Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Criminal law (6)
- Negotiation (6)
- Criminal procedure (5)
- Plea bargaining (5)
- Social justice (4)
-
- Crime (3)
- Evidence (3)
- Recidivism (3)
- Criminal justice debt (2)
- Debtors' prisons (2)
- Deferred prosecution (2)
- Deterrence (2)
- Equal protection (2)
- Fees (2)
- Fines (2)
- Hearsay (2)
- Imprisonment (2)
- Incapacitation (2)
- Jail (2)
- Poverty law (2)
- Pretrial detention (2)
- Prison (2)
- Privatization (2)
- RICO (2)
- Sentencing reform (2)
- Sixth amendment (2)
- ADR (1)
- Abandonment (1)
- Algorithmic governance (1)
- Alternative Dispute Resolution (1)
Articles 1 - 30 of 39
Full-Text Articles in Law
Rico's Long Arm, Randy D. Gordon
Rico's Long Arm, Randy D. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
RICO has for over 50 years presented something of a parlor game for lawyers, mostly because its text leaves wide latitude in interpretation. And, as is often the case with RICO, resolution of one question begets more. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Yegiazaryan v. Smagin proves no exception. Here, the Court brought some clarity to a question left open by RJR Nabisco: viz, what must one plead and prove to satisfy the “domestic injury” requirement necessary to invoke an extraterritorial application of RICO. The Court held that a foreign plaintiff can indeed, given the right facts and circumstances, establish …
Bending The Rules Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn, Julia Simon-Kerr
Bending The Rules Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn, Julia Simon-Kerr
Faculty Scholarship
The evidence rules have well-established, standard textual meanings—meanings that evidence professors teach their law students every year. Yet, despite the rules’ clarity, courts misapply them across a wide array of cases: Judges allow past acts to bypass the propensity prohibition, squeeze hearsay into facially inapplicable exceptions, and poke holes in supposedly ironclad privileges. And that’s just the beginning.
The evidence literature sees these misapplications as mistakes by inept trial judges. This Article takes a very different view. These “mistakes” are often not mistakes at all, but rather instances in which courts are intentionally bending the rules of evidence. Codified evidentiary …
Mass E-Carceration: Electronic Monitoring As A Bail Condition, Sara Zampierin
Mass E-Carceration: Electronic Monitoring As A Bail Condition, Sara Zampierin
Faculty Scholarship
Over the past decade, the immigration and criminal legal systems have increasingly relied on electronic monitoring as a bail condition; hundreds of thousands of people live under this monitoring on any given day. Decisionmakers purport to impose these conditions to release more individuals from detention and to maintain control over individuals they perceive to pose some risk of flight or to public safety. But the data do not show that electronic monitoring successfully mitigates these risks or that it leads to fewer individuals in detention. Electronic monitoring also comes with severe restrictions on individual liberty and leads to harmful effects …
Designing For Justice: Pandemic Lessons For Criminal Courts, Cynthia Alkon
Designing For Justice: Pandemic Lessons For Criminal Courts, Cynthia Alkon
Faculty Scholarship
March 2020 brought an unprecedented crisis to the United States: COVID-19. In a two-week period, criminal courts across the country closed. But, that is where the uniformity ended. Criminal courts did not have a clear process to decide how to conduct necessary business. As a result, criminal courts across the country took different approaches to deciding how to continue necessary operations and in doing so many did not consider the impact on justice of the operational changes that were made to manage the COVID-19 crisis. One key problem was that many courts did not use inclusive processes and include all …
Letting Offenders Choose Their Punishment?, Gilles Grolleau, Murat C. Mungan, Naoufel Mzoughi
Letting Offenders Choose Their Punishment?, Gilles Grolleau, Murat C. Mungan, Naoufel Mzoughi
Faculty Scholarship
Punishment menus allow offenders to choose the punishment to which they will be subjected from a set of options. We present several behaviorally informed rationales for why punishment menus may serve as effective deterrents, notably by causing people to refrain from entering a calculative mindset; reducing their psychological reactance; causing them to reconsider the reputational impacts of punishment; and reducing suspicions about whether the act is enforced for rent-seeking purposes. We argue that punishment menus can outperform the traditional single punishment if these effects can be harnessed properly. Our observations thus constitute a challenge, based on behavioral arguments, to the …
Criminal Court System Failures During Covid-19: An Empirical Study, Cynthia Alkon
Criminal Court System Failures During Covid-19: An Empirical Study, Cynthia Alkon
Faculty Scholarship
How did the criminal legal system respond to the early months of pandemic in 2020? This article reports the results of a unique national survey of judges, defense lawyers, and prosecutors that gives a snapshot of how the criminal legal system responded to the COVID-19 in the first five chaotic months. Criminal courts in the United States rely on in-person proceedings and formal and informal in-person communications to manage caseloads. The survey results detail, in ways not previously fully understood, how crucial these in-person communications are and how ill-prepared the criminal courts and legal professionals were to deal with the …
Jurisdictional Elements And The Jury, G. Alexander Nunn
Jurisdictional Elements And The Jury, G. Alexander Nunn
Faculty Scholarship
Do jurisdictional elements in criminal statutes actually matter? Of course, formally, the answer is obvious; jurisdictional elements are of paramount importance. In fact, they often serve as the entire justifying basis for a federal (rather than state) criminal prosecution. But beyond mere technicalities, do jurisdictional elements actually make a difference in a jury deliberation room?
