Criminal Law Commons^™

Contact Is A Stronger Predictor Of Attitudes Toward Police Than Race: A State-Of-The-Art Review, Amy Alberton, Kevin M. Gorey

Social Work Publications

Purpose – This scoping review thoroughly scanned research on race, contacts with police and attitudes toward police. An exploratory meta-analysis then assessed the strength of their associations and interaction in Canada and the USA. Key knowledge gaps and specific future research needs, synthetic and primary, were identified. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach – A germinal methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews was used (Arksey and O’Malley, 2005). The authors searched for published or unpublished research over the past 15 years and retrieved 33 eligible surveys, 19 of which were included in a sample-weighted meta-analysis.

Findings – The …

Police In America: Ensuring Accountability And Mitigating Racial Bias Feat. Professor Destiny Peery

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Litigating Police Misconduct: Does The Litigation Process Matter? Does It Work?

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Ideology, Race, And The Death Penalty: "Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics" In Advocacy Research, Anthony Walsh, Virginia Hatch

Journal of Ideology

We use the literature on race in death penalty to illustrate the hold that ideology has on researchers and journalists alike when a social issue is charged with emotional content. We note particularly how statistical evidence become misinterpreted in ways that support a particular ideology, either because of innumeracy or because—subconsciously or otherwise—one’s ideology precludes a critical analysis. We note that because white defendants are now proportionately more likely to receive the death penalty and to be executed than black defendants that the argument has shifted from a defendant-based to a victim-based one. We examine studies based on identical data …

Newsroom: Horwitz On The Trump Effect 12-1-2016, Amanda Milkovits, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Trending @ Rwu Law: Dean Yelnosky's Post: America's Cycle Of Violence 7-8-16, Michael Yelnosky

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Guns And Drugs, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article argues that the increasingly prevalent critiques of the War on Drugs apply to other areas of criminal law. To highlight the broader relevance of these critiques, the Article uses as its test case the criminal regulation of gun possession. The Article identifies and distills three lines of drug-war criticism, and argues that they apply to possessory gun crimes in much the same way that they apply to drug crimes. Specifically, the Article focuses on: (1) race- and class-based critiques; (2) concerns about police and prosecutorial power; and (3) worries about the social costs of mass incarceration. Scholars have …

Criminal Justice And (A) Catholic Conscience, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is one person's reflections on how an important influence on his own sense of moral values -- Jesus Christ -- affects his thinking about his own approach to his role as a public official in a secular society, using the vital topic of criminal justice as a focal point. This article draws several important lessons from Christ's teachings about the concept of the other that are relevant to issues of criminal justice. Using Catholicism as a framework, this article addresses, among other things, capital punishment and denying the opportunity for redemption; the problem of racial disparities in the …

Foreword: Critical Race Theory And Empirical Methods Conference, Kimani Paul-Emile

Fordham Law Review

Everyone seems to be talking about race. From the protests that erupted in cities across the country over the failure of grand juries in Missouri and New York to indict police officers in the killing of two unarmed black men, to the racially charged statements made by the owners of professional sports teams; and the college fraternity members captured on film singing a racist lynching song; race exploded into the nation’s collective consciousness. Even the Starbucks Coffee chain’s recent “Race Together” campaign, intended to promote discussion about race, sparked a controversy and was quickly withdrawn. These and other events have …

Police Racial Violence: Lessons From Social Psychology, L. Song Richardson

Fordham Law Review

The recent rash of police killing unarmed black men has brought national attention to the persistent problem of policing and racial violence. These cases include the well-known and highly controversial death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the deaths of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio; Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York; John Crawford III in Beavercreek, Ohio; Ezell Ford in Los Angeles, California; Dante Parker in San Bernardino County, California; and Vonderrit D. Myers Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri. Data reported to the FBI indicate that white police officers killed black citizens almost twice a …

When Is Fear For One's Life Race-Gendered? An Intersectional Analysis Of The Bureau Of Immigration Appeals's In Re A-R-C-G- Decision, Ange-Marie Hancock

Fordham Law Review

In August 2014, the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) handed down a breakthrough decision, In re A-R-C-G-, permitting courts to consider domestic violence as a gendered form of persecution in a home country and thus grounds for asylum in the United States. Along with two other 2014 decisions, In re W-G-R- and In re M-E-V-G-, this case represented a marked shift from prior BIA decisions, which for fifteen years had interpreted sections 208(a) and 241(b)(3) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act more narrowly, thus excluding claims of home country abuse as reasonable grounds to grant asylum. Specifically, …

When Theory Met Practice: Distributional Analysis In Critical Criminal Law Theorizing, Aya Gruber

Fordham Law Review

Focusing on criminal law and procedure in particular, this Article seeks to expose various tensions in critical race theorizing and progressive theorizing more broadly, offer some suggestions for a unifying methodology of critical criminal law analysis, and discuss where empirical study might fit into this new program. Progressive (critical race and feminist) theorizing on criminal law is not only subject to the competing frames of critique and formalism, it also exists within an overarching American criminal law culture that can eclipse both concerns over rights violations and structural injustice. The U.S. penal system has become a “peculiar institution” and a …

Taking A Stand?: An Initial Assessment Of The Social And Racial Effects Of Recent Innovation In Self-Defense Laws, Mario L. Barnes

Fordham Law Review

Perhaps, not surprisingly, the controversy over the rise of self-defense reforms in the United States that have come to be known as ―Stand Your Ground‖ (SYG) laws, began with a story about colors. This Article principally applies an empirical method and critical race theory (eCRT) lens to explore whether these reformed statutes, which generally have authorized greater use of force within the context of self-defense, deter crime and differentially affect Whites, Blacks, and other racial groups.

