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Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
A Measure Of Our Justice System: A Look At Maine's Indigent Criminal Defense Delivery System, Ronald W. Schneider Jr.
A Measure Of Our Justice System: A Look At Maine's Indigent Criminal Defense Delivery System, Ronald W. Schneider Jr.
Maine Law Review
This Comment will examine briefly the history of the right to counsel and the accompanying right to the effective assistance of counsel in this country. At the time the Sixth Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, the United States rejected the English practice of denying the right to counsel to those accused of felonies while granting the right to those charged with misdemeanors. People in the United States have enjoyed the right to counsel in all criminal cases, felonies and misdemeanors, since 1791. Yet in a very real and dangerous sense, the courts have reversed the course of …
Judges, Racism, And The Problem Of Actual Innocence, Stephen J. Fortunato Jr.
Judges, Racism, And The Problem Of Actual Innocence, Stephen J. Fortunato Jr.
Maine Law Review
The facts and data are in and the conclusion they compel is bleak: the American criminal justice system and its showpiece, the criminal trial, harbor at their core a systemic racism. For decades, criminologists, law professors, sociologists, government statisticians, and others have been collecting and collating data on crime, punishment, and incarceration in the United States. These intrepid scholars have looked at crime, criminals, and the justice system from all angles—the race of defendants and victims; the relationship of poverty to criminality; severity of crime; severity of punishment; incarceration rates for different racial groups; sentencing and sentence disparities; and so …