Law Commons^™

Redistributing Justice, Benjamin Levin, Kate Levine

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article surfaces an obstacle to decarceration hiding in plain sight: progressives’ continued support for the carceral system. Despite increasingly prevalent critiques of criminal law from progressives, there hardly is a consensus on the left in opposition to the carceral state. Many left-leaning academics and activists who may critique the criminal system writ large remain enthusiastic about criminal law in certain areas—often areas where defendants are imagined as powerful and victims as particularly vulnerable. In this article, we offer a novel theory for what animates the seemingly conflicted attitude among progressives toward criminal punishment—the hope that the criminal system can …

After The Criminal Justice System, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Since the 1960s, the “criminal justice system” has operated as the common label for a vast web of actors and institutions. But, as critiques of mass incarceration have entered the mainstream, academics, activists, and advocates increasingly have stopped referring to the “criminal justice system.” Instead, they have opted for critical labels—the criminal legal system, the criminal punishment system, the prison industrial complex, etc. What does this re-labeling accomplish? Does this change in language matter to broader efforts at criminal justice reform or abolition? Or, does an emphasis on labels and language distract from substantive engagement with the injustices of contemporary …

Amendment 4: A Movement To Reduce Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement In Florida, Hunter L. Harding

Masters Theses

The paper explores the foundations of Felon Disenfranchisement in the State of Florida and how the United States Constitution allowed for individual states to implement disenfranchisement measures. The historical foundations are necessary for understanding the implications of felon disenfranchisement and its disproportionate outcomes on minority communities. With previous attempts to change policy regarding the restoration of civil rights for those disenfranchised, a different approach was needed to solve the plagued restoration process in the State of Florida. Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, a group led by ex-felons, fostered the movement to create the ballot initiative of Amendment 4 in the 2018 …

Race And Washington’S Criminal Justice System: 2021 Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0

Washington Law Review

RACE & WASHINGTON’S CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM:

EDITOR’S NOTE

As Editors-in-Chief of the Washington Law Review, Gonzaga Law Review, and Seattle University Law Review, we represent the flagship legal academic publications of each law school in Washington State. Our publications last joined together to publish the findings of the first Task Force on Race and the Criminal Justice System in 2011/12. A decade later, we are honored to join once again to present the findings of Task Force 2.0. Law journals have enabled generations of legal professionals to introduce, vet, and distribute new ideas, critiques of existing legal structures, and reflections …

Dear Courts: I, Too, Am A Reasonable Man, Marvel L. Faulkner

Pepperdine Law Review

There has been an ongoing debate regarding police-on-Black violence since the dawn of the United States police force. At every stage, the criminal justice system has had a monumental impact on the plight of the Black American community. The historical roots of racism within the criminal justice system have had adverse effects on the Black American psyche. Emerging research suggests that the upsurge in reporting police-on-Black violence—including videos shot from pedestrian camera phones and uploaded to multimedia platforms and historical accounts of the agonizing treatment Black Americans have experienced beginning with Slave Patrols—has affected individualized behavior during interactions with police …

The Perils Of "Old" And "New" In Sentencing Reform, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Essay turns attention from actuarial risk assessment tools as a reform to the inclination for a technical sentencing reform more broadly. When situated in the context of technical guidelines created to structure and regulate judicial discretion in the 1980s and beyond, the institutionalization of an actuarial risk assessment at sentencing is both an old and new idea. Both sentencing guidelines and actuarial risk assessments raise conceptual and empirical questions about sentencing law and policy. This Essay drills down on two conceptual issues—equality and selective incapacitation—to highlight that actuarial risk assessments as a reform raise recurring questions about sentencing, even …

Washington’S Young Offenders: O’Dell Demands A Change To Sentencing Guidelines, Erika Vranizan

