Digital Commons Network^™

Establishing A Right To Last Rites: Examining Death Row Inmates’ Right To Clergy Presence In The Execution Chamber In Gutierrez V. Saenz, Sarah B. Conley

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Redundant Leniency And Redundant Punishment In Prosecutorial Reforms, Stephanie Holmes Didwania

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Inherent Problem With Mass Incarceration, Raff Donelson

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Getting To “Prisoner As Neighbor”, Avlana K. Eisenberg

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Efficiency Mindset And Mass Incarceration, Thea Johnson

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Disability, Policing, And Punishment: An Intersectional Approach, Jamelia Morgan

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Murder And Massacre In Seventeenth Century England, Andrew Quesenberry

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Religion was almost always involved in murder and massacre during seventeenth century England, if not in its content, then at least in its interpretation. This work will support this assertion by examining multiple case studies of murder in seventeenth century England, which will simultaneously give the reader a more complete picture of the nature of homicide during the period. Specifically, the case studies consist of both homicides and infanticides, and explore the relation of the Devil to violent crime in seventeenth century England.

Ransomware Warfare: Exploring Global And Private Negotiations To Help U.S. Victims Respond To The Threat, Karina Nad

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

By weaponizing technology, now more than ever before, cybercriminals are transforming the cyberworld into their new hunting ground. Almost daily, news headlines alert us to a new malicious cyber threat or major data breach. The evolution of cybercrime has created a malicious online environment, or "malspace," that is now inhabited by hacker groups and espionage units from all over the world. As a global concern, the use of powerful online capabilities by hacker groups has led to the "militarization" of cyberspace. Closer to home, critical infrastructure, valuable personal data, and access to medical care has been compromised at alarming rates …

Collective Policy Design: An Inclusive Approach To Legislative Negotiation, Joseph Crupi

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Members of legislatures often do not have equal opportunities to participate in legislative negotiations. The lack of inclusiveness in legislative negotiations may result in suboptimal policy outcomes and undermine representative democracy. Legislatures face two categories of barriers to conducting inclusive negotiations: (1) the scope and complexity of legislative negotiations and (2) members' lack of incentives and capacity to engage in inclusive negotiations. Legislatures may be able to overcome these barriers by synthesizing and applying insights from agile project management, design thinking, collective intelligence, social choice theory, and interest-based negotiation. Specifically, legislatures may be able to conduct negotiations that are both …

Race And Washington’S Criminal Justice System 2021: Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0 Research Working Group

Seattle University Law Review

This report is an update on the 2011 Preliminary Report on Race and Washington’s Criminal Justice System. This update does not include as context the history of race discrimination in Washington, and readers are encouraged to view the 2011 report for its brief historical overview.14 The 2011 report began with that historical overview because the criminal justice system does not exist in a vacuum. Instead, it exists as part of a legal system that for decades actively managed and controlled where people could live, work, recreate, and even be buried.

Members of communities impacted by race disproportionality in Washington’s criminal …

Security In The Digital Age, Michael Gentithes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Rapidly evolving technology allows governments and businesses to elevate our collective well-being in ways we could not have imagined just decades ago. Data is now a resource that governments and businesses alike can mine to address the world’s needs with greater efficiency, accuracy, and flexibility. But evolving technology and advanced data analytics also come with risk. New digital capabilities also create new means for nefarious actors to infiltrate the complex technological systems at the heart of nearly all of our daily activities. Just as new digital tools emerge to offer unique goods and services, new tools allow wrongdoers to invade …

Robert Cover’S Love Of Stories: A Rumination On His Wanting To Discuss The Brothers Karamazov With Me Across Five Conversations During The Last Five Years Of His Life, With An Application To The Chauvin Murder Trial Of 2021, Richard H. Weisberg

Articles

The field of Law and Literature, perhaps more than any other area of legal studies, has been touched deeply by Robert Cover’s life and work. My interactions with Bob over the last half dozen years of his tragically short life provide an insight, recounted in a somewhat personal vein here, into his profound engagement with stories, with the most enduring part of that revitalized inter-discipline. I specify and illustrate five conversations I had with him during conferences, family interactions, or long New Haven walks beginning in 1981 and ending the day before his untimely death in the Summer of …

Victims’ Rights Revisited, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Essay responds to Bennett Capers's article, "Against Prosecutors." I offer four critiques of Capers’s proposal to bring back private prosecutions: (A) that shifting power to victims still involves shifting power to the carceral state and away from defendants; (B) that defining the class of victims will pose numerous problems; C) that privatizing prosecution reinforces a troubling impulse to treat social problems at the individual level; and (D) broadly, that these critiques suggest that Capers has traded the pathologies of “public” law for the pathologies of “private” law. Further, I argue that the article reflects a new, left-leaning vision of …

Lemonade: A Racial Justice Reframing Of The Roberts Court’S Criminal Jurisprudence, Daniel S. Harawa

Scholarship@WashULaw

The saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it comes to the Supreme Court’s criminal jurisprudence and its relationship to racial (in)equity, progressive scholars often focus on the tartness of the lemons. In particular, they have studied how the Court often ignores race in its criminal decisions, a move that in turn reifies a racially subordinating criminalization system.

However, the Court has recently issued a series of decisions addressing racism in the criminal legal system: Buck v. Davis, Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, Timbs v. Indiana, Flowers v. Mississippi, and
Ramos v. Louisiana. On their face, the cases teach …

Regulating Police Chokeholds, Trevor George Gardner, Esam Al-Shareffi

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article presents findings from an analysis of police chokehold policies enacted at the federal, state, and municipal levels of government. In addition to identifying the jurisdictions that restricted police chokeholds in the wake of George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, the Article conveys (via analysis of an original dataset) the considerable variance in the quality of police chokehold regulation. While many jurisdictions regulate the police chokehold, the strength of such regulations should not be taken for granted. Police chokehold policies vary by the type of chokehold barred (“air choke” and/or carotid choke), the degree of the chokehold restriction, …

The Informed Jury, Daniel Epps, William Ortman

Scholarship@WashULaw

The right to a criminal jury trial is a constitutional disappointment. Cases almost never make it to a jury because of plea bargaining. In the few cases that do, the jury is relegated to a narrow factfinding role that denies it normative voice or the ability to serve as a meaningful check on excessive punishment.

One simple change could situate the jury where it belongs, at the center of the criminal process. The most important thing juries do in criminal cases is authorize state punishment. But today, when a jury returns a guilty verdict, it authorizes punishment without any idea …

Section 230: The Internet's Most Important And Most Misunderstood Law Is Unfairly Under Attack, Málfríður A. Helgadóttir

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a foundational law enabling the modern internet, is under threat despite its critical role in protecting online platforms from liability for user-generated content. The article argues that Section 230 is essential for promoting free speech and innovation, as its repeal would force platforms to censor content to avoid liability, fundamentally altering the internet. Critics often misunderstand the law, and bipartisan attacks jeopardize its future, risking the unravelling of the internet as we know it.

Criminal Injustice, Edward Rubin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

As its title suggests, Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free is a wide-ranging critique of our criminal justice system. While it is hardly the first, it offers a number of distinctive insights. Most of the now voluminous work on this topic is written by scholars, policy analysts, or journalists and is addressed to the legislature or the executive. This certainly makes sense. External observers are well positioned to critique a system that punishes without purpose, and the major determinants of its dysfunction are the legislature that enacts the criminal law and the executive that enforces it. …

A World Without Prosecutors, Jeffrey Bellin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Bennett Capers' article Against Prosecutors challenges us to imagine a world where we "turn away from prosecution as we know it," and shift "power from prosecutors to the people they purport to represent." In this world, crime victims decide whether to prosecute their own cases, and public prosecutors play a subsidiary role, taking primary responsibility only for cases "where the state is truly a victim (such as tax fraud)." This leaves a large category of cases - victimless crimes - without any prosecutor at all; Capers singles out drug offenses as "the biggest examples." Without prosecutors championing these and analogous …

Affirmative Consent, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Justin Murray

Publications

No abstract provided.

