Digital Commons Network^™

The Case For A New Compassionate Release Statutory Provision, Adelina Iftene

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In the last decade there has been a steady growth in the number of federally incarcerated people aging in prisons. These individuals have a long list of medical needs while they present low risk to communities. However, this category of people tends to spend more time in prison than their younger counterparts and face difficulties in being released. Using original empirical data, as well as the existing literature, I argue that a high number of these individuals need to be released through a compassionate release mechanism. This article has two purposes. One is to show that compassionate release does not …

De-Policing, Stephen Rushin, Griffin Sims Edwards

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Critics have long claimed that when the law regulates police behavior it inadvertently reduces officer aggressiveness, thereby increasing crime. This hypothesis has taken on new significance in recent years as prominent politicians and law enforcement leaders have argued that increased oversight of police officers in the wake of the events in Ferguson, Missouri has led to an increase in national crime rates. Using a panel of American law enforcement agencies and difference-in-difference regression analyses, this Article tests whether the introduction of public scrutiny or external regulation is associated with changes in crime rates. To do this, this Article relies on …

State Labor Law And Federal Police Reform, Stephen Rushin, Allison Garnett

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Police Union Contracts, Stephen Rushin

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article empirically demonstrates that police departments' internal disciplinary procedures, often established through the collective bargaining process, can serve as barriers to officer accountability.

Policymakers have long relied on a handful of external legal mechanisms like the exclusionary rule, civil litigation, and criminal prosecution to incentivize reform in American police departments. In theory, these external legal mechanisms should increase the costs borne by police departments in cases of officer misconduct, forcing rational police supervisors to enact rigorous disciplinary procedures. But these external mechanisms have failed to bring about organizational change in local police departments. This Article argues that state labor …

Bad Cops Or Bad Training? How Police Officer Training Impacts Use Of Force Incidents., Kendra Bengtson

Departmental Honors Projects

There has been growing tension between the police and public for allegations of excessive use of force, racism, and insufficient knowledge of mental illness. The purpose of this project is to examine how officers are trained to use force and what changes in training are still needed to limit using force. This project involved a comprehensive literature review on training, use of force, racial bias and mental illness. Additionally, seven in-depth interviews were conducted with individuals involved in the policing community, and four hours of use of force training and forty hours of de-escalation training were observed. This project found …

Blue Lives Have Always Mattered: The Usurping Of Hate Crime Laws For An Unintended And Unnecessary Purpose, Lisa M. Olson

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

Abstract forthcoming.

A Culture Of Silence: Exploring The Impact Of The Historically Contentious Relationship Between African-Americans And The Police, Mikah K. Thompson

Faculty Works

The relationship between African-Americans and the police has traditionally been focused on authority, control, and the enforcement of laws we now acknowledge were racially discriminatory. This historical relationship, when combined with a modern-day narrative that the police disproportionately stop, arrest, and utilize deadly force against African-Americans, has resulted in pervasive, inter-generational fear and distrust of the police. Most African-Americans view police officers not as the heroic protectors they can call upon when in need of help or the hard-hitting investigators they would trust to look into a family member’s murder. Instead, many African-Americans believe police officers have bought into the …

Predictive Analytics' Punishment Mismatch, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Use Of Force: A Split-Second Decision, Samantha Mcnulty

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper discusses the compliance and measures taken by Summit County, Ohio police departments in their efforts to meet use of force policy standards set by the Ohio Collaborative Community-Police Advisory Board. This board was established by Kasich's Executive Order 2015-04K to create standards on what the departments' use of force or response to resistance policies should contain and determine the Ohio departments which comply with the certification standards.