Seattle University Law Review

This Note argues that the O’Dell decision was a watershed moment for criminal justice reform. It argues that the reasoning in O’Dell should be seized upon by the legislature to take action to remediate instances in which defendants are legal adults but do not possess the cognitive characteristics of an adult sufficient to justify adult punishment. Given both the scientific impossibility of identifying a precise age at which characteristics of youthfulness end and adulthood begins and the Court’s repeated recognition that these very factors impact culpability, the current approach to sentencing young offenders aged eighteen to twenty-five as adults simply …

Gender Disparities In Plea Bargaining, Carlos Berdejo

Indiana Law Journal

Across wide-ranging contexts, academic literature and the popular press have identified pervasive gender disparities favoring men over women in society. One area in which gender disparities have conversely favored women is the criminal justice system. Most of the empirical research examining gender disparities in criminal case outcomes has focused on judges’ sentencing decisions. Few studies have assessed disparities in the steps leading up to a defendant’s conviction, where various actors make choices that constrain judges’ ultimate sentencing discretion. This Article addresses this gap by examining gender disparities in the plea-bargaining process. The results presented in this Article reveal significant gender …

Law And Society: The Criminalization Of Latinx In The United States, Gabriela Groenke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The United States leads the world in incarceration with just over 2.2 million people in state or federal prisons or local jails in 2014 (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2016). Although the number of incarcerated individuals has declined by about .5 percent since its peak in 2008 (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2016), the fact remains that mass incarceration is an epidemic in the United States. Over the last decade much has been written about the effects of mass incarceration on people of color, with many analysts pointing to the fear of crime as contributing to the formulation of current policies, which …

Lead Us Not Into Temptation: A Response To Barbara Fedders’S “Opioid Policing”, Anna Roberts

Indiana Law Journal

In “Opioid Policing,”1 Barbara Fedders contributes to the law review literature the first joint scholarly analysis of two drug policing innovations: Seattle’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program and the Angel Initiative, which originated in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Even while welcoming the innovation and inspiration of these programs, she remains clear-eyed about the need to scrutinize their potential downsides. Her work is crucially timed. While still just a few years old, LEAD has been replicated many times2 and appears likely to be replicated still further—and to be written about much more. Inspired by Fedders’s call for a balanced take, this Response …

Cashing In On Convicts: Privatization, Punishment, And The People, Laura I. Appleman

Utah Law Review

For-profit prisons, jails, and alternative corrections present a disturbing commodification of the criminal justice system. Though part of a modern trend, privatized corrections has well-established roots traceable to slavery, Jim Crow, and current racially-based inequities. This monetizing of the physical incarceration and regulation of human bodies has had deleterious effects on offenders, communities, and the proper functioning of punishment in our society. Criminal justice privatization severs an essential link between the people and criminal punishment. When we remove the imposition of punishment from the people and delegate it to private actors, we sacrifice the core criminal justice values of expressive, …

Toward A Critical Race Theory Of Evidence, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, judges, and lawyers have long believed that evidence rules apply equally to all persons regardless of race. This Article challenges this assumption and reveals how evidence law structurally disadvantages people of color. A critical race analysis of stand-your-ground defenses, cross-racial eyewitness misidentifications, and minority flight from racially-targeted police profiling and violence uncovers the existence of a dual-race evidentiary system. This system is reminiscent of nineteenth century race-based witness competency rules that barred people of color from testifying against white people. I deconstruct this problem and introduce the original concept of “racialized reality evidence.” This construct demonstrates how evidence of …

Transforming The System, India Thusi, Robert L. Carter

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Our criminal justice system must keep all communities safe, foster prevention and rehabilitation, and ensure fair and equal justice. But in too many places, and in too many ways, our system is falling short of that mandate and with devastating consequences. The United States is saddled with an outdated, unfair, and bloated criminal justice system that drains resources and disrupts communities.