Prosecutorial Nonenforcement And Residual Criminalization, Justin Murray

Publications

In recent years a small but influential group of locally elected prosecutors committed to criminal justice reform have openly refused to enforce various criminal laws—laws prohibiting marijuana possession, sentencing enhancements, laws authorizing the death penalty, and much more—because they see those laws as unjust and incompatible with core reform objectives. Condemned by many on the political right for allegedly usurping the legislature’s lawmaking role and praised by many on the left for bypassing dysfunctional state legislatures in favor of local solutions, these prosecutorial nonenforcement policies are commonly said to have the same effect as nullifying, or even repealing, the laws …

Against Domestic Violence: Public And Private Prosecution Of Batterers, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

No abstract provided.

Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed

Scholarly Works

What if instead of seeing criminal court as an institution driven by the operation of rules, we saw it as a workplace where people labor to criminalize those with the misfortune to be prosecuted? I offer three different ways to think about labor in criminal court: (1) labor as a source of sociological value, (2) labor as an input that generates certain measurable outcomes, and (3) labor as a vehicle to advance abolitionist reforms. First, through their quotidian activities, criminal courts’ workers enact a practical philosophy that communicates lessons about who and how we value each other. Drawing on ethnographic …

The Right To Counsel In A Neoliberal Age, Zohra Ahmed

Scholarly Works

Legal scholarship tends to obscure how changes in criminal process relate to broader changes in society at large. This article offers a modest corrective to this tendency. By studying the Supreme Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence, as it has developed since the mid-70s, I show the pervasive impact of the concurrent rise of neoliberalism on relationships between defendants and their attorneys. Since 1975, the Court has emphasized two concerns in its rulings regarding the right to counsel: choice and autonomy. These, of course, are nominally good things for defendants to have. But by paying close attention to how the Court …

The Informed Jury, Daniel Epps, William Ortman

Scholarly Works

The right to a criminal jury trial is a constitutional disappointment. Cases almost never make it to a jury because of plea bargaining. In the few cases that do, the jury is relegated to a narrow factfinding role that denies it normative voice or the ability to serve as a meaningful check on excessive punishment.

One simple change could situate the jury where it belongs, at the center of the criminal process. The most important thing juries do in criminal cases is authorize state punishment. But today, when a jury returns a guilty verdict, it authorizes punishment without any idea …

Equal Education Means Equal Education: Confronting Education Access Disparities For New York Students Amid The Covid-19 Pandemic During The 2020-2021 School Year, Sara Gruber

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing educational disparities, particularly affecting low-income and minority students in New York due to the shift to online learning. The state's current legislation, such as the Dignity for All Students Act, fails to address these off-campus digital divide issues, necessitating legal reform to ensure equal educational opportunities.

Capital Punishment And The ‘Acnestis’ Of Its Modern Reformation, Sudarsanan Sivakumar

Human Rights Brief

The term “Capital Punishment” encompasses any penalizing punishment that results in the death of people accused of committing a crime.1 This damnation dates back to the Eighteenth Century B.C. in the “Code of Hammurabi,” a misemployed code that ensured the death penalty for twenty-five distinct crimes. People convicted of crimes were made to suffer for their actions in horrific ways, including being burnt alive and drowning.2 Since then, death by hanging has been the conventional method for capital punishment in most of the world.

The Evolution Of Life Sentences For Second-Degree Murder: Parole Ineligibility And Time Spent In Prison, Debra Parkes, Jane Sprott, Isabel Grant

All Faculty Publications

Canada's murder sentencing regime has been in effect since 1976, and yet very little data has examined what these sentences actually mean for those convicted. This paper begins to fill this gap by examining the meaning of a life sentence for those convicted of second degree murder in Canada. Using data provided by the Correctional Investigator, we examine both the parole ineligibility periods imposed by sentencing judges, and how long people are serving before a grant of full parole over time from 1977 to 2020. We found statistically significant increases over time in both judicial parole ineligibility periods, and in …

The Meaning Of Capacity And Consent In Sexual Assault: R. V. G.F., Isabel Grant, Janine Benedet

All Faculty Publications

The Criminal Code provisions dealing with sexual assault have been amended in a piecemeal fashion several times since the major reforms of 1982, which replaced the offences of rape and indecent assault with a three-tiered sexual assault offence. Many of these reforms were brought forward in response to particular judicial decisions that provoked controversy and concern. In most cases, new provisions were added without removing or amending related provisions already in place. What remains is a set of provisions that do not work together as a coherent whole.