The Justified Lawman: Cowboy Killings In The Modern Era, Joel Franklin Harman

Online Theses and Dissertations

Stereotypes advanced by the popular media, do not necessarily have the power to directly determine an individual's ways of thinking, but do help frame and reinforce already existing cultural beliefs, particularly within the context of the seemingly innocuous narrative fictions of cable television. These narratives not only simplify complex ideas, but also can further entrench or justify harmful social relations. My contention here, is that the popular television program Justified does precisely this by normalizing police violence and the ways that the police underpin and reproduce profoundly disparate class and racialized social order. While in many ways a typical police …

Structure And Service Delivery Approach Of The Children’S Bureau’S Resource Centers And Implementation Centers, Tammy Richards, Michelle Graef, Kathy Deserly, Peter Watson, Mark Ells

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

The Children’s Bureau (CB) provides a system of training and technical assistance (T/TA) to build the capacity of state and tribal child welfare systems, with the goal of improving outcomes for children and families. During the time period of 2008-2014, this infrastructure included ten National Child Welfare Resource Centers (NRCs), five Child Welfare Implementation Centers (ICs), and a Training and Technical Assistance Coordination Center (TTACC). Individual ICs and NRCs differed in structure and content expertise, yet they served the same jurisdictions and at times provided services concurrently. To increase cohesion and consistency, the NRCs, ICs, TTACC, and CB worked together …

Curbing Excessive Force: A Primer On Barriers To Police Accountability, Kami N. Chavis, Conor Degnan

Faculty Publications

This Issue Brief summarizes some of the traditional mechanisms for holding police accountable for misconduct, offers a critique of each, and ends with suggestions for the future of police accountability. Part I focuses on some of the legal and structural impediments to police accountability including the inherent conflicts of interest that frequently prevent local prosecutors from prosecuting police officers accused of using excessive force. Part I also discusses how the doctrine of qualified immunity shields officers from civil liability when a suspect is harmed or dies in police custody. Part II explores how the Department of Justice (DOJ) has failed …

Firearms In The Family, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article considers firearms prohibitions for domestic violence offenders, in light of recent Supreme Court decisions and the larger, national debate about gun control. Unlike other scholarship in the area, it confronts the costs of ratcheting up the scope and enforcement of such firearms bans and argues that the politicization of safety has come at the expense of a sound approach to gun control in the context of intimate-partner abuse. In doing so, it expands scholarly arguments against mandatory, one-size-fits-all criminal justice responses to domestic violence in a direction that other critics have been reluctant to go, perhaps because of …

Fingerprints And Miscarriages Of Justice: "Other" Types Of Error And A Post-Conviction Right To Database Searching, Simon A. Cole, Barry Scheck

Articles

The article examines the role of fingerprint evidence in wrongful convictions and exonerations, focusing on errors beyond erroneous individualizations, such as missed exclusions and inconclusive results. It introduces a framework for categorizing fingerprint errors and advocates for increased access to post-conviction Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) searches to reduce miscarriages of justice. The authors argue that while DNA database searching is widely recognized as a tool for exonerations, fingerprint database searching remains underutilized despite its potential to uncover innocence. They propose expanding legal access to fingerprint evidence to align with the principles of truth, justice, and science.

Punishment, Liberalism, And Public Reason, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

The article argues for a conception of the justification of punishment that is compatible with a modern, politically liberal regime. Section I deals with what some have thought are the obvious social interests society has in punishing criminals, and tries to develop those possible interests somewhat sympathetically. Section II suggests that many of those reasons are not good ones if punishment is regarded (as it should be) from the perspective of political philosophy. Social responses to bad things happening to people cannot be grounded in controversial metaphysical views about what is good for people or what people deserve, but many …

The Miranda App: Metaphor And Machine, Andrew Ferguson, Richard Leo

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

For fifty years, the core problem that gave rise to Miranda – namely, the coercive pressure of custodial interrogation – has remained largely unchanged. This article proposes bringing Miranda into the twenty-first century by developing a “Miranda App” to replace the existing, human Miranda warnings and waiver process with a digital, scripted computer program of videos, text, and comprehension assessments. The Miranda App would provide constitutionally adequate warnings, clarifying answers, contextual information, and age-appropriate instruction to suspects before interrogation. Designed by legal scholars, validated by social science experts, and tested by police, the Miranda App would address several decades of …