"Fuck Your Breath": Black Men And Youth, State Violence, And Human Rights In The 21st Century, Jeremy I. Levitt

Journal Publications

This polemical essay was written at the behest of Black men and youth, and it is dedicated to African American women who relentlessly fight to safeguard the rights and well-being of Black men, even when in the process their maltreatment and welfare are grossly overlooked and forgotten. Bree Newsome's courageous and necessary removal of the confederate flag in the South Carolina State House is a prime example of such fearless activism. Joanne Deborah Chesimard aka Assata Shakur's-a former leader of the revolutionary organization known as the Black Liberation Armyascendency to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list is another tragically intoxicating …

Misdemeanors, Alexandra Natapoff

Alexandra Natapoff

The Paradox Of Political Power: Post-Racialism, Equal Protection, And Democracy, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

Racial minorities have achieved unparalleled electoral success in recent years. Simultaneously, they have continued to rank at or near the bottom in terms of health, wealth, income, education, and the effects of the criminal justice system. Social conservatives, including those on the Supreme Court, have latched onto evidence of isolated electoral success as proof of “post-racialism,” while ignoring the evidence of continued disparities for the vast majority of people of color.

This Essay will examine the tension between the Court's conservatives' repeated calls for minorities to achieve their goals through the political process and the Supreme Court's increasingly restrictive "colorblind" …

Book Review: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

Many in the legal academy have heard of Michelle Alexander’s new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness. It has been making waves. One need only attend any number of legal conferences in the past year or so, or read through the footnotes in recent law review articles. Furthermore, this book has been reviewed in journals from a number of academic fields, suggesting Alexander has provided a text with profound insights across the university and public spheres. While I will briefly talk about the book as a book, I will spend the majority of this …

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 …

Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. Paul Butler’s Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hip Theory of Justice makes an important contribution to the debate about the crime policies that have produced this result. Butler began his career as a federal prosecutor who believed that the best way to serve Washington, D.C’s low-income African-American community was to punish its law-breakers. His experiences—including being prosecuted for a crime himself—eventually led him to conclude that America incarcerates far too many nonviolent offenders, especially drug offenders. Let’s Get Free offers a set of reforms for reducing …

Negotiating The Situation: The Reasonable Person In Context, Lu-In Wang

Articles

This Essay argues that our understanding of the reasonable person in economic transactions should take into account an individual’s race, gender, or other group-based identity characteristics - not necessarily because persons differ on account of those characteristics, but because of how those characteristics influence the situations a person must negotiate. That is, individuals’ social identities constitute features not just of themselves, but also of the situations they inhabit. In economic transactions that involve social interaction, such as face-to-face negotiations, the actor’s race, gender, or other social identity can affect both an individual actor and those who interact with him or …

Getting Real About Race And Prisoner Rights, Michael B. Mushlin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article explores the nexus of two stories central to contemporary American jurisprudence and--for tens of millions of citizens--central to the American experience: the rise of the “carceral state” through steep increases in the incarceration of non-whites, and the decline, over the very same period, in legal protections for prisoners. The Article suggests that these two stories cannot be considered in isolation from one another. Nearly everything we know about race from the social sciences suggests that, in the highly pressured context of prison life, racial tensions will play a role in the decisions that guards and administrators make concerning …

Efforts To Improve The Illinois Capital Punishment System: Worth The Cost?, Thomas P. Sullivan

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judicial Review Of Thirteenth Amendment Legislation: 'Congruence And Proportionality' Or 'Necessary And Proper'?, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

The Thirteenth Amendment has relatively recently been rediscovered by scholars and litigants as a source of civil rights protections. Most of the scholarship focuses on judicial enforcement of the Amendment in lawsuits brought by individuals. However, scholars have paid relatively little attention as of late to the proper scope of congressional action enforcing the Amendment. The reason, presumably, is that it is fairly well settled that Congress enjoys very broad authority to determine what constitutes either literal slavery or, to use the language of Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., a "badge or incident of slavery" falling within the Amendment's …

The Importance Of Research On Race And Policing: Making Race Salient To Individuals And Institutions Within Criminal Justice, David A. Harris

Articles

For years, criminologists have directed research efforts at questions at the intersection of race and law enforcement. This has not always been welcomed by practitioners, to put it mildly; rather, many police officers view research focused on race and policing as nothing short of an attempt to paint the policing profession and police officers as racist.

This commentary argues that, to the contrary, research into race and policing can still impart to everyone in our society, including police officers and their law enforcement institutions, much that they do not know about how race plays a role in both routine and …

Against Prediction: Sentencing, Policing, And Punishing In An Actuarial Age, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Actuarial methods – i.e., the use of statistical rather than clinical methods on large datasets of criminal offending rates to determine different levels of offending associated with one or more group traits, in order to (1) predict past, present or future criminal behavior and (2) administer a criminal justice outcome – now permeates the criminal law and its enforcement. With the single exception of racial profiling against African-Americans and Hispanics, most people view the turn to the actuarial as efficient, rational, and wealth-maximizing. The fact is, law enforcement agencies can detect more crime with the same resources if they investigate …

A Thirteenth Amendment Framework For Combating Racial Profiling, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

Law enforcement officers’ use of race to single persons out for criminal suspicion (“racial profiling”) is the subject of much scrutiny and debate. This Article provides a new understanding of racial profiling. While scholars have correctly concluded that racial profiling should be considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and existing federal statutes, this Article contends that the use of race as a proxy for criminality is also a badge and incident of slavery in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Racial profiling is not only a denial of the right to equal treatment, but …

The Color Of Money, Paul F. Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction: O.J. Simpson And The Criminal Justice System On Trial, Christopher B. Mueller

Publications

No abstract provided.