Digital Commons Network^™

Politics And The Application Of Law: Crime Construction And Police Power, Komysha Hassan

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The shooting death of Michael Brown in June of 2014 by police in Ferguson, Missouri triggered massive public protests across the United States, calling attention to a wave of similar incidents thereafter, where unarmed black men have been killed at the hands of officers in a wide range of locales. The recent coverage has revealed the extent and dispersion of aggressive and, in many cases, fatal interactions between law enforcement and the public, particularly minorities. Actions by the Department of Justice and other state and local agencies have consistently focused on individual agencies and/or agents, as the cause of the …

Probation Officer Productivity: Using The Effort-Reward Imbalance Model, Brandon Presley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which workplace efforts and rewards are associated with probation officer stress, overcommitment, health, and productivity. This research uses the effort-reward imbalance model, which is an indicator of job stress, on a group of criminal justice probation officers. The probation officers completed questionnaires regarding their perceptions of health, perceived reward, perceived effort, perceptions of overcommitment, and perceived productivity. Afterward, the responses were collected, and analyses were conducted using correlation and multiple regression to determine the extent to which perceptions of effort, reward, and overcommitment effect probation officer productivity and health. …

Sexual Violence Victimization And Prescription Drug Misuse: An Analysis Using General Strain Theory, Corey Pomykacