Digital Commons Network^™

The Good Lawyer: State-Led Professional Socialization In Contemporary China, Lawrence J. Liu, Rachel E. Stern

Scholarship@WashULaw

How do authoritarian states define and communicate notions of appropriate work conduct and professional excellence? This article examines three channels of communication used by the Chinese state to signal professional expectations to the bar: the bar exam, the administrative rules governing lawyers, and the state-sanctioned National Outstanding Lawyer Award. We find that China’s state narrative about “the good lawyer” celebrates lawyers willing to work closely with the authorities and asks more stringent critics to separate private beliefs from public behavior. In contrast to assumptions often made in research on authoritarian law, this article highlights how lawyers can participate in politics …

Statistical Assessment Of The Significance Of Fracture Fits In Trace Evidence, Evie K. Brooks

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Fracture fits are often regarded as the highest degree of association of trace materials due to the common belief that inherently random fracturing events produce individualizing patterns. Often referred to as physical matches, fracture matches, or physical fits, these assessments consist of the realignment of two or more items with distinctive features and edge morphologies to demonstrate they were once part of the same object. Separated materials may provide a valuable link between items, individuals, or locations in forensic casework in a variety of criminal situations. Physical fit examinations require the use of the examiner’s judgment, which rarely can be …

Spatio-Temporal Analysis Of Crime Incidents For Forensic Investigation, Jamie Spencer Spaulding

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Crime analysis and mapping has been routinely employed to gather intelligence which informs security efforts and forensic investigations. Traditionally, geographic information systems in the form of third-party mapping applications are used for analysis of crime data but are often expensive and lack flexibility, transparency, or efficiency in uncovering associations and relationships in crime. Each crime incident and article of evidence within that incident has an associated spatial and temporal component which may yield significant and relevant information to the case. Wide variations exist in the techniques that departments use and commonly spatial and temporal components of crime are evaluated independently, …

Mi Casa No Es Tu Casa: Attitudes Of Rio Grande Valley Police Regarding Immigration And Crime, Catherine E. Burton, Gordon A. Crews

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Extremism In Society, Gordon A. Crews

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Mother Knows Best: A Brief Examination Of The 1982- 2019 Us Mass Shootings Data From Mother Jones’S Investigation, Gordon A. Crews, Garrison A. Crews

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

In the aftermath of the movie theater mass shooting in July of 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, Mother Jones magazine created one of the first open-source databases documenting mass shootings in the United States. They focused on documenting rampage shootings in public places which resulted in four or more victims killed by the attacker(s). Their initial database consisted of incidents between 1982 and 2012, then an additional 54 cases were added to this data base of incidents which occurred between 2013 and August 2019. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the incidents gathered in this complete database from 1982 …

Law Enforcement Officers As Victims Of Felonious Killings And Assaults: An Analysis Of The Predictors Of Lethality And The Likelihood Of Officer Assault Or Death, Gabriella Mercado

Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to explore the predictors of lethality for the outcome of police officer assault with injury and felonious death. Recent news has focused on police brutality and their excessive use of force. Conversely, the inverse relationship has not received much focus. To explore the aforementioned relationship, data from the LEOKA program on 1,375 officers who were feloniously killed or assaulted with serious injury between the years of 2008 and 2017 were examined to determine the statistical significance between several predictor variables and the outcome variable.

Binary logistic regression was used to answer the research questions posed by …

Asd Training: Knowledge, Attitudes & Perceptions Of A South Georgia Police Officer, Heather Banks Mcneal

Theses and Dissertations

This study offered a preliminary look at the evidence to support the benefits of training South Georgia Police Officers on the phenomenon that is autism. Research suggested that there was limited experimental data available regarding why persons with ASD entered the criminal justice system, as well as how to manage them once they are there (Chovanec, 2013). Various regions of the United States embraced the importance of ASD training amongst their law enforcement officers; however, Georgia has only recently taken steps to do the same by the inclusion of a voluntary, online course regarding autism and de-escalation. Participants shared their …

The Second Shift.” Female Police Officers And The Struggle Of Work/Life Balance And Promotion, Ashlyn Decruise-Fortune

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined how women in law enforcement maintained a work-life balance with responsibilities such as motherhood, domestic responsibility and other care-taker roles. While there has been some research conducted on female police officers, much of the literature was outdated. Further, many of these studies focused on women’s performance and competence as police officers, and the associated burnout rate of female police officers. Very few studies examined the gender gaps in supervisory positions in relation to the Law Enforcement field within the United States, as well as the continued underrepresentation of women in Law Enforcement. Additionally, previous literature did not …

Police Procedural Justice, Lawyer Procedural Justice, Judge Procedural Justice, And Satisfaction With The Criminal Justice System: Findings From A Neglected Region Of The World, Daniel K. Pryce, George Wilson

Sociology & Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Although the impact of procedural justice on citizens’ satisfaction with the police and other branches of the criminal justice system has been tested in several geopolitical contexts, this is the first study to examine the relative impacts of police procedural justice, lawyer procedural justice, and judge procedural justice on satisfaction with a country’s criminal justice system. To assess the universal applicability of procedural justice, scholars must carry out research in all geopolitical regions. However, subSaharan Africa appears to be a region that scholars have neglected for far too long. As a result, the current study assesses the relative impacts of …

Understanding The Association Between Routine Activities, Social Bonds, Violent Victimization, And Violent Offending, Caleigh D. Lynch

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Postconviction Innocence Review In The Age Of Progressive Prosecution, Elizabeth H. Webster

Criminal Justice & Criminology: Faculty Publications & Other Works

The Article examines how prosecutors adopt legal standards, how they evaluate both forensic and non-forensic new evidence of innocence, and how and when they acknowledge innocence—all in the context of the highly discretionary postconviction arena.

Are Opinions On Abortion Based On Racial Attitudes?, Ashley Mueller

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

My specific research question that I will be addressing through my Honors Research Project is; Does one’s race influence their opinions and criminalization of abortion in the United States? In addition to this question I will be discussing if these views have changed over time depending on race, and how their backgrounds, due to their race, may differentiate these views.

Beyond Unreasonable, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

The concept of “reasonableness” permeates the law: the “reasonable person” determines the outcome of torts and contracts disputes, the criminal burden of proof requires factfinders to reach conclusions “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and claims of self-defense succeed or fail on reasonableness determinations. But as any first-year law student can attest, the line between reasonable and unreasonable is not always clear. Nor is that the only ambiguity. In the realm of the unreasonable, many of us intuit that some actions are not only unreasonable but beyond the pale—we might say they are beyond unreasonable. Playing football, summiting Nanga Parbat, and attempting …

What’S Wrong With Police Unions?, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In an era of declining labor power, police unions stand as a rare success story for worker organizing—they exert political clout and negotiate favorable terms for their members. Yet, despite broad support for unionization on the political left, police unions have become public enemy number one for academics and activists concerned about race and police violence. Much criticism of police unions focuses on their obstructionist nature and how they prioritize the interests of their members over the interests of the communities they police. These critiques are compelling—police unions shield officers and block oversight. But, taken seriously, they often sound like …

Section 1983 Civil Liability Against Prison Officials And Dentists For Delaying Dental Care, Claire Nolasco, Michael S. Vaughn

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications (Archived)

Many prisoners enter correctional facilities in the United States with little history of good dental hygiene and even less history of access to dentists. Thus, the incarceration experience presents opportunities for inmates to receive quality dental care, often for the first time. Dental care delivered by correctional dentists is complicated, however, by the array of serious dental conditions and difficult to treat dental problems in clinical settings. These conditions exist within a legal environment that mandates adequate dental care be provided to prisoners by the state. This article examines prisoners’ Section 1983 lawsuits, claiming that delays in the delivery of …

