Law and Psychology Commons^™

Beyond Finality: How Making Criminal Judgments Less Final Can Further The Interests Of Finality, Andrew Chongseh Kim

Andrew Chongseh Kim

Courts and scholars commonly assume that granting convicted defendants more liberal rights to challenge their judgments would harm society’s interests in “finality.” According to conventional wisdom, finality in criminal judgments is necessary to conserve resources, encourage efficient behavior by defense counsel, and deter crime. Thus, under the common analysis, the extent to which convicted defendants should be allowed to challenge their judgments depends on how much society is willing to sacrifice to validate defendants’ rights. This Article argues that expanding defendants’ rights on post-conviction review does not always harm these interests. Rather, more liberal review can often conserve state resources, …

The Legitimacy Of Crimmigration Law, Juliet P. Stumpf

Juliet P Stumpf

Crimmigration law—the intersection of immigration and criminal law—with its emphasis on immigration enforcement, has been hailed as the lynchpin for successful political compromise on immigration reform. Yet crimmigration law’s unprecedented approach to interior immigration and criminal law enforcement threatens to undermine public belief in the fairness of immigration law. This Article uses pioneering social science research to explore people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of crimmigration law. According to Tom Tyler and other compliance scholars, perceptions about procedural justice—whether people perceive authorities as acting fairly—are often more important than a favorable outcome such as winning the case or avoiding arrest. Legal …

Isolated Confinement In Michigan: Mapping The Circles Of Hell, Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Streeter

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

For the past twelve months, there has been a burgeoning campaign to abolish, or greatly reduce, the use of segregated confinement in prisons. Advocates for the campaign call such classifications "solitary confinement" despite the fact that in some states, like New York, prisoners in these cells are often double-celled. The Michigan Department of Corrections, as well as other prison systems, uses labels such as "segregation," "special management," "special housing," and "observation" for these classifications. Prisoners ordinarily use traditional terms, such as "the hole." In this Essay we will refer to such restrictive classifications as "segregation" or "segregated confinement." Our perspective …

The Federal Bureau Of Prisons: Willfully Ignorant Or Maliciously Unlawful?, Deborah Golden

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Federal Bureau of Prisons ("BOP") and the larger U.S. government either purposely ignore the plight of men with serious mental illness in the federal prison system or maliciously act in violation of the law. I have no way of knowing which it is. In a complex system comprising many individual actors, motivations are most likely complex and contradictory. Either way, uncontrovertibly, the BOP and the U.S. government, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, continuously assert that there are no men with serious mental illnesses housed in the federal supermax prison, the Administrative Maximum facility in Florence, Colorado, also known …

A Phenomenological Exploration Of Black Male Law Enforcement Officers' Perspectives Of Racial Profiling And Their Law Enforcement Career Exploration And Commitment, Gregory A. Salters

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This phenomenological study explored Black male law enforcement officers’ perspectives of how racial profiling shaped their decisions to explore and commit to a law enforcement career. Criterion and snow ball sampling was used to obtain the 17 participants for this study. Super’s (1990) archway model was used as the theoretical framework. The archway model “is designed to bring out the segmented but unified and developmental nature of career development, to highlight the segments, and to make their origin clear” (Super, 1990, p. 201).

Interview data were analyzed using inductive, deductive, and comparative analyses. Three themes emerged from the inductive analysis …

Timeless Trial Strategies And Tactics: Lessons From The Classic Claus Von Bülow Case, Daniel M. Braun

Daniel M Braun

In this new Millennium -- an era of increasingly complex cases -- it is critical that lawyers keep a keen eye on trial strategy and tactics. Although scientific evidence today is more sophisticated than ever, the art of effectively engaging people and personalities remains prime. Scientific data must be contextualized and presented in absorbable ways, and attorneys need to ensure not only that they correctly understand jurors, judges, witnesses, and accused persons, but also that they find the means to make their arguments truly resonate if they are to formulate an effective case and ultimately realize justice. A decades-old case …

Minding The Court: Enhancing The Decision-Making Process, Pamela Casey, Kevin Burke, Steve Leben

Faculty Works

A compelling and growing body of research from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience provides important insights about how we process information and make decisions. This research has great potential significance for judges, who spend much of their time making decisions of great importance to others. For most judges, this research literature is not part of their judicial education. This article reviews cutting edge research about decision making and discusses its implications for helping judges and those who work with them produce fair processes and just outcomes. It builds on a 2007 American Judges Association paper that encouraged judges …

A Good Enough Reason: Addiction, Agency And Criminal Responsibility, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

The article begins by contrasting medical and moral views of addiction and how such views influence responsibility and policy analysis. It suggests that since addiction always involves action and action can always be morally evaluated, we must independently decide whether addicts do not meet responsibility criteria rather than begging the question and deciding by the label of ‘disease’ or ‘moral weakness’. It then turns to the criteria for criminal responsibility and shows that the criteria for criminal responsibility, like the criteria for addiction, are all folk psychological. Therefore, any scientific information about addiction must be ‘translated’ into the law’s folk …

Yonder Stands Your Orphan With His Gun: The International Human Rights And Therapeutic Jurisprudence Implications Of Juvenile Punishment Schemes, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

In the last decade, the US Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty, a life sentence without possibility of parole (LWOP), and mandatory LWOP for homicide convictions violate the Eighth Amendment when applied to juvenile defendants. These decisions were premised, in large part, on findings that "developments in psychology and brain science continue to show fundamental differences between juvenile and adult minds," and that those findings both lessened a child's "moral culpability" and enhanced the prospect that, as the years go by and neurological development occurs, his "deficiencies will be reformed."

These decisions have, by and large, been welcomed …

Wisdom Is Thrown Into Jail: Using Therapeutic Jurisprudence To Remediate The Criminalization Of Persons With Mental Illness, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

The common wisdom is that there are two related villains in the saga of the “criminalization of persons with mental illness”: the dramatic elimination of psychiatric hospital beds in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the “civil rights revolution,” and the failure of the deinstitutionalization movement. Both of these explanations are superficially appealing, but neither is correct; in fact, the causal link between deinstitutionalization and criminalization has never been rigorously tested. It is necessary, rather, to consider another issue to which virtually no attention has been or is being paid: the near-disappearance of mental status issues from the …

They’Re Planting Stories In The Press: The Impact Of Media Distortions On Sex Offender Law And Policy, Heather Ellis Cucolo, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

Individuals classified as sexual predators are the pariahs of the community. Sex offenders are arguably the most despised members of our society and therefore warrant our harshest condemnation. Twenty individual states and the federal government have enacted laws confining individuals who have been adjudicated as “sexually violent predators” to civil commitment facilities post incarceration and/or conviction. Additionally, in many jurisdictions, offenders who are returned to the community are restricted and monitored under community notification, registration and residency limitations. Targeting, punishing and ostracizing these individuals has become an obsession in society, clearly evidenced in the constant push to enact even more …