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Full-Text Articles in Criminal Law
Defeating De Facto Disenfranchisement Of Criminal Defendants, Neil Sobol
Defeating De Facto Disenfranchisement Of Criminal Defendants, Neil Sobol
Faculty Scholarship
In a democracy, voting is not only an important civic duty but also a right that governments owe to their citizens. However, by operation of law, forty-eight states deny voting rights to individuals based on criminal convictions. Activists and scholars attack de jure disenfranchisement as an improper collateral consequence that disproportionately impacts people of color. Although recent years show substantial reforms to reenfranchise defendants, an estimated 5.17 million defendants remained ineligible to vote in 2020.
While efforts to address de jure disenfranchisement remain necessary, a problem that has received considerably less attention is the de facto disenfranchisement of criminal defendants …
Judicial Resistance To New York's 2020 Criminal Legal Reforms, Angelo Petrigh
Judicial Resistance To New York's 2020 Criminal Legal Reforms, Angelo Petrigh
Faculty Scholarship
Scholars have examined judiciaries as organizations with their own culture and considered how this organizational culture can form a significant impediment to the implementation of reforms.22 There is a strong connection between judicial culture and a reform’s ability to accomplish its stated goals. Some go so far as to state that most reforms will fail because of the difficulty in altering judicial culture.23 These studies sometimes focus on legislators misunderstanding the actual effects of legislation when it was drafted, or on the failure to account for particularities in a law’s implementation by undervaluing the fragmentation, adversarial nature, and …
How Do Prosecutors "Send A Message"?, Steven Arrigg Koh
How Do Prosecutors "Send A Message"?, Steven Arrigg Koh
Faculty Scholarship
The recent indictments of former President Trump are stirring national debate about their effects on American society. Commentators speculate on the cases’ impact outside of the courtroom — on the 2024 election, on political polarization, and on the future of American democracy. Such cases originated in the prosecutor’s office, begging the question of if, when, and how prosecutors should consider the societal effects of the cases they bring.
Indeed, prosecutors often publicly claim that they “send a message” when they indict a defendant. What, exactly, does this mean? Often, their assumption is that such messaging goes in one direction: indictment …
Unexceptional Protest, Amber Baylor
Unexceptional Protest, Amber Baylor
Faculty Scholarship
Anti-protest legislation is billed as applying only in the extreme circumstances of mass-movements and large scale civil disobedience. Mass protest exceptionalism provides justification for passage of anti-protest laws in states otherwise hesitant to expand public order criminal regulation. Examples include a Virginia bill that heightens penalties for a “failure to disperse following a law officer’s order”; a Tennessee law directing criminal penalties for “blocking traffic”; a bill in New York criminalizing “incitement to riot by nonresidents.” These laws might be better described as antiprotest expansions of public order legislation.
While existing critiques of these laws emphasize the chilling effects on …