. Shamah
Password Theft: Rethinking An Old Crime In A New Era, Daniel S. Shamah
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
By putting themselves out in front as the victims, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) helped reshape the governing norms of the times, and as a result, people viewed the act of file-sharing differently. By forcing people to see music downloading as a form of theft, the RIAA was quite successful in deterring it. In the process, they also proposed a radical view of theft that changes our basic economic understandings of the action[...] This paper argues that the RIAA's model for deterring music theft could be successfully used to deter many other forms of computer theft, and, specifically, …
How Qui Tam Actions Could Fight Public Corruption, Aaron R. Petty
How Qui Tam Actions Could Fight Public Corruption, Aaron R. Petty
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This Note argues that public corruption at the state and local levels is a serious problem throughout the United States. Because public corruption decreases confidence in the democratic system at all levels of government, a strong response is necessary. Due to difficulties inherent in the deterrence, detection, and prosecution of state and local corruption, innovative methods to respond to this problem are needed. The author argues that amending the federal criminal statutes most commonly used to prosecute state and local public corruption, to allow a private citizen to bring a qui tam civil action against the public official for violations …
Reflecting On The Subject: A Critique Of The Social Influence Conception Of Deterrence, The Broken Windows Theory, And Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style, Bernard E. Harcourt
Reflecting On The Subject: A Critique Of The Social Influence Conception Of Deterrence, The Broken Windows Theory, And Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style, Bernard E. Harcourt
Michigan Law Review
In 1993, New York City began implementing the quality-of-life initiative, an order-maintenance policing strategy targeting minor misdemeanor offenses like turnstile jumping, aggressive panhandling, and public drinking. The policing initiative is premised on the broken windows theory of deterrence, namely the hypothesis that minor physical and social disorder, if left unattended in a neighborhood, causes serious crime. New York City's new policing strategy has met with overwhelming support in the press and among public officials, policymakers, sociologists, criminologists and political scientists. The media describe the "famous" Broken Windows essay as "the bible of policing" and "the blueprint for community policing." Order-maintenance …
Hardening Of The Attitudes: Americans' Views On The Death Penalty, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Samuel R. Gross
Hardening Of The Attitudes: Americans' Views On The Death Penalty, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Samuel R. Gross
Articles
American support for the death penalty has steadily increased since 1966, when opponents outnumbered supporters, and now in the mid-1990s is at a near record high. Research over the last 20 years has tended to confirm the hypothesis that most people’s death penalty attitudes (pro or con) are based on emotion rather than information or rational argument. People feel strongly about the death penalty, know little about it, and feel no need to know more. Factual information (e.g., about deterrence and discrimination) is generally irrelevant to people’s attitudes, and they are aware that this is so. Support for the death …
The Writing On Our Walls: Finding Solutions Through Distinguishing Graffiti Art From Graffiti Vandalism, Marisa A. Gómez
The Writing On Our Walls: Finding Solutions Through Distinguishing Graffiti Art From Graffiti Vandalism, Marisa A. Gómez
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This Note argues that outlawing graffiti completely is not an effective solution. The only effective means of controlling graffiti is to develop laws and policies which accommodate graffiti art while discouraging graffiti vandalism and which attack the root causes of graffiti. Part I briefly outlines the origins of graffiti. Part II describes the different types of graffiti and the motivations of their respective creators. Part III analyzes the arguments for and against the legalization of certain types of graffiti and concludes that, because of the multitude of different types of graffiti, both graffiti proponents and opponents have meritorious arguments that …
Punishment: Desert And Crime Control, Ernest Van Den Haag
Punishment: Desert And Crime Control, Ernest Van Den Haag
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Past or Future Crimes: Deservedness and Dangerousness in the Sentencing of Criminals by Andrew von Hirsch
A Capacity To Punish: The Ecology Of Crime And Punishment, Samuel M. Hill
A Capacity To Punish: The Ecology Of Crime And Punishment, Samuel M. Hill
Michigan Law Review
A Review of A Capacity to Punish: The Ecology of Crime and Punishment by Henry N. Pontell
Desert And Deterrence: An Assessment Of The Moral Bases Of The Case For Capital Punishment, Richard O. Lempert
Desert And Deterrence: An Assessment Of The Moral Bases Of The Case For Capital Punishment, Richard O. Lempert
Michigan Law Review
The controversy over the death penalty has generated arguments of two types. The first argument appeals to moral intuitions; the second concerns deterrence. Although both types of argument speak to the morality of systems of capital punishment, the first debate has been dominated by moral philosophers and the second by empirical social scientists. For convenience I shall at times refer to the approach of the moral philosophers as the moral case for (or against) capital punishment or as the argument from morality.
Two Theories Of Criminal Justice, Alsen D. Miller
Two Theories Of Criminal Justice, Alsen D. Miller
Michigan Law Review
A Review of A Theory of Criminal Justice by Jan Gorecki, and A Theory of Criminal Justice by Hyman Gross
The Allocation Of Prosecution: An Economic Analysis, Michigan Law Review
The Allocation Of Prosecution: An Economic Analysis, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
This Note uses economic theory to reassess the division of prosecutorial tasks between victims and the government for offenses other than victimless offenses. It attempts to answer in a general manner questions such as why the prosecutor should differ from offense to offense and where ,the line should be drawn between governmental and individual prosecution. Work done in the areas of welfare economics and public finance concerning the effectiveness of government and the private sector in providing different sorts of goods is drawn upon heavily. This Note views prosecution as an economic good and a victim's prosecution of an offender …
The Reincarnation Of The Death Penalty: Is It Possible?, Yale Kamisar
The Reincarnation Of The Death Penalty: Is It Possible?, Yale Kamisar
Articles
Fifty years ago Clarence Darrow, probably the greatest criminal defense lawyer in American history and a leading opponent of capital punishment, observed: The question of capital punishment has been the subject of endless discussion and will probably never be settled so long as men believe in punishment. Some states have abolished and then reinstated it; some have enjoyed capital punishment for long periods of time and finally prohibited the use of it. The reasons why it cannot be settled are plain. There is first of all no agreement as to the objects of punishment. Next there is no way to …