The Duty To Charge In Police Use Of Excessive Force Cases, Rebecca Roiphe

Articles & Chapters

Responding to the problems of mass incarceration, racial disparities in justice, and wrongful convictions, scholars have focused on prosecutorial overcharging. They have, however, neglected to address undercharging the failure to charge in entire classes of cases. Undercharging can similarly undermine theefficacy and legitimacy of the criminal justice system. While few have focused on this question in thedomestic criminal law context, international law scholars have long recognized the social and structural cost for nascent democratic states when they fail to charge those responsible for the prior regime’s human rights abuses. This sort of impunity threatens the rule of law and misses …

The Crime Lab In The Age Of The Genetic Panopticon, Brandon L. Garrett

Michigan Law Review

Review of Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice by Adam Benforado, Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA by Erin E. Murphy, and Cops in Lab Coats: Curbing Wrongful Convictions Through Independent Forensic Laboratories by Sandra Guerra Thompson.

Impact Of Family-Friendly Prison Policies On Health, Justice And Child Protection Outcomes For Incarcerated Mothers And Their Dependent Children: A Cohort Study Protocol, Helen Myers, Leonie Segal, Derek Lopez, Ian W. Li, David B. Preen

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Introduction

Female imprisonment has numerous health and social sequelae for both women prisoners and their children. Examples of comprehensive family-friendly prison policies that seek to improve the health and social functioning of women prisoners and their children exist but have not been evaluated. This study will determine the impact of exposure to a family-friendly prison environment on health, child protection and justice outcomes for incarcerated mothers and their dependent children.

Methods and analysis

A longitudinal retrospective cohort design will be used to compare outcomes for mothers incarcerated at Boronia Pre-release Centre, a women’s prison with a dedicated family-friendly environment, and …

Police Contact And Mental Health, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom R. Tyler

Faculty Scholarship

Although an effective police presence is widely regarded as critical to public safety, less is known about the effects of police practices on mental health and community wellbeing. Adolescents and young adults in specific neighborhoods of urban areas are likely to experience assertive contemporary police practices. This study goes beyond research on policing effects on legal socialization to assess the effects of police contact on the mental health of those stopped by the police. We collected and analyzed data in a two wave survey of young men in New York City (N=717) clustered in the neighborhoods with the highest rates …

Keynote Address, Erwin Chemerinsky

Georgia Law Review

Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald,
Freddy Gray. So many others like them, who died as a result of
police abuses. It is, of course, why we are here today. We are also
here, as we have discussed throughout the day, to discuss the day
to day violations of constitutional rights by police that are endemic
across the country.
It is important to remember this is not new. Almost fifty years
ago, the National Commission on Civil Disorders, often called the
Kerner Commission, released its report, and discussed how almost
every major riot that occurred in a city …

The Grand Jury: A Shield Of A Different Sort, R. M. Cassidy, Julian A. Cook Iii

Georgia Law Review

According to the Washington Post, 991 people were shot to
death by police officers in the United States during calendar year
2015, and 957 people were fatally shot in 2016. A
disproportionate percentage of the citizens killed in these police-
civilian encounters were black. Events in Ferguson, Missouri;
Chicago, Illinois; Charlotte, North Carolina; Baton Rouge,
Louisiana; and Staten Island, New York-to name but a few
affected cities-have now exposed deep distrust between
communities of color and law enforcement. Greater transparency
is necessary to begin to heal this culture of distrust and to inform
the debate going forward about police practices …

The Problematic Prosecution Of An Asian American Police Officer: Notes From A Participant In People V. Peter Liang, Gabriel J. Chin

