Digital Commons Network^™

Seeing And Responding: How Students Perceive School Personnel To Fail To Respond To Bullying, Ethan M. Higgins, Benjamin W. Fisher, Maury Nation

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Although research has shown that students and school personnel believe that adults respond to bullying at different rates, it is unclear why these differences occur. Using open-ended survey responses from 189 students, this study investigates why students perceive that school personnel fail to respond to bullying. Students articulated a variety of reasons for school personnel’s lack of response, including ways in which they could fail to see, notice, or respond to the bullying. In turn, students used their agency to understand and counteract school personnel’s lack of response. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed."

Disparity In Context: Judges’ Perspectives On Disparities In A Sentencing Guideline System, Justin M. Smith

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Unwarranted disparity in sentencing continues to be a problem in criminal courts. Sentencing, a final step in the multi-stage process of criminal justice, is seen as such an important component of ensuring consistency that legislative policy has created guidelines to control judicial decision-making. Nonetheless, research shows that disparity under sentencing guidelines persists due to influences external to the law - referred to as substantive rationality. Sentencing research overwhelmingly utilizes quantitative analysis of official court data to produce its conclusions about the influences of disparity. The current study builds upon past research by using qualitative analysis of interviews with 20 judges …

Social Exchange And The Formation Of Prison Visitation Communities, Adam Trahan, Douglas Evans

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Family members and significant others of incarcerated individuals suffer when their loved ones are incarcerated. The loss of a parent, sibling, child, spouse, or partner to incarceration can be painful. If they wish to stay physically connected to an incarcerated individual, visitation is their only recourse. Visiting a prison can be costly in terms of the amount of time it takes to travel to the facility, the total expenses incurred during travel, and the socio-emotional effects of limited contact. On top of these costs, visitation can be an intricate process to navigate due to the multitude of facility rules and …

Perceptions Of Rehabilitative Change Among Incarcerated Persons Enrolled In A Prison-Equine Program (Pep), Joyce A. Arditti, Amy A. Morgan, Sara Spiers, Virginia Buechner-Maxwell, Vicky Shivy

Qualitative Criminology (QC)

"Guided by a grounded theory methodology, the authors propose a theory of rehabilitation for incarcerated persons within a prison equine program (PEP). Interviews with ten incarcerated men yielded a grounded theory of rehabilitative change centered around the importance of relationships with program staff and horses, and the uniqueness of the barn-equine environment in promoting safe attachments and positive views of self. Special emphasis is placed on the development of secure reparative attachments between men and their horses grounded in acceptance and mutual empathy, as well as the development of redemptive identities whereby participants viewed themselves as having purpose and value …

When Clemency Is A Lifeline, Shehzil Zahid

Capstones

In 1982, Yohannes Johnson was convicted for the murder of Errol Blackwood. He has spent the last 40 years behind bars and today, he is seeking clemency. This is a profile on potential clemency recipient Yohannes Johnson.

In New York’S Prison System, Who Is Eligible For A Second Chance?, Jackie Harris

Capstones

Robert "Bobby" Ehrenberg is 61 years old, and he is serving a 50 years to life sentence at Sullivan Correctional Facility for murdering Silvio Goldberg, a jewelry store owner, in 1992. After decades of "self-examination, education, and rehabilitative programs," Ehrenberg applied for clemency in 2020. In the audio portion, we hear who he was before incarceration and what factors led up to the murder he committed. The other multimedia display the clemency application components, incarceration population data and upcoming state legislation that could impact Ehrenberg’s sentence.

Autonomous Cyber Weapons And Command Responsibility, Russell Buchan, Nicholas Tsagourias

International Law Studies

Autonomous cyber weapons have made their way onto the battlefield, raising the question of whether commanders can be held criminally responsible under command responsibility when war crimes are committed. The doctrine of command responsibility has a long history in international criminal law and comprises three core elements: the existence of a superior-subordinate relationship, the commander’s knowledge of the crime, and the commander’s failure to prevent or repress the subordinate’s criminal actions. This article unpacks the content of these elements and applies them to autonomous cyber weapons by treating them as being analogous to soldiers since they operate within an organized …