Perceptions Of Barriers In Prosecuting Human Trafficking Cases, Jennifer Nelms

Theses and Dissertations

Human trafficking is a world-wide problem with many barriers. Human trafficking cases are criminal but are also a violation of human rights. Human trafficking victims are lured from their homes based on the allusion from the trafficker of a better life. The victims are then beaten, forces to use drugs, and essentially broken. Once the victim is broken they are forced to perform sexual acts. Due to the initial promises and threats the victims endure, they also suffered from fear of trusting others especially law enforcement as well as other psychological issues similar to that of a domestic violence victim. …

The Wandering Officer, Ben Grunwald, John Rappaport

Faculty Scholarship

“Wandering officers” are law-enforcement officers fired by one department, sometimes for serious misconduct, who then find work at another agency. Policing experts hold disparate views about the extent and character of the wandering-officer phenomenon. Some insist that wandering officers are everywhere—possibly increasingly so—and that they’re dangerous. Others, however, maintain that critics cherry-pick rare and egregious anecdotes that distort broader realities. In the absence of systematic data, we simply do not know how common wandering officers are or how much of a threat they pose, nor can we know whether and how to address the issue through policy reform.

In this …

The Transparency Of Jail Data, William E. Crozier, Brandon L. Garrett, Arvind Krishnamurthy

Faculty Scholarship

Across the country, pretrial policies and practices concerning the use of cash bail are in flux, but it is not readily possible for members of the public to assess whether or how those changes in policy and practice are affecting outcomes. A range of actors affect the jail population, including: law enforcement who make arrest decisions, magistrates and judges who rule at hearings on pretrial conditions and may modify such conditions, prosecutors and defense lawyers who litigate at hearings, pretrial-service providers who assist in evaluation and supervision of persons detained pretrial, and the custodian of the jail who supervises facilities. …

Genetic Evidence, Maoa, And State V. Yepez, Nita A. Farahany, Roderick T. Kennedy, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Justice In Forensic Algorithms, Brandon L. Garrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Undeliverable: Suspended Driver's Licenses And The Problem Of Notice, Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi, William Crozier

Faculty Scholarship

In North Carolina, one in seven adult drivers currently has a suspended license for nondriving related reasons. As in many other states, in North Carolina, driver’s licenses are commonly suspended, for reasons unrelated to safety, when a person fails to appear in court in response to notice of a traffic court date or fails to pay traffic fines. Notices of traffic court dates are sent by mail, typically to the address on record at the Department of Motor Vehicles, as are subsequent notices that the consequence for nonappearance will be a driver’s license suspension. To better understand the effects of …

Judging Risk, Brandon L. Garrett, John Monahan

Faculty Scholarship

Risk assessment plays an increasingly pervasive role in criminal justice in the United States at all stages of the process, from policing, to pre-trial, sentencing, corrections, and during parole. As efforts to reduce incarceration have led to adoption of risk-assessment tools, critics have begun to ask whether various instruments in use are valid and whether they might reinforce rather than reduce bias in criminal justice outcomes. Such work has neglected how decisionmakers use risk-assessment in practice. In this Article, we examine in detail the judging of risk assessment and we study why decisionmakers so often fail to consistently use such …

Did Juvenile Domestic Violence Offending Change During Covid-19?, Michael T. Baglivio, Kevin T. Wolff, Joan A. Reid, Sherry L. Jackson, Alex R. Piquero

Publications and Research

The current study adds some of the first light into the initial impacts of the largest global health crisis in a generation on family and domestic violence, the long-term repercussions of which may take decades to unpack. Statewide trends in juvenile arrests for domestic violence (DV)-related offending are examined, taking into account school closures for in-person learning in March 2020 and the subsequent mandate for an in-person learning option in Florida in August 2020. Additionally, trends by sex, race/ethnicity, and severity of the offense are examined. Contrasting with growing studies demonstrating an increase in DV-related arrests among adults, we find …