Georgia Law Review

Peter Liang is a former New York City Police Officer convicted
of accidentally killing a twenty-eight-year-old African-American
man, Akai Gurley in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project.
On the evening of Thursday, November 20, 2014, Mr. Liang was a
rookie officer, 11 months out of the police academy. He and his
partner Shaun Landau, also a rookie, were on patrol in the Louis
Pink Houses, a public housing project built by Robert Moses in
East New York, Brooklyn. They were pulling, a mandatory
overtime shift ordered because of recent shootings in the Pink

Houses. This was only their second …

Commodifying Policing: A Recipe For Community-Police Tensions, Nora V. Demleitner

Georgia Law Review

Deadly police-citizen encounters do not occur in a vacuum.
They reflect our times and our society. Since the fatal shooting of
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the nation's attention has
been riveted on police killings. In small towns and large cities,
virtually all of the victims have been African-American. In some
cases, the fatal encounters led to riots. Large-scale investigations
by the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division have provided
insight into some of the incidents.
Deadly police actions against citizens can be viewed as an
internal police problem,' as a symbol of larger societal challenges,
especially racism, or as …

Urban Policing And Public Policy-The Prosecutor's Role, Bruce Green

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

State Labor Law And Federal Police Reform, Stephen Rushin, Allison Garnett

Georgia Law Review

In April of 1997, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reached
a settlement agreement with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police
(PBP) to correct a pattern of unconstitutional misconduct.' It was
the first time the DOJ had used 42 U.S.C. § 14141 to intervene
into a local police department to correct systemic misconduct.
The statute, passed in response to the Rodney King beating,
provides the U.S. Attorney General with the power to seek
equitable relief against troubled local police departments.
As the reform process began to unfold in Pittsburgh, "problems
soon emerged." The consent decree required Pittsburgh to
improve its process …

Youth-Police Encounters On Chicago's South Side: Acknowledging The Realities, Craig Futterman, Chaclyn Hunt, Jamie Kalven

Georgia Law Review

We write from Chicago, a city in upheaval following revelations
about the police shooting of seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald.
In a matter of days, public debate about patterns of police abuse
and impunity, a discourse extending back to the 1960s and beyond,
has undergone a Copernican revolution. A set of propositions about
the nature of the problem, fiercely resisted for decades by public
and private interests, has been embraced by officials and the
media as axiomatic.
Perhaps the most striking expression of this sea change was the
speech Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave to the Chicago City Council on
December 9, 2015. …

Missing Police Body Camera Videos: Remedies, Evidentiary Fairness, And Automatic Activation, Mary D. Fan

Georgia Law Review

A movement toward police regulation by recording is
sweeping the nation. Responding to calls for
accountability, transparency and better evidence,
departments have rapidly adopted body cameras.
Recording policies require the police to record more law
enforcement encounters than ever before. But what
happens if officers do not record? This is an important,
growing area of controversy. Based on the collection
and coding of police department body camera policies,
this Article reveals widespread detection and
enforcement gaps regarding failures to record as
required. More than half of the major-city departments
in the sample have no provisions specifying
consequences for not recording …

Disparate Impact In Big Data Policing, Andrew D. Selbst

Georgia Law Review

Data-driven decision systems are taking over. No
institution in society seems immune from the
enthusiasm that automated decision-making generates,
including-and perhaps especially-the police. Police
departments are increasingly deploying data mining
techniques to predict, prevent, and investigate crime.
But all data mining systems have the potential for
adverse impacts on vulnerable communities, and
predictive policing is no different. Determining
individuals' threat levels by reference to commercial
and social data can improperly link dark skin to higher
threat levels or to greater suspicion of having
committed a particularcrime. Crime mapping based
on historical data can lead to more arrests for nuisance
crimes …

Informants And Cooperators, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

The police have long relied on informants to make critical cases, and prosecutors have long relied on cooperator testimony at trials. Still, concerns about these tools for obtaining closely held information have substantially increased in recent years. Reliability concerns have loomed largest, but broader social costs have also been identified. After highlighting both the value of informants and cooperators and the pathologies associated with them, this chapter explores the external and internal measures that can or should be deployed to regulate their use.