Racial Adultification And The American Criminal Justice System, Keshia Dauphin

Master’s Theses and Projects

African Americans are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and known to experience disadvantages in society because of their race, ethnicity and sometimes gender. With determination to understand the barriers that hinder African Americans from equal opportunities; this thesis explores the disparities against Black boys in the American criminal justice system. This thesis uses a qualitative study approach in which I analyze three historical cases that happened in different eras, George Stinney Jr. (1944), Central Park Five (1989); and Tamir Rice (2014). Each case will demonstrate the denial of Black childhood and Black boys being seen as adults, mistreated and …

Decarcerating New York City: Lessons From A Pandemic, Nicole Smith Futrell

Publications and Research

Over the last decade, long before the far-reaching impact of COVID-19, the criminal legal system in New York City was on a meandering path toward decarceration. Set against the national backdrop of declining crime rates and a reckoning with the economic, social, and racial costs of mass criminalization and incarceration, elected officials in New York City and State had finally acknowledged that a shift toward reducing the number of people held in New York City jails was long overdue. Sweeping legislative reforms to bail, discovery, and speedy trial statutes, as well as the planned closure of Rikers Island, the city’s …

Juveniles In The Interrogation Room: Defense Attorneys As A Protective Factor, Caitlin N. August, Kelsey S. Henderson

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

Juveniles are more susceptible in the interrogation room than adults, due to a host of vulnerabilities that put them at risk. Scholars have suggested that requiring the presence of a defense attorney during interrogations can protect juveniles from making an unintelligent waiver; variations of this type of policy have been mandated in some states across the United States (e.g., Illinois and California). The current study takes an exploratory, qualitative approach to examine how defense attorneys may act as a protective factor in the interrogation room. We interviewed 19 juvenile defenders using a semi-structured interview method; questions focused on experiences in …

Circumventing The Crime Victims' Rights Act: A Critical Analysis Of The Eleventh Circuit's Decision Upholding Jeffrey Epstein's Secret Non-Prosecution Agreement, Paul Cassell, Jordan Peck, Bradley Edwards

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Whether crime victims have rights before formal criminal charges are filed has recently come to the fore in one of the most publicized criminal cases in recent memory. For more than twelve years, victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking organization have attempted to invalidate a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) entered between Epstein and federal prosecutors. The victims have argued that because prosecutors deliberately concealed the NPA from them, the prosecutors violated the federal Crime Victim’s Rights Act (CVRA). On April 14, 2020, a divided panel of the Eleventh Circuit entered a surprising ruling, rejecting the victims’ argument. The panel refused to …

The Female Face Of Misogyny: A Review Of Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach To Intimate Partner Violence By Leigh Goodmark And The Feminist War On Crime: The Unexpected Role Of Women's Liberation In Mass Incarceration By Aya Gruber, Dianne L. Post

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law, John A. Regan

Mercer Law Review

This Article reviews opinions impacting the practice of criminal law delivered by the Supreme Court of the United States and the Georgia Supreme Court covering the period of June 1, 2019, up until May 21, 2020.This Article is designed to be a mere overview to both prosecutors and defense attorneys of decisions and new statutes, and it serves as a broad guideline to how these decisions will affect their practices.

Irreparably Corrupt And Permanently Incorrigible: Georgia’S Procedures For Sentencing Children To Die In Prison, Rachel Ness-Maddox

Mercer Law Review

Right now, two teenagers live in Georgia prisons, knowing they will be incarcerated for the rest of their lives.Countless adults are serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) for crimes they, too, committed when they were teenagers. It is difficult to find in officially‑reported data adults serving sentences they received for crimes they committed while children. This is because, once the two teenagers specifically noted in the Georgia Department of Corrections’ Inmate Statistical Profileturn twenty, they will move to the next data bracket for imprisoned people between the ages of twenty and twenty‑nine, just as all the …

Never Mistake Law For Justice: Releasing Indigent Defendants From Legal Purgatory, R.K. Brinkmann

Washington Law Review

Washington courts impose two mandatory legal financial obligations (LFOs) on almost anyone who pleads guilty to or is convicted of a crime: a $100 DNA sample fee and a crime victim penalty assessment of $250 for misdemeanors and $500 for felonies. These fines run afoul of the Social Security Act, which bars attachment of Social Security benefits to pay debts, including LFOs. As a result, defendants whose sole source of income is Social Security benefits are not obligated to pay their mandatory LFOs. But such defendants cannot obtain certificates of discharge to clear their conviction records and thus complete their …