In pursuit of an answer, this Article undertakes a novel empirical study designed to assess the antecedent issue of how laypeople weigh jurisdictional elements when determining guilt. The project’s experiment ultimately finds that when one increases the amount of evidence demonstrating a defendant’s substantive guilt, …
How To Be A Better Plea Bargainer, Cynthia Alkon, Andrea Kupfer Schneider
How To Be A Better Plea Bargainer, Cynthia Alkon, Andrea Kupfer Schneider
Faculty Scholarship
Preparation matters in negotiation. While plea bargaining is a criminal lawyer’s primary activity, the value of this skill is discounted by law schools and training programs. A systemic model can be used to improve plea bargaining skills. This Article offers a prep sheet for both prosecutors and defense attorneys and explains how each element of the sheet specifically applies to the plea bargaining context. The prep sheet is designed as a learning tool so that the negotiator can learn from the sheet and then make their own. The sheet highlights important considerations such as understanding the interests and goals of …
Law, Fact, And Procedural Justice, G. Alexander Nunn
Law, Fact, And Procedural Justice, G. Alexander Nunn
Faculty Scholarship
The distinction between questions of law and questions of fact is deceptively complex. Although any first-year law student could properly classify those issues that fall at the polar ends of the law-fact continuum, the Supreme Court has itself acknowledged that the exact dividing line between law and fact—the point where legal inquiries end and factual ones begin—is “slippery,” “elusive,” and “vexing.” But identifying that line is crucially important. Whether an issue is deemed a question of law or a question of fact often influences the appointment of a courtroom decision maker, the scope of appellate review, the administration of certain …
Visible Policing: Technology, Transparency, And Democratic Control, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Visible Policing: Technology, Transparency, And Democratic Control, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Faculty Scholarship
Law enforcement has an opacity problem. Police use sophisticated technologies to monitor individuals, surveil communities, and predict behaviors in increasingly intrusive ways. But legal institutions have struggled to understand—let alone set limits on—new investigative methods and techniques for two major reasons. First, new surveillance technology tends to operate in opaque and unaccountable ways, augmenting police power while remaining free of meaningful oversight. Second, shifts in Fourth Amendment doctrine have expanded law enforcement’s ability to engage in surveillance relatively free of scrutiny by courts or by the public. The result is that modern policing is not highly visible to oversight institutions …
Bargaining Without Bias, Cynthia Alkon
Bargaining Without Bias, Cynthia Alkon
Faculty Scholarship
In this article, to work towards decreasing bias in plea bargaining, I propose a structural fix and an individual fix to these core problems. The structural fix is that prosecutors' offices should adopt policies for blind assessment of cases when the first plea offer is made. All indicia of race or ethnicity (including names and neighborhoods) should be removed when prosecutors review a case and make the initial plea offer. This would help prosecutors focus on the facts and their evidence when making a plea offer and prevent bias in decision making. However, it is not realistic to expect that …
Transparency's Ai Problem, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Transparency's Ai Problem, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Faculty Scholarship
A consensus seems to be emerging that algorithmic governance is too opaque and ought to be made more accountable and transparent. But algorithmic governance underscores the limited capacity of transparency law—the Freedom of Information Act and its state equivalents—to promote accountability. Drawing on the critical literature on “open government,” this Essay shows that algorithmic governance reflects and amplifies systemic weaknesses in the transparency regime, including privatization, secrecy, private sector cooptation, and reactive disclosure. These deficiencies highlight the urgent need to reorient transparency and accountability law toward meaningful public engagement in ongoing oversight. This shift requires rethinking FOIA’s core commitment to …
The Political Economy Of Enforcer Liability For Wrongful Police Stops, Tim Friehe, Murat C. Mungan
The Political Economy Of Enforcer Liability For Wrongful Police Stops, Tim Friehe, Murat C. Mungan
Faculty Scholarship
This article questions whether excessive policing practices can persist in an environment where law enforcement policies are subject to political pressures. Specifically, it considers a setting where the police decide whether to conduct stops based on the suspiciousness of a person's behavior and the potential liability for conducting a wrongful stop. We establish that the liability level that results in a voting equilibrium is smaller than optimal, and consequently, that excessive policing practices emerge in equilibrium.
Inside The Master's Gates: Resources And Tools To Dismantle Racism And Sexism In Higher Education, Susan Ayres
Inside The Master's Gates: Resources And Tools To Dismantle Racism And Sexism In Higher Education, Susan Ayres
Faculty Scholarship
The spring of 2020 saw waves of protest as police killed people of color. After George Floyd’s death, protests erupted in over 140 cities. The systemic racism exhibited by these killings has been uncontrollable, hopeless, and endless. Our country is facing a national crisis. In response to the police killings, businesses, schools, and communities held diversity workshops across the nation, and businesses and organizations posted antiracism statements. Legislators and City Councils introduced bills and orders to defund police and to limit qualified immunity. As schools prepared for the fall semester, teachers considered ways to incorporate antiracism materials into the curriculum. …
Griffin V. Illinois: Justice Independent Of Wealth, Neil Sobol
Griffin V. Illinois: Justice Independent Of Wealth, Neil Sobol
Faculty Scholarship
More than sixty years ago in Griffin v. Illinois, Justice Hugo Black opined that equal justice cannot exist as long as “the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.” While Griffin dealt with the limited issue of the inability of a defendant to pay for an appellate transcript, the Supreme Court and legislatures would subsequently extend Black’s equal justice analysis to cases involving other forms of criminal justice debt assessed at trial, appeal, incarceration, and probation. Despite the promise of these judicial and legislative pronouncements, indigent defendants, relative to defendants with financial …
A Third-Party Doctrine For Digital Metadata, H. Brian Holland
A Third-Party Doctrine For Digital Metadata, H. Brian Holland
Faculty Scholarship
For more than four decades, the third-party doctrine was understood as a bright-line, categorical rule: there is no legitimate privacy interest in any data that is voluntarily disclosed or conveyed to a third party. But this simple rule has dramatic effects in a world of ubiquitous networked computing, mobile technologies, and the commodification of information. The digital devices that facilitate our daily participation in modern society are connected through automated infrastructures that are designed to generate vast quantities of data, nearly all of which is captured, utilized, and stored by third-party service providers. Under a plain reading of the third-party …
The Lost Promise Of Lambert V. California, Cynthia Alkon
The Lost Promise Of Lambert V. California, Cynthia Alkon
Faculty Scholarship
This Article will start with a brief overview of the Lambert case. It will then discuss the differing views on how to interpret this relatively short case. Next, it will review the cases citing to Lambert that illustrate the narrow approach that courts have taken when applying this case. Finally, it will offer some thoughts on how Lambert could have played a role in preventing some of the excesses of mass incarceration, but failed.
Beyond The Witness: Bringing A Process Perspective To Modern Evidence Law, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn
Beyond The Witness: Bringing A Process Perspective To Modern Evidence Law, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn
Faculty Scholarship
The focal point of the modern trial is the witness. Witnesses are the source of observations, lay and expert opinions, authentication, as well as the conduit through which documentary, physical, and scientific evidence is introduced. Evidence law therefore unsurprisingly concentrates on – or perhaps obsesses over – witnesses. In this Article, we argue that this witness-centered perspective is antiquated and counterproductive. As a historical matter, focusing on witnesses may have made sense when most evidence was the product of individual observation and action. But the modern world frequently features evidence produced through standardized, objective, and even mechanical processes that largely …
Sweetheart Deals, Deferred Prosecution, And Making A Mockery Of The Criminal Justice System: U.S. Corporate Dpas Rejected On Many Fronts, Peter Reilly
Faculty Scholarship
Corporate Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPAs) are contracts negotiated between the federal government and defendants to address allegations of corporate misconduct without going to trial. The agreements are hailed as a model of speedy and efficient law enforcement, but also derided as making a “mockery” of America’s criminal justice system stemming from lenient deals being offered to some defendants. This Article questions why corporate DPAs are not given meaningful judicial review when such protection is required for other alternative dispute resolution (ADR) tools, including plea bargains, settlement agreements, and consent decrees. The Article also analyzes several cases in which federal district …
Connecting The Disconnected: Communication Technologies For The Incarcerated, Neil Sobol
Connecting The Disconnected: Communication Technologies For The Incarcerated, Neil Sobol
Faculty Scholarship
Incarceration is a family problem—more than 2.7 million children in the United States have a parent in jail or prison. It adversely impacts family relationships, financial stability, and the mental health and well-being of family members. Empirical research shows that communications between inmates and their families improve family stability and successful reintegration while also reducing the inmate’s incidence of behavioral issues and recidivism rates. However, systemic barriers significantly impact the ability of inmates and their families to communicate. Both traditional and newly developed technological communication tools have inherent advantages and disadvantages. In addition, private contracting of communication services too often …
Corporate Deferred Prosecution As Discretionary Injustice, Peter Reilly
Corporate Deferred Prosecution As Discretionary Injustice, Peter Reilly
Faculty Scholarship
A recent federal appellate court ruling of first impression permits the resolution of allegations of serious corporate criminal wrongdoing by way of an Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanism called Deferred Prosecution, without appropriate judicial review. This Article describes why this ruling is ill-advised, and suggests how other courts might address these same legal issues while arriving at different conclusions. This Article argues that if federal prosecutors are going to continue using Deferred Prosecution Agreements (“DPAs”) in addressing allegations of corporate criminal misconduct, then that discretionary power must be confined and checked through meaningful judicial review. The overriding concern with the appellate …
Gateway Crimes, Murat C. Mungan
Gateway Crimes, Murat C. Mungan
Faculty Scholarship
Many who argue against the legalization of marijuana suggest that while its consumption may not be very harmful, marijuana indirectly causes significant social harm by acting as a “gateway drug,” a drug whose consumption facilitates the use of other, more harmful drugs. This Article presents a theory of “gateway crimes,” which, perhaps counterintuitively, implies that there are social gains to decriminalizing offenses that cause minor harms, including marijuana-related offenses. A typical gateway crime is an act which is punished lightly, but because it is designated as a crime, being convicted for committing it leads one to be severely stigmatized. People …
Hard Bargaining In Plea Bargaining: When Do Prosecutors Cross The Line?, Cynthia Alkon
Hard Bargaining In Plea Bargaining: When Do Prosecutors Cross The Line?, Cynthia Alkon
Faculty Scholarship
Well over 90 percent of all criminal cases in the United States are resolved by plea bargaining and not by trial. This means that how plea bargaining works impacts nearly every criminal defendant. However, there are few restrictions to protect defendants in the negotiating process. One serious problem is that prosecutors regularly use hard bargaining tactics such as exploding offers, threats to add enhancements, take-it-or-leave-it offers, and threats to seek the death penalty. These hard bargaining tactics contribute to the often highly coercive atmosphere of plea bargaining that can lead innocent defendants to plead guilty. Pressure to plead guilty can …
Identifying Criminals’ Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick
Identifying Criminals’ Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick
Faculty Scholarship
There is a 250-year-old presumption in the criminology and law enforcement literature that people are deterred more by increases in the certainty rather than increases in the severity of legal sanctions. We call this presumption the Certainty Aversion Presumption (CAP). Simple criminal decision-making models suggest that criminals must be risk seeking if they behave consistently with CAP. This implication leads to disturbing interpretations, such as criminals being categorically different from law-abiding people, who often display risk-averse behavior while making financial decisions. Moreover, policy discussions that incorrectly rely on criminals’ risk attitudes implied by CAP are ill informed, and may therefore …
Dna, Blue Bus, And Phase Changes, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn
Dna, Blue Bus, And Phase Changes, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn
Faculty Scholarship
In ‘Exploring the Proof Paradoxes’, Mike Redmayne comprehensively surveyed the puzzles at the intersection of law and statistics, the most famous of which is the Blue Bus problem, which prohibits legal actors from ascribing liability purely on the basis of probabilistic evidence. DNA evidence, however, is a longstanding exception to Blue Bus. Like Blue Bus, DNA presents probabilistic evidence of identity. Unlike Blue Bus, DNA is widely accepted as legitimate, even when it stands alone as so-called ‘naked’ statistical evidence. Observers often explain such DNA exceptionalism in two ways: either that people break down in extreme cases, or relatedly, that …
Plea Bargain Negotiations: Defining Competence Beyond Lafler And Frye, Cynthia Alkon
Plea Bargain Negotiations: Defining Competence Beyond Lafler And Frye, Cynthia Alkon
Faculty Scholarship
In the companion cases of Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye the U.S. Supreme Court held that there is a right to effective assistance of counsel during plea bargaining. However, the Court defined effective assistance of counsel in only one narrow phase of plea bargaining: the client counseling phase. The Court said it would not look more broadly at the negotiation process itself as "[b]argaining is, by its nature, defined to a substantial degree by personal style.” This statement indicates that the Court does not fully understanding developments in the field of negotiation over the last thirty years. Negotiation …
#Sayhername Captured: Using Video To Challenge Law Enforcement Violence Against Women, Amber Baylor
#Sayhername Captured: Using Video To Challenge Law Enforcement Violence Against Women, Amber Baylor
Faculty Scholarship
Kianga Mweba’s cellphone camera blurs into darkness broken by flashes of lights surrounding her car. From the audio of her cellphone recording, one can hear Kianga Mweba scream as she is pulled out of the car and tased. Mweba, arrested as she filmed the police detaining a man on the street, was charged with attempted assault on an officer. After recovering footage from her phone, her defense attorney produced the video as evidence against the criminal charges. Now the recording is a key piece of evidence in a lawsuit against the department. Mweba’s experience, captured by her cellphone camera, rallied …
A Federal Certificate Of Rehabilitation Program: Providing Federal Ex-Offenders More Opportunity For Successful Reentry, Lisa A. Rich
A Federal Certificate Of Rehabilitation Program: Providing Federal Ex-Offenders More Opportunity For Successful Reentry, Lisa A. Rich
Faculty Scholarship
The purpose of this Article is to propose a new federal certificate of rehabilitation program. The creation of such a program not only would help the thousands of federal offenders released back into their communities every year overcome employment barriers but would also serve as a model for states to use in addressing the need of their own burgeoning population of former offenders. In order to understand the magnitude of the problem, it is essential to understand the pool of offenders affected by their criminal history, the intent of the federal agencies to assist this disadvantaged group, and the barriers …
Abandoned Criminal Attempts: An Economic Analysis, Murat C. Mungan
Abandoned Criminal Attempts: An Economic Analysis, Murat C. Mungan
Faculty Scholarship
An attempt is 'abandoned' if the criminal, despite having a chance to continue with his criminal plan, forgoes the opportunity to do so. A regime that makes abandonment a defense to criminal attempts provides an incentive to the offender to withdraw from his criminal conduct prior to completing the previously intended offense. However, the same regime may induce offenders to initiate criminal plans more often by reducing the expected costs associated with such plans. The former effect is called the marginal deterrence effect and the latter is called the ex-ante deterrence effect of the abandonment defense. This Article formalizes a …
Lessons Learned From Ferguson: Ending Abusive Collection Of Criminal Justice Debt, Neil L. Sobol
Lessons Learned From Ferguson: Ending Abusive Collection Of Criminal Justice Debt, Neil L. Sobol
Faculty Scholarship
On March 4, 2015, the Department of Justice released its scathing report of the Ferguson Police Department calling for “an entire reorientation of law enforcement in Ferguson” and demanding that Ferguson “replace revenue-driven policing with a system grounded in the principles of community policing and police legitimacy, in which people are equally protected and treated with compassion, regardless of race.” Unfortunately, abusive collection of criminal justice debt is not limited to Ferguson. This Article, prepared for a discussion group at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference in July 2015, identifies the key findings in the Department of Justice’s report …