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The Quest For Finality: Five Stories Of White Collar Criminal Prosecution, Lucian E. Dervan
The Quest For Finality: Five Stories Of White Collar Criminal Prosecution, Lucian E. Dervan
Law Faculty Scholarship
In this symposium article, Professor Dervan examines the issue of finality and sentencing. In considering this issue, he argues that prosecutors, defendants, and society as a whole are drawn to the concept of finality in various ways during criminal adjudications. Further, far from an aspirational summit, he argues that some outgrowths of this quest for finality could be destructive and, in fact, obstructive to some of the larger goals of our criminal justice system, including the pursuit of truth and the protection of the innocent. Given the potential abstraction of these issues, Professor Dervan decided to discuss the possible consequences …
White Collar Over-Criminalization: Deterrence, Plea Bargaining, And The Loss Of Innocence, Lucian E. Dervan
White Collar Over-Criminalization: Deterrence, Plea Bargaining, And The Loss Of Innocence, Lucian E. Dervan
Law Faculty Scholarship
Overcriminalization takes many forms and impacts the American criminal justice system in varying ways. This article focuses on a select portion of this phenomenon by examining two types of overcriminalization prevalent in white collar criminal law. The first type of over criminalization discussed in this article is Congress’s propensity for increasing the maximum criminal penalties for white collar offenses in an effort to punish financial criminals more harshly while simultaneously deterring others. The second type of overcriminalization addressed is Congress’s tendency to create vague and overlapping criminal provisions in areas already criminalized in an effort to expand the tools available …
Pleading Innocents: Laboratory Evidence Of Plea Bargaining's Innocence Problem, Vanessa Edkins, Lucian E. Dervan
Pleading Innocents: Laboratory Evidence Of Plea Bargaining's Innocence Problem, Vanessa Edkins, Lucian E. Dervan
Law Faculty Scholarship
We investigated plea bargaining by making students actually guilty or innocent of a cheating offense and varying the sentence that they would face if found ‘guilty’ by a review board. As hypothesized, guilty students were more likely than innocent students to accept a plea deal (i.e., admit guilt and lose credit; akin to accepting a sentence of probation) (Chi-square=8.63, p<.01) but we did not find an effect of sentence severity. Innocent students, though not as likely to plead as guilty students, showed an overall preference (56% across conditions) for accepting a plea deal. Implications and future directions are discussed.
The Innocent Defendant’S Dilemma: An Innovative Empirical Study Of Plea Bargaining’S Innocence Problem, Lucian E. Dervan, Vanessa Edkins
The Innocent Defendant’S Dilemma: An Innovative Empirical Study Of Plea Bargaining’S Innocence Problem, Lucian E. Dervan, Vanessa Edkins
Law Faculty Scholarship
In 1989, Ada JoAnn Taylor was accused of murder and presented with stark options. If she pleaded guilty, she would be rewarded with a sentence of ten to forty years in prison. If, however, she proceeded to trial and was convicted, she would likely spend the rest of her life behind bars. Over a thousand miles away in Florida and more than twenty years later, a college student was accused of cheating and presented with her own incentives to admit wrongdoing and save the university the time and expense of proceeding before a disciplinary review board. Both women decided the …