Comparing Corporeal Lineups To Photo Arrays, Andrew J. Costello, Blair Hoplight, Maria Lombardo

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

An eyewitness identification study of a simulated theft of a laptop in a lecture hall was conducted in a northeastern university. After five days, 148 subjects attempted to identify the suspect from either a lineup or a photo array. Corporal lineups and video lineups were conducted in addition to traditional static photo arrays and a new “dynamic photo array” consisting of the use of front, left profile, and right profile images presented in an animated sequence within the standard six-pack photo array. No significant differences between correct identification, misidentification, and non-selection were found between any of the identification methods used. …

An Exploratory Study Of Occupational And Secondary Traumatic Stress Among A Mid-Sized Public Defenders’ Office, Elizabeth Dotson, David C. Brody, Ruibin Lu

Journal of Criminal Justice and Law

The impact of stress on the mental and physical well-being of criminal justice professionals is of critical import for the effective operation of the criminal justice system. While a number of studies have examined various forms of stress among law enforcement and correctional officers, minimal research has examined the presence and impact of stressors among individuals working in the criminal courts. This exploratory study examines whether indigent defense attorneys suffer from occupational stress and secondary traumatic stress. A survey of attorneys from a mid-sized public defender’s office were found to have symptoms of severe occupational stress as well as high …

Predictable Punishments, Brian Galle, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analyses of both crime and regulation writ large suggest that the subjective cost or value of incentives is critical to their effectiveness. But reliable information about subjective valuation is scarce, as those who are punished have little reason to report honestly. Modern “big data” techniques promise to overcome this information shortfall but perhaps at the cost of individual privacy and the autonomy that privacy’s shield provides.

This Article argues that regulators can and should instead rely on methods that remain accurate even in the face of limited information. Building on a formal model we present elsewhere, we show that …

Decriminalizing Prostitution: Embracing The Swedish Model By Removing The Mistake-Of-Age Defense From New York’S Stop Violence In The Sex Trade Act, Carley Cooke

Journal of Law and Policy

In recent years, New York has re-focused on the widely debated topic of how to best manage and regulate prostitution in the United States. As a state-level issue, the debate presents an invaluable opportunity to re-examine how New York as a society views sex work. The answer in New York focuses on the idea that sex work is real work, where workers should be able to carry out their profession without stigma or fear of arrest. As it stands, the proposed reform largely focuses on decriminalizing both the purchase and sale of sex. This approach contrasts with the legal structure …

Detecting Mens Rea In The Brain, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Gideon Yaffe

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

What if the widely used Model Penal Code (MPC) assumes a distinction between mental states that doesn’t actually exist? The MPC assumes, for instance, that there is a real distinction in real people between the mental states it defines as “knowing” and “reckless.” But is there?

If there are such psychological differences, there must also be brain differences. Consequently, the moral legitimacy of the Model Penal Code’s taxonomy of culpable mental states – which punishes those in defined mental states differently – depends on whether those mental states actually correspond to different brain states in the way the MPC categorization …

Labor Redemption In Work Law, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

People with criminal records must find and keep work to reintegrate into society. But private employers often categorically exclude candidates with criminal record histories, especially if the candidate is African American or Latinx. The conventional wisdom is that workplace laws offer little to address this problem. People with criminal records are not a protected class under Title VII, and many employers fear that hiring people with criminal records invites negligent hiring liability. Ban the Box privacy laws delay but may not deter overbroad criminal background checks

This Article challenges this standard account by shifting focus to the state in imposing …

Safety, Crisis, And Criminal Law, Jenny E. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

Concepts of safety and prevention of danger pervade the criminal law canon. Arizona is no exception. The state’s criminal systems pivot around central and entwined goals of protecting public safety and preventing danger. The state constitution permits pretrial detention both for the most serious offenses and when no other condition of release will adequately protect the community from the danger the accused’s freedom might pose. The rules of criminal procedure and the criminal code designate some offenses and actors “dangerous” and urge judges to weigh not only the accused’s risk of flight, but also his future dangerousness in making decisions …

Re-Victimization Of Domestic Violence Victims, Angela De La Garza

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

No abstract provided.

No Longer Innocent Until Proven Guilty: How Ohio Violates The Fourth Amendment Through Familial Dna Searches Of Felony Arrestees, Jordan Mason

Cleveland State Law Review

In 2013, the United States Supreme Court legalized DNA collection of all felony arrestees upon arrest through its decision in Maryland v. King. Since then, the State of Ohio has broadened the use of arrestee DNA by subjecting it to familial DNA searches. Ohio’s practice of conducting familial DNA searches of arrestee DNA violates the Fourth Amendment because arrestees have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information that is extracted from a familial DNA search and it fails both the totality of the circumstances and the special needs tests. Further, these tests go against the intention of the …

Domestic Violence In Criminal Courts: The Larger Implications For Victims, Jason Johnson

Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections

Academics have considered the treatment of domestic violence in Canada inadequate (Bell, Perez, Goodman, & Dutton, 2011) and “…an indicator of society's inattentiveness to violence against women…” (Garner & Maxwell, 2009, p. 44). Van Wormer (2009) further notes that there is still “…widespread dissatisfaction by battered women … and their advocates with the current system…” (p. 107). While much of the literature focuses on early aspects of the criminal justice system (police action, decision to prosecute, for e.g.), few authors have sought to understand victims opinions about the trial process (Hare, 2010; Smith, 2001). This paper conducts a literature review …

Life In Jail For Misbehavior: Criminal Contempt And The Consequence Of Improper Classification, Kaley Ree Jaslow

Florida Law Review

Contempt is a crime that can be traced back to twelfth century England. It was an offense of disobedience that caused the obstruction of justice, and the punishment of such crimes was deeply important to the English justice system. Subsequent to the American Revolution, early American courts retained the use of contempt. Today, in the United States, criminal contempt is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 401. Despite the federal code, actions that exemplify contempt are not specifically defined by statute. Judges are granted broad discretion in determining which actions are contemptuous and which are not. Moreover, federal criminal …

Reconceptualizing Criminal Justice Reform For Offenders With Serious Mental Illness, E. Lea Johnston

Florida Law Review

Roughly 14% of male inmates and 31% of female inmates suffer from one or more serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder. Policymakers and the public widely ascribe the overrepresentation of offenders with serious mental illness in the justice system to the “criminalization” of the symptoms of this afflicted population. The criminalization theory posits that the criminal justice system has served as the primary agent of social control over symptomatic individuals since the closure of state psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s and the tightening of civil commitment laws. The theory identifies untreated mental illness as …

Coordinating Community Reintegration Services For “Deportable Alien” Defendants: A Moral And Financial Imperative, Amy F. Kimpel

Florida Law Review

Recidivism rates for individuals who are convicted of illegal entry and re-entry (U.S.C. §§ 1325 and 1326) are quite high despite post-sentencing deportations. The “holistic defense” model developed in New York City at the Neighborhood Defender Services and Bronx Defenders has been instrumental in achieving better outcomes for criminal defendants and their communities, in large part due to an emphasis on re-entry or reintegration services for defendants being released from incarceration. However, that model is difficult to implement when applied to noncitizen defendants who are to be deported. This Article argues that some attention to re-entry services for deportable non-citizen …

Taming Self-Defense: Using Deadly Force To Prevent Escapes, Robert Leider

Florida Law Review

The modern fleeing felon rule permits police officers to use deadly force when necessary to prevent the escape of a person who has committed a violent felony. To justify this rule, the Supreme Court has relied on self-defense and defense of others. This Article argues against the self-defense justification. Fleeing felons—even those suspected of violent crimes—are not imminent threats to others solely by virtue of their flight. Stretching self-defense doctrine to justify the fleeing felon rule undermines critical limitations on private self-defense and has not produced an effective set of rules to limit police violence.

This Article further argues that …

The Case Against Prosecuting Refugees, Evan J. Criddle

Faculty Publications

Within the past several years, the U.S. Department of Justice has pledged to prosecute asylum-seekers who enter the United States outside an official port of entry without inspection. This practice has contributed to mass incarceration and family separation at the U.S.–Mexico border, and it has prevented bona fide refugees from accessing relief in immigration court. Yet, federal judges have taken refugee prosecution in stride, assuming that refugees, like other foreign migrants, are subject to the full force of American criminal justice if they skirt domestic border controls. This assumption is gravely mistaken.

This Article shows that Congress has not authorized …