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Collateral Consequences And Criminal Justice: Future Policy And Constitutional Directions

Marquette Law Review

National policy with respect to collateral consequences is receiving more attention than it has in decades. This article outlines and explains some of the reasons for the new focus. The legal system is beginning to recognize that for many people convicted of crime, the greatest effect is not imprisonment, but being marked as a criminal and subjected to legal disabilities. Consequences can include loss of civil rights, loss of public benefits, and ineligibility for employment, licenses, and permits. The United States, the 50 states, and their agencies and subdivisions impose collateral consequences—often applicable for life—based on convictions from any jurisdiction. …

Hidden In Plain View: Juries And The Implicit Credibility Given To Police Testimony, Jonathan M. Warren

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

“I Made A Huge Mistake With My Life” – The Harms Of Prostitution As Mis-Reflected In Israeli Law, Gal Amir, Shulamit Almog

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Criminal Justice System And Latinos In An Emerging Latino Area, Betina Cutaia Wilkinson

Latino Public Policy

The topic of my study is Latinos’ attitudes and experiences with the criminal justice system in an emerging Latino area. There is an extensive amount of research on African Americans’ experiences and views of the criminal justice system yet our knowledge of Latinos’ experiences with the criminal justice system is quite scant. Still, a few studies have provided some foundation for our understanding of this topic. We know that immigrant policing is associated with Latinos’ reduced trust in government agencies and its programs (Cruz Nichols et al. 2018a). Restrictive immigration policies negatively impact Latinos’ physical and mental health (Cruz Nichols …

Non-Merit-Based Tests Have No Merit: Restoring District Court Discretion Under § 1915(E)(1), John R. Fitzgerald

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note evaluates the circuit split regarding the provision of counsel in prisoner civil rights cases and proposes a uniform test. Part I describes the historical background of the right to counsel and prisoner litigation in the United States. Part II outlines the current circuit split regarding § 1915(e)(1). Part III explains why all district courts should consider merit and substance, using a case study to illustrate the deficiencies of non-merit-based tests. Part IV demonstrates why merit and substance are the best metrics for deciding when to provide counsel. Ultimately, this Note asserts that all district judges should consider: (1) …

Undocumented Crime Victims: Unheard, Unnumbered, And Unprotected, Pauline Portillo

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming

The First Amendment Case For Public Access To Secret Algorithms Used In Criminal Trials, Vera Eidelman

Georgia State University Law Review

As this Article sets forth, once a computerized algorithm is used by the government, constitutional rights may attach. And, at the very least, those rights require that algorithms used by the government as evidence in criminal trials be made available—both to litigants and the public. Scholars have discussed how the government’s refusal to disclose such algorithms runs afoul of defendants’ constitutional rights, but few have considered the public’s interest in these algorithms—or the widespread impact that public disclosure and auditing could have on ensuring their quality.

This Article aims to add to that discussion by setting forth a theory of …

Georgia State Law Review Symposium Keynote Address: Uncovering Forensic Flaws - An Outside Perspective, Spencer S. Hsu

Georgia State University Law Review

This transcript is a reproduction of the Keynote Address by Spencer Hsu at the 2017–2018 Georgia State University Law Review Symposium — From the Crime Scene to the Court room: The Future of Forensic Science Reform — on April 6, 2018.

Spencer Hsu is an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a national Emmy Award nominee.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Revising Strickland As Applied To Forensic Science Evidence, Mark Loudon-Brown

Georgia State University Law Review

Sophisticated scientific evidence may be an undesirable subject matter for a judge to tackle anew, and it can be even more daunting for a defense attorney to confront, particularly one faced with a crushing caseload. It can be tempting to avoid a challenge to a vulnerable forensic science discipline—be it new, novel, or simply recently called into question—when a lawyer reasonably believes that the evidence will be admitted regardless.

Worse still, it may seem reasonable to disregard any adversarial challenge to incriminatory science altogether, and to opt instead for a different defense or to encourage a guilty plea. With hundreds …

Criminal Employment Law, Benjamain Levin

Cardozo Law Review

This Article diagnoses a phenomenon, "criminal employment law," which exists at the nexus of employment law and the criminal justice system. Courts and legislatures discourage employers from hiring workers with criminal records and encourage employers to discipline workers for non-work-related criminal misconduct. In analyzing this phenomenon, my goals are threefold: (1) to examine how criminal employment law works; (2) to hypothesize why criminal employment law has proliferated; and (3) to assess what is wrong with criminal employment law. This Article examines the ways in which the laws that govern the workplace create incentives for employers not to hire individuals with …

From Marriage To Households: Towards Equal Treatment Of Intimate Forms Of Life, Deborah Zalesne, Adam Dexter

