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Washington’S Young Offenders: O’Dell Demands A Change To Sentencing Guidelines, Erika Vranizan
Washington’S Young Offenders: O’Dell Demands A Change To Sentencing Guidelines, Erika Vranizan
Seattle University Law Review
This Note argues that the O’Dell decision was a watershed moment for criminal justice reform. It argues that the reasoning in O’Dell should be seized upon by the legislature to take action to remediate instances in which defendants are legal adults but do not possess the cognitive characteristics of an adult sufficient to justify adult punishment. Given both the scientific impossibility of identifying a precise age at which characteristics of youthfulness end and adulthood begins and the Court’s repeated recognition that these very factors impact culpability, the current approach to sentencing young offenders aged eighteen to twenty-five as adults simply …
Actual Versus Perceived Performance Of Judges, Theodore Eisenberg, Talia Fisher, Issi Rosen-Zvi
Actual Versus Perceived Performance Of Judges, Theodore Eisenberg, Talia Fisher, Issi Rosen-Zvi
Seattle University Law Review
Perceptions of judges ought to be based on their performance. Yet, few studies of the relation between perceived and actual judicial performance exist. Those claiming judicial bias should be especially sensitive to the relation between perception and performance. Judges perceived by the public or by the legal community as disfavoring a group may be regarded as biased, but that perception is unfair if the judges’ votes in cases do not disfavor the group. For example, it may be unfair to accuse an appellate judge of pro-state bias in criminal cases if the judge votes for defendants at a higher rate …
Preliminary Report On Race And Washington's Criminal Justice System, Task Force On Race And The Criminal Justice System
Preliminary Report On Race And Washington's Criminal Justice System, Task Force On Race And The Criminal Justice System
Seattle University Law Review
For this Report, the Research Working Group reviewed evidence on disproportionality in Washington’s criminal justice system and considered whether crime commission rates accounted for this disproportionality. We found that crime commission rates by race and ethnicity are largely unknown and perhaps unknowable, but that some researchers simply take arrest rates as good proxies for underlying commission rates for all crimes.We found that use of arrest rates likely overstates black crime commission rates for several reasons.68 But even if arrest rates are used as a proxy for underlying crime commission rates, the extent of racial disproportionality is not explained by commission …