Law Commons^™

Expanding The Reach Of Progressive Prosecution, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Changing Role Of The American Prosecutor, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Theories Of Prosecution, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

For decades, legal commentators sounded the alarm about the tremendous power wielded by prosecutors. Scholars went so far as to identify uncurbed prosecutorial discretion as the primary source of the criminal justice system’s many flaws. Over the past two years, however, the conversation shifted. With the emergence of a new wave of “progressive prosecutors,” scholars increasingly hail broad prosecutorial discretion as a promising mechanism for criminal justice reform.

The abrupt shift from decrying to embracing prosecutorial power highlights a curious void at the center of criminal justice thought. There is no widely accepted normative theory of the prosecutorial role. As …

Winks, Whispers, And Prosecutorial Discretion In Rural Iowa, 1925-1928, Emily Prifogle

Articles

Through the eyes of Charles Pendleton’s memoirs, this article walks through a rural community with a county attorney to consider how race, religion, gender, and sexuality influenced rural prosecutorial discretion in the early twentieth century. Rural communities like those in Buena Vista County, Iowa, where the article is centered, experienced “the law” through distinctly isolated geographies and social networks that lacked anonymity and thus shaped available methods of conflict resolution. But anonymity did not mean homogeneity. Ethnic, racial, and religious diversity created divisions within a community where social distance between individuals was small. Both onymity and diversity shaped who should …

Government Misconduct And Convicting The Innocent: The Role Of Prosecutors, Police And Other Law Enforcement, Samuel R. Gross, Maurice J. Possley, Kaitlin Jackson Roll, Klara Huber Stephens

Other Publications

This is a report about the role of official misconduct in the conviction of innocent people. We discuss cases that are listed in the National Registry of Exonerations, an ongoing online archive that includes all known exonerations in the United States since 1989, 2,663 as of this writing. This Report describes official misconduct in the first 2,400 exonerations in the Registry, those posted by February 27, 2019.

In general, we classify a case as an “exoneration” if a person who was convicted of a crime is officially and completely cleared based on new evidence of innocence.

The Report is …

Defending Progressive Prosecution: A Review Of Charged By Emily Bazelon, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

"Progressive prosecutors" are taking over District Attorney's Offices across the nation with a mandate to reform the criminal Justice system from the inside. Emily Bazelon's new book, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, chronicles this potentially transformative moment in American criminal Justice.

This Essay highlights the importance of Charged to modern criminal justice debates and leverages its concrete framing to offer a generally applicable theory of prosecutor-driven criminal justice reform. The theory seeks to reconcile reformers' newfound embrace of prosecutorial discretion with long-standing worries, both inside and outside the academy, about the dangerous …

Should Criminal Justice Reformers Care About Prosecutorial Ethics Rules?, Bruce A. Green, Ellen C. Yaroshefsky

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Victims’ Rights From A Restorative Perspective, Lara Bazelon, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

The criminal adjudicatory process is meant in part to help crime victims heal. But for some crime victims, the process is re-victimizing. For decades, efforts have been made to make the criminal process fairer and more humane for victims. For example, state and federal laws are now designed to keep victims informed, allow them to be heard at sentencing, and afford them monetary restitution. But these efforts, while important, have not persuaded crime victims to trust criminal process. For example, sexual assaults remain grossly under-reported and under-prosecuted. Less than 1 percent of sexual assault crimes result in a felony conviction. …

Against Prosecutors, I. Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

When Prosecutors Politick: Progressive Law Enforcers Then And Now, Bruce A. Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Faculty Scholarship

A new and recognizable group of reform-minded prosecutors has assumed the mantle of progressive prosecution. The term is hard to define in part because its adherents embrace a diverse set of policies and priorities. In comparing the contemporary movement with Progressive Era prosecutors, this Article has two related goals. First, it seeks to better define progressive prosecution. Second, it uses a historical comparison to draw some lessons for the current movement. Both groups of prosecutors were elected on a wave of popular support. Unlike today’s mainstream prosecutors who tend to campaign and labor in relative obscurity, these two sets of …