Buffalo Law Review

Law and attitudes around marriage have changed drastically in our own history and are widely different across cultures. Same-sex marriage is now legal, polyamorous relationships are on the rise, and, as an empirical matter, marriage serves a different purpose than it did as little as forty years ago -- marriage is no longer a prerequisite for sexual intimacy, cohabitation, or parenthood. There are no essential elements to a definition of marriage to which the state can appeal without arbitrarily restricting citizens’ possibilities with respect to their most intimate relationships. Therefore, because any state-sanctioned version of marriage will be arbitrary, the …

Effects Of Senate Bill 4 On Wage-Theft: Why All Workers Are At Risk In Low-Income Occupations, Daniella Salas-Chacon

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming

A Nation Of Informants: Reining In Post-9/11 Coercion Of Intelligence Informants, Diala Shamas

Brooklyn Law Review

This article challenges the adequacy of the existing legal and regulatory framework governing informant recruitment and coercion practices to protect fundamental rights, informed by the Muslim-American experience. It looks at the growing law enforcement practice of recruiting informants among Muslim-American communities for intelligence gathering purposes. Although the coercion of law-abiding individuals to provide information to federal law enforcement agencies for intelligence gathering purposes implicates significant rights, it is left unregulated. Existing, albeit limited, restraints on the government agents’ ability to coerce individuals to provide information either assume a criminal context, or are driven by historical concerns over FBI corruption. As …

Reforming Policing, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Law Faculty Scholarship

Law enforcement killing of unarmed black men and police brutality visited upon minority citizens continues to confound the United States. Despite protests, clarion calls for reform, admitted training shortcomings and deficiencies among U.S. law enforcement officers, conferences, summits, and movements to reform policing, the solution to ending undisciplined police violence and the hostile killings of unarmed minority individuals at the hands of U.S. police seems to elude us. Why should this be? The United States is home to some of the most creative, innovative, pathmarking, and course-changing thinkers the world has ever known. This challenge — police killing of unarmed …

Stop Repeating History: The Story Of An Amicus Brief And Its Lessons For Engaging In Strategic Advocacy, Coalition Building, And Education, Robert Chang

Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality

Stop Repeating History: The Story of an Amicus Brief and Its Lessons for Engaging in Strategic Advocacy, Coalition Building, and Education

Restoring Fairness To Campus Sex Tribunals, Cynthia Ward

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Picking Cotton For Pennies: An Exploration Into The Law’S Modern Endorsement Of A Free-Prison Workforce, Renee Elaine Henson

The Business, Entrepreneurship & Tax Law Review

The Thirteenth Amendment made slavery unconstitutional, but also created an exception where “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” This carve-out opened the door for prison-dependent companies to make handsome profits from large scale prison labor. Inmates must work full time in demanding conditions, and are paid nominally in return. Inmates do not receive minimum wages because they are excluded from the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) through judicial interpretation. Low wages …

Batson For Judges, Police Officers & Teachers: Lessons In Democracy From The Jury Box, Stacy L. Hawkins

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In our representative democracy we guarantee equal participation for all, but we fall short of this promise in so many domains of our civic life. From the schoolhouse, to the jailhouse, to the courthouse, racial minorities are underrepresented among key public decision-makers, such as judges, police officers, and teachers. This gap between our aspirations for representative democracy and the reality that our judges, police officers, and teachers are often woefully under-representative of the racially diverse communities they serve leaves many citizens of color wanting for the democratic guarantee of equal participation. This critical failure of our democracy threatens to undermine …

The Case Against Police Militarization, Eliav Lieblich, Adam Shinar

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

We usually think there is a difference between the police and the military. Recently, however, the police have become increasingly militarized – a process which is likely to intensify in coming years. Unsurprisingly, many find this process alarming and call for its reversal. However, while most of the objections to police militarization are framed as instrumental arguments, these arguments are unable to capture the core problem with militarization.

This Article remedies this shortcoming by developing a novel and principled argument against police militarization. Contrary to arguments that are preoccupied with the consequences of militarization, the real problem with police militarization …

Fairness In The Exceptions: Trusting Juries On Matters Of Race, Virginia Weeks

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Implicit bias research indicates that despite our expressly endorsed values, Americans share a pervasive bias disfavoring Black Americans and favoring White Americans. This bias permeates legislative as well as judicial decision-making, leading to the possibility of verdicts against Black defendants that are tainted with racial bias. The Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado provides an ex post remedy for blatant racism that impacts jury verdicts, while jury nullification provides an ex ante remedy by empowering jurors to reject convicting Black defendants when to do so would reinforce racially biased laws. Both remedies exist alongside a trend limiting the …

Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever?, Elizabeth K. Julian

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

No abstract provided.

Implicit Bias's Failure, Samuel Bagenstos

Articles

The 2016 presidential election was a coming-out party of sorts for the concept of implicit bias-and not necessarily in a good way. In answering a question about race relations and the police during the vice-presidential debate, Mike Pence introduced the topic. Offering his explanation for why the Fraternal Order of Police had endorsed the Trump-Pence ticket, Pence said:

Cashing In On Convicts: Privatization, Punishment, And The People, Laura I. Appleman

Utah Law Review

For-profit prisons, jails, and alternative corrections present a disturbing commodification of the criminal justice system. Though part of a modern trend, privatized corrections has well-established roots traceable to slavery, Jim Crow, and current racially-based inequities. This monetizing of the physical incarceration and regulation of human bodies has had deleterious effects on offenders, communities, and the proper functioning of punishment in our society. Criminal justice privatization severs an essential link between the people and criminal punishment. When we remove the imposition of punishment from the people and delegate it to private actors, we sacrifice the core criminal justice values of expressive, …

Accelerated Civil Rights Settlements In The Shadow Of Section 1983, Katherine A. Macfarlane

Utah Law Review

The families of Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott have obtained multimillion dollar settlements from the cities in which their family members lost their lives. This Article identifies and labels these settlements as a legal response unique to high-profile policeinvolved deaths: accelerated civil rights settlement. It defines accelerated civil rights settlement as a resolution strategy that uses the threat of 42 U.S.C. Section 1983 litigation rather than litigation itself to compensate police-involved shooting victims’ family members. This Article explains how accelerated civil rights settlement involves no complaint or case—nothing is filed. Also, the goal of accelerated civil …

Mccleskey V. Kemp: Field Notes From 1977-1991, John Charles Boger

Northwestern University Law Review

The litigation campaign that led to McCleskey v. Kemp did not begin as an anti-death-penalty effort. It grew in soil long washed in the blood of African-Americans, lynched or executed following rude semblances of trials and hasty appeals, which had prompted the NAACP from its very founding to demand “simple justice” in individual criminal cases. When the Warren Court signaled, in the early 1960s, that it might be open to reflection on broader patterns of racial discrimination in capital sentencing, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) began to gather empirical evidence and craft appropriate constitutional responses. As …

Blind Justice: Why The Court Refused To Accept Statistical Evidence Of Discriminatory Purpose In Mccleskey V. Kemp—And Some Pathways For Change, Reva B. Siegel

Northwestern University Law Review

In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court refused to accept statistical evidence of race discrimination in an equal protection challenge to the death penalty. This lecture, on the decision’s thirtieth anniversary, locates McCleskey in cases of the Burger and Rehnquist Courts that restrict proof of discriminatory purpose in terms that make it exceedingly difficult for minority plaintiffs successfully to assert equal protection claims.

The lecture’s aims are both critical and constructive. The historical reading I offer shows that portions of the opinion justify restrictions on evidence to protect prosecutorial discretion, while others limit proof of discrimination in ways that …

Equal Protection And The Social Sciences Thirty Years After Mccleskey V. Kemp, Destiny Peery, Osagie K. Obasogie

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

What Can Brown Do For You?: Addressing Mccleskey V. Kemp As A Flawed Standard For Measuring The Constitutionally Significant Risk Of Race Bias, Mario L. Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay asserts that in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court created a problematic standard for the evidence of race bias necessary to uphold an equal protection claim under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. First, the Court’s opinion reinforced the cramped understanding that constitutional claims require evidence of not only disparate impact but also discriminatory purpose, producing significant negative consequences for the operation of the U.S. criminal justice system. Second, the Court rejected the Baldus study’s findings of statistically significant correlations between the races of the perpetrators and victims and the imposition of the death …

Equal Protection And White Supremacy, Paul Butler

Northwestern University Law Review

The project of using social science to help win equal protection claims is doomed to fail if its premise is that the Supreme Court post-McCleskey just needs more or better evidence of racial discrimination. Everyone—including the Justices of the Court—already knows that racial discrimination is endemic in the criminal justice system. Social science does help us to understand the role of white supremacy in U.S. police and punishment practices. Social science also can help us understand how to move people to resist, and can inform our imagination of the transformation needed for equal justice under the law.

Combating Discrimination Against The Formerly Incarcerated In The Labor Market, Ifeoma Ajunwa, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Northwestern University Law Review

Both discrimination by private employers and governmental restrictions in the form of statutes that prohibit professional licensing serve to exclude the formerly incarcerated from much of the labor market. This Essay explores and analyzes potential legislative and contractual means for removing these barriers to labor market participation by the formerly incarcerated. First, as a means of addressing discrimination by the state, Part I of this Essay explores the ways in which the adoption of racial impact statements—which mandate that legislators consider statistical analyses of the potential impact their proposed legislation may have on racial and ethnic groups prior to enacting …