Improving Law Enforcement’S Victim-Centric Responses To Sexual Assault: Global Best Practice Catalog, Ayesha Ashraf, Sebastián Galleguillos Agurto, Frederick Geyer, Kamela Gjoka, Jasmine Hwang, Stanley Montinat, Jessica Moor, Pierre Reyes, Tara Ventimiglia, Hongda Xu

Publications and Research

This catalog was compiled as part of a U.S. State Department Diplomacy Lab Project entitled “Improving Law Enforcement’s Victim-Centric Responses to Sexual Assault,” in fall semester of 2019, for American Citizens Services, US Embassy Bangkok. It is intended to cover best practices in law enforcement response to sexual assault across the globe, including laws, policies and programs.Ten multilingual graduate students in the capstone seminar of the Master of Arts Degree Program in International Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) established criteria for inclusion and standardized elements for each entry in this catalog. The ultimate aim …

Convenience Theory Of Cryptocurrency Crime: A Content Analysis Of U.S. Federal Court Decisions, Claire Nolasco Braaten, Michael S. Vaughn

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications (Archived)

This article examines cryptocurrency cases decided in the U.S. District and Circuit Courts to determine the applicability of Gottschalk’s convenience theory of white collar crime to cryptocurrency crime litigation and to empirically analyze whether the conditions under which cryptocurrency offenses occurred show support for the convenience theory. Analysis of U.S. federal district and circuit court case law involving cryptocurrency crimes and fraud indicate support for the convenience theory of white-collar crime. Defendants in various schemes were motivated by financial gain, either for the company or for personal use. Their roles and positions in the businesses allowed them access to resources …

Human Rights? What A Good Idea! From Universal Jurisdiction To Crime Prevention, Daniel Feierstein

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Over the last decades, Genocide Studies has entered in a “comfort zone.” With fellowships and support from governments or NGOs, we have developed a very comfortable environment in which the knowledge we produce about genocide prevention is neither critical nor useful. We have become trapped by assumptions we have never checked against reality and many of us have chosen to work inside the circle of those assumptions: genocide and mass violence are horrible acts committed by horrible people; we cannot stand by and do nothing; we have the responsibility to protect civilian populations and that responsibility takes the form, as …

How Gun Control Laws Affect Homicide, Abbey Maloney

Honors Theses

Homicide is an ever-prevalent problem in the United States (U.S.). One solution that is often turned to is the implementation of stricter gun control laws. This causes much divide as many citizens are not in agreement about whether or not these laws do what they are intended to. The aim of this study was to determine whether or not gun control laws have an effect on homicide, and, if so, what this effect is. The U.S. states were evaluated in several different categories to determine how strict or lax their gun laws were. They were scored using the number of …

Fabricated Forensics: Examining An Undergraduate Population’S Ability To Detect Fallacies In Crime-Based Media, Conner Davis

Senior Capstone Theses

My research examines the effects of general education on students’ perspectives of the CSI effect. The CSI effect is a phenomenon in which people’s perceptions of criminal investigation are distorted from the truth because of the media’s portrayal of criminal investigation. The study sample includes undergraduate students enrolled in a Mid-Atlantic University. To quantify the degrees in which subjects are susceptible to the CSI effect, the subjects will be measured on their ability to identify basic forensic investigation flaws portrayed in three different television series. Subjects were given a worksheet, exposed to a fifteen-minute video compilation, and were told to …

Impact Of High Profile Police Use Of Force Incidents On Violent Crime Rates, Megan Galante

Honors Theses

This research study examined the relationship between high-profile police use of force incidents and local violent crime rates. It is important to analyze the impact that police use of force has on the respective community in regard to crime rates. This study analyzed three incidents of police use of force that have received extensive coverage in the media in order to determine if there was a change in the rates of violent crime in that city. The theory of de-policing suggests that in the aftermath of a high-profile incident of police brutality, police departments in the area change their behaviors …