Law and Psychology Commons^™

Mental Disorder And Criminal Justice, Stephen J. Morse

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

This paper is a chapter that will appear in REFORMING CRIMINAL JUSTICE: A REPORT OF THE ACADEMY FOR JUSTICE BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN SCHOLARSHIP AND REFORM (Erik Luna ed., Academy for Justice 2018). The criminal law treats some people with severe mental disorders doctrinally and practically differently at virtually every stage of the criminal justice process, beginning with potential incompetence to stand trial and ending with the question of competence to be executed, and such people have special needs when they are in the system. This chapter begins by exploring the fundamental mental health information necessary to make informed judgements ...

Implicit Racial Biases In Prosecutorial Summations: Proposing An Integrated Response, Praatika Prasad

Fordham Law Review

Racial bias has evolved from the explicit racism of the Jim Crow era to amore subtle and difficult-to-detect form: implicit racial bias. Implicit racial biases exist unconsciously and include negative racial stereotypes andassociations. Everyone, including actors in the criminal justice system who believe themselves to be fair, possess these biases. Although inaccessible through introspection, implicit biases can easily be triggered through language. When trials involve Black defendants, prosecutors’ summations increasingly include racial themes that could trigger jurors’ implicit biases, lead to the perpetuation of unfair stereotypes, and contribute to racial injustice and disparate outcomes. This Note examines and critiques the ...

Aspirations Of Objectivity: Systemic Illusions Of Justice In The Biased Courtroom, Meagan B. Roderique

Scripps Senior Theses

Given the ever-growing body of evidence surrounding implicit bias in and beyond the institution of the law, there is an equally growing need for the law to respond to the accurate science of prejudice in its aspiration to objective practice and just decision-making. Examined herein are the existing legal conceptualizations of implicit bias as utilized in the courtroom; implicit bias as peripheral to law and implicit bias as effectual in law, but not without active resolution. These views and the interventional methods, materials, and procedures they inspire are widely employed to appreciably “un-bias” legal actors and civic participants; however, without ...

Crafting Next Generation Eco-Label Policy, Jason J. Czarnezki, Katrina F. Kuh

Pace Law Faculty Publications

Eco-labels present a promising policy tool in the effort to achieve sustainable consumption. Many questions remain, however, about the extent to which eco-labels can contribute to sustainability efforts and how to maximize their effectiveness. This Article deploys research from evolutionary psychology, behavioral law and economics, and norm theory to offer specific insights for the design and implementation of eco-labels to enhance their influence on sustainable consumer choice. Notably, this research suggests possibilities for eco-labels to shape or expand consumer preferences for green goods, and thereby enhance eco-label influence on consumer behavior by extending it beyond eco-minded consumers. We suggest that ...

An Overview Of Psychology And Law And Forensic Psychology In Australia, Alfred Allan, Anthony D. Cole, Donald M. Thomson, Cate L. Parry

ECU Publications Post 2013

Psychology’s roots in Australia go back to 1881, but the first documented evidence of psychology-and-law (psycholegal) research and psychologists working in court and correctional settings only emerged in 1949. The activities of psycholegal researchers and psychologists providing services to the correction, investigative and justice systems are not well-documented. Our aim in this paper is to start recording the histories of these people and the development of the psycholegal and forensic psychology fields. We do this primarily by examining publications and conference papers and recording our and other people’s personal recollections. We specifically record psychologists’ interaction with lawyers, their ...

The Strength Of Digital Ties: Virtual Networks, Norm-Generating Communities, And Collective Action Problems, Raymond H. Brescia

Dickinson Law Review

To live in a nomos—a norm-generating community—is to understand the norms that are expected of us; to honor our credible commitments to other members of the community; and to share the values, the goals, and even the myths, histories, and stories of the community. For millennia, humans have used narratives, or stories, to communicate norms and values designed to spur the communities they inhabit to solve collective action problems by encouraging their members to trust and to be trust- worthy. To do so, we have used a range of tools, media, and set- tings for those communications, from ...

My Brain Is So Wired; Neuroimaging's Role In Competency Cases Involved Persons With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin, Alison Lynch

Articles & Chapters

In this article, we consider the therapeutic jurisprudence implications of the use of neuroimaging techniques in assessing whether a defendant is competent to stand trial, a topic that has been the subject of no prior legal commentary. Recent attention paid to neuroscience in the criminal process has focused on questions of mitigation and competency to be executed, but the potential of such evidence transcends these areas.

There has been almost no attention paid to its potential impact on a critical intersection between the criminal trial process and inquiries into mental or psychological status: a defendant’s trial competency. Less than ...

'Your Old Road Is/Rapidly Agin': International Human Rights Standards And Their Impact On Forensic Psychologists, The Practice Of Forensic Psychology, And The Conditions Of Institutionalization Of Persons With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

An earlier version of this paper was presented as the Lynn Stuart Weiss lecture at the American Psychological Association yearly conference, sponsored by the American Psychology-Law Society and the American Psychology Foundation, August 2016, Denver, Colorado.

For years, considerations of the relationship between international human rights standards and the work of forensic psychologists have focused on the role of organized psychology in prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghirab. That issue has been widely discussed and debated, and these discussions show no sign of abating. But there has been virtually no attention given to another issue of international human ...

