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Full-Text Articles in Law
Redistributing Justice, Benjamin Levin, Kate Levine
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 …
The Conflict Among African American Penal Interests: Rethinking Racial Equity In Criminal Procedure, Trevor George Gardner
The Conflict Among African American Penal Interests: Rethinking Racial Equity In Criminal Procedure, Trevor George Gardner
Scholarship@WashULaw
This Article argues that neither the criminal justice reform platform nor the penal abolition platform shows the ambition necessary to advance each of the primary African American interests in penal administration. It contends, first, that abolitionists have rightly called for a more robust conceptualization of racial equity in criminal procedure. Racial equity in criminal procedure should be considered in terms of both process at the level of the individual, and the number of criminal procedures at the level of the racial group—in terms of both the quality and “quantity” of stops, arrests, convictions, and the criminal sentencings that result in …
After The Criminal Justice System, Benjamin Levin
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 …
Regulating Police Chokeholds, Trevor George Gardner, Esam Al-Shareffi
Regulating Police Chokeholds, Trevor George Gardner, Esam Al-Shareffi
Scholarship@WashULaw
This Article presents findings from an analysis of police chokehold policies enacted at the federal, state, and municipal levels of government. In addition to identifying the jurisdictions that restricted police chokeholds in the wake of George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, the Article conveys (via analysis of an original dataset) the considerable variance in the quality of police chokehold regulation. While many jurisdictions regulate the police chokehold, the strength of such regulations should not be taken for granted. Police chokehold policies vary by the type of chokehold barred (“air choke” and/or carotid choke), the degree of the chokehold restriction, …
Imagining The Progressive Prosecutor, Benjamin Levin
Imagining The Progressive Prosecutor, Benjamin Levin
Scholarship@WashULaw
As criminal justice reform has attracted greater public support, a new brand of district attorney candidate has arrived: the “progressive prosecutors.” Commentators increasingly have keyed on “progressive prosecutors” as offering a promising avenue for structural change, deserving of significant political capital and academic attention. This essay asks an unanswered threshold question: what exactly is a “progressive prosecutor”? Is that a meaningful category at all, and if so, who is entitled to claim the mantle? In this essay, I argue that “progressive prosecutor” means many different things to many different people. These differences in turn reveal important fault lines in academic …