The U.S. prison population has swelled to unprecedented levels and unequal, unjustified treatment based on race and ethnicity is well documented. People of color, particularly Native American, African American, and Latino people, have felt the impact of discrimination within …

The Transformative Influence Of International Law And Practice On The Death Penalty In The United States, Richard Wilson

Contributions to Books

No region of the world has been more vocal and persistent in its opposition to U.S. death penalty practice than Europe, which has itself become a death penalty-free zone. The chapter will examine the actions taken by European legislative and judicial bodies against U.S. practice of the death penalty, as well as those of the other regional treaty bodies, with particular attention to the Inter-American human rights system, in which the U.S. reluctantly participates. It then will examine U.S. interactions with its treaty partners in the area of extradition, where death penalty policy is acted out in the exchanges of …

Race, Crime And The Pool Of Surplus Criminality: Or Why The "War On Drugs" Was A "War On Blacks", Kenneth B. Nunn

Kenneth B. Nunn

The War on Drugs has had a devastating effect on African American communities nationwide. The concept of the pool of surplus criminality may explain the drug war's focus on African Americans. Faced with a perceived drug problem, White Americans naturally identified African American people as the source of that threat and targeted them for police harassment and penal control. There are ways in which the drug war may be construed as a race war. The disproportionate impact on the African American community, evidence that policy makers anticipated the drug war would disproportionately harm the African American community, and the historic …

New Explorations In Culture And Crime: Definitions, Theory, Method, Kenneth B. Nunn

Kenneth B. Nunn

Culture affects criminal law in at least two key ways. First, culture and crime symbiotically define each other. Second, culture helps explain which courtroom narratives will be successful, and which will not. Culture influences who will be arrested, charged, convicted, and what sentence they will receive. Indeed, the invisible hand of culture drives the process of criminalization and helps to determine which acts we will sanction through criminal statutes.

Analyzing Stops, Citations, And Searches In Washington And Beyond, Mario L. Barnes, Robert S. Chang

Seattle University Law Review

Racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system is a fact. But the fact of racial disproportionality is the beginning and not the end of the conversation. The fact that blacks are overrepresented in stop, arrest, charge, pretrial detention, conviction, and incarceration statistics demonstrates only correlation and not causation. A number of commentators caution that disproportionality and the overrepresentation of blacks, Native-Americans, and Hispanics in Washington State’s prisons do not prove racial discrimination. Further, the fact of disproportionality at each stage of criminal justice processing does not prove that racial discrimination occurs at each particular stage. For example, the observed disproportionality …

“Like Wolves In Sheep’S Clothing”: Combating Racial Bias In Washington State’S Criminal Justice System, Krista L. Nelson, Jacob J. Stender

Seattle University Law Review

Despite their differences, both the majority and concurring opinions in Monday present new ways to address prosecutorial misconduct, deter the injection of racial bias into courtroom proceedings, and create substantively similar outcomes. Part II of this Note discusses the traditional prosecutorial misconduct test in Washington State, as well as the rules articulated by the Monday majority and concurrence. Part III discusses the implications of both the majority and concurring opinions, the primary differences in their approaches to deterrence, the degree of racial bias they require to warrant reversal of a conviction, and the discretion they afford the judiciary. Part III …

The Impact Of Implicit Racial Bias On The Exercise Of Prosecutorial Discretion, Robert J. Smith, Justin D. Levinson

Seattle University Law Review

The Article is organized as follows: Part II provides an introduction to implicit bias research, orienting readers to the important aspects of implicit bias most relevant to prosecutorial discretion. Part III begins the examination of implicit bias in the daily decisions of prosecutors. The Part presents key prosecutorial discretion points and specifically connects each of them to implicit bias. Part IV recognizes that, despite compelling proof of implicit bias in a range of domains, there is no direct empirical proof of implicit bias in prosecutorial decision-making. It thus calls for an implicit bias research agenda designed to further examine how …

“If Justice Is Not Equal For All, It Is Not Justice”: Racial Bias, Prosecutorial Misconduct, And The Right To A Fair Trial In State V. Monday, Michael Callahan

Seattle University Law Review

This Note argues that of the three opinions from Monday, Washington state courts should follow Chief Justice Madsen’s concurring opinion. The Monday decision also raises three questions that none of the opinions adequately answer: who does Monday apply to, what conduct does Monday forbid, and what is the legal source of the rules from Monday? The court will have to answer these questions in the future to determine the scope of its new rules. Part II of this Note discusses how Washington courts previously addressed the issue of prosecutorial misconduct and appeals to racial bias in trials. Part …

Introduction, Hon. Steven C. Gonzàlez

Seattle University Law Review

At Seattle University School of Law’s Symposium on Racial Bias and the Criminal Justice System, students, faculty, judges, scholars, lawyers, and community members gathered to address racial disparity in the criminal justice system and to explore ways to keep the promise of our democracy that we all are equal before the law. Race, ethnicity, skin color, and national origin profoundly influence our legal structure and our liberty. The way that race influences perceptions and actions is critically important in the context of our criminal justice system—a system that changes lives, disrupts and protects communities, and represents a key part of …

Race Bias And The Importance Of Consciousness For Criminal Defense Attorneys, Andrea D. Lyon

Seattle University Law Review

This Article will begin with a discussion of race bias and will examine who in the criminal justice system has such biases. These concepts will provide a backdrop to the next Part, where I will turn to an analysis about the need for criminal defense lawyers to be conscious of race bias. I focus on two specific circumstances in which awareness of one’s own racial bias is imperative: interacting with clients and voir dire. But first, we must come to an understanding about the nature of race bias itself.

Methodological Issues In Biased Policing Research With Applications To The Washington State Patrol, Clayton Mosher, J. Mitchell Pickerill

Seattle University Law Review

Racial profiling violates the United States Constitution’s premise that all people are equal under the law, as well as the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee that people should be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Racial profiling has been found to result from individual officer racism or stereotyping, from institutionalized biases, and from the organizational culture of law enforcement agencies. We begin this Article by discussing the history of racial profiling before proceeding to consider various studies from a select number of American jurisdictions. We then examine important methodological and theoretical issues in conducting research on racial profiling and racially biased policing, …

O.P.P.: How "Occupy's" Race-Based Privilege May Improve Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence For All, Lenese C. Herbert

Seattle University Law Review

This Article submits that Occupy’s race problem could, ironically, prove to be a solution if protesters grow more serious about exposing the injury of political subordination and systems of privilege that adhere to the criminal justice system. Privilege is a “systemic conferral of benefit and advantage [as a result of] affiliation, conscious or not and chosen or not, to the dominant side of a power system.” Accordingly, now that police mistreatment affects them personally, Occupy may finally help kill a fictitious Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that ignores oppression through improper policing based on racial stigma. Occupy may also help usher in …

Actual Versus Perceived Performance Of Judges, Theodore Eisenberg, Talia Fisher, Issi Rosen-Zvi

Seattle University Law Review

Perceptions of judges ought to be based on their performance. Yet, few studies of the relation between perceived and actual judicial performance exist. Those claiming judicial bias should be especially sensitive to the relation between perception and performance. Judges perceived by the public or by the legal community as disfavoring a group may be regarded as biased, but that perception is unfair if the judges’ votes in cases do not disfavor the group. For example, it may be unfair to accuse an appellate judge of pro-state bias in criminal cases if the judge votes for defendants at a higher rate …

Preliminary Report On Race And Washington's Criminal Justice System, Task Force On Race And The Criminal Justice System

Seattle University Law Review

For this Report, the Research Working Group reviewed evidence on disproportionality in Washington’s criminal justice system and considered whether crime commission rates accounted for this disproportionality. We found that crime commission rates by race and ethnicity are largely unknown and perhaps unknowable, but that some researchers simply take arrest rates as good proxies for underlying commission rates for all crimes.We found that use of arrest rates likely overstates black crime commission rates for several reasons.68 But even if arrest rates are used as a proxy for underlying crime commission rates, the extent of racial disproportionality is not explained by commission …