'The Pain I Rise Above': How International Human Rights Can Best Realize The Needs Of Persons With Trauma-Related Mental Disabilities, Mehgan Gallagher, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Who Will Judge The Many When The Game Is Through: Considering The Profound Differences Between Mental Health Courts And Traditional Involuntary Civil Commitment Courts, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

This paper is an expansion of a presentation given by the author at the annual Therapeutic Jurisprudence Workshop at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 15, 2016. There is a developing robust literature about mental health courts (MHCrts) in the United States, and researchers have begun to focus on a broad range of empirical issues, such as the extent to which defendants are competent to waive their trial rights in such settings, the significance of diversion, etc. Also, advocates and other scholars have engaged in vigorous debates about the value of these courts, and the extent ...

Who's Pretending To Care For Him? How The Endless Jail-To-Hospital-To-Street-Repeat Cycle Deprives Persons With Mental Disabilities The Right To Continuity Of Care, Naomi Weinstein, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

There is a well-documented “shuttle process” by which individuals committed to psychiatric institutions (having been charged with minor “nuisance”-type criminal offenses) are often stabilized, returned to jail to await trial, and then returned to the hospital following relapse. This shuttling or cycling is bad for many reasons, not least of which is the way that it deprives the cohort of individuals at risk from any meaningful continuity of care. Continuity of care is crucial in order to reduce the rate of incarceration and institutionalization for persons with mental illness. Without this continuity, it is far less likely that any ...

Fear-Based Provocation, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers three major contributions to challenge existing view of provocation: first, it considers psychological research that found that fear, similarly to anger, may also significantly interfere with individuals’ decision making processes by disturbing rational judgment, therefore sometimes leading to lethal aggression. Second, drawing on this research, this Article argues that provocation doctrine should be reconstructed to also include a fear-based prong. Third, recognizing fear-based provocation calls for rejecting the loss of control paradigm that currently dominates judges’ and jurors’ perception of the defense. In its place, this Article advocates focusing on the fearful defendant’s fear of violence ...

Decoding Guilty Minds: How Jurors Attribute Knowledge And Guilt, Owen D. Jones, Matthew R. Ginther, Francis X. Shen, Richard J. Bonnie, Morris B. Hoffman, Kenneth W. Simons

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A central tenet of Anglo-American penal law is that in order for an actor to be found criminally liable, a proscribed act must be accompanied by a guilty mind. While it is easy to understand the importance of this principle in theory, in practice it requires jurors and judges to decide what a person was thinking months or years earlier at the time of the alleged offense, either about the results of his conduct or about some elemental fact (such as whether the briefcase he is carrying contains drugs). Despite the central importance of this task in the administration of ...

Eyewitness Identification, Gary L. Wells

Psychology Publications

Mistaken eyewitness-identification testimony is at the heart of a large share of the convictions of people whose innocence was later proven using forensic DNA testing. A considerable amount is now known about how to lower the rate of mistaken identifications through the use of better procedures for conducting identification. Several procedural reforms are described, such as double-blind lineups and pristine assessments of eyewitness-identification confidence. Although numerous jurisdictions have made improvements to their identification procedures in recent years, a large share of jurisdictions have still not made significant reforms. Although some courts have been making better use of the scientific findings ...

Book Review: The Pimping Of Prostitution: Abolishing The Sex Work Myth By Julie Bindel, Roger Matthews

Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation By Renate Klein, Kate Rose

Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Boost: Improving Mindfulness, Thinking, And Diversity, Peter H. Huang

Articles

Many important decisions can be difficult; require focused, cognitive attention; produce delayed, noisy feedback; benefit from careful and clear thinking; and quite often trigger anxiety, stress, and other strong, negative emotions. Much empirical, experimental, and field research finds that we often make decisions leading to outcomes we judge as suboptimal. These studies have contributed to the popularity of the idea of nudging people to achieve better outcomes by changing how choices and information are framed and presented (also known as choice architecture and information architecture). Although choice architecture and information architecture can nudge people into better outcomes, choice architecture and ...

Thinking Fast And Slow About The Concept Of Materiality, Mark J. Loewenstein

Articles

Determining whether, for securities law purposes, a misrepresentation or omission is material raises interesting questions. The Court of Appeals in SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co. provided some guidance on materiality, and the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in several times in the past 50 years. This article first discusses what Texas Gulf Sulphur contributed to the doctrine of materiality, then briefly considers other dimensions of the doctrine, and finally moves to its thesis: The doctrine of materiality should take into account important psychological insights and heuristics that may affect the way that a fact finder decides whether a ...

The Disruptive Neuroscience Of Judicial Choice, Anna Spain Bradley

Articles

Scholars of judicial behavior overwhelmingly substantiate the historical presumption that most judges act impartially and independent most of the time. The reality of human behavior, however, says otherwise. Drawing upon untapped evidence from neuroscience, this Article provides a comprehensive evaluation of how bias, emotion, and empathy—all central to human decision-making—are inevitable in judicial choice. The Article offers three novel neuroscientific insights that explain why this inevitability is so. First, because human cognition associated with decision-making involves multiple, and often intersecting, neural regions and circuits, logic and reason are not separate from bias and emotion in the brain. Second ...

Deterrence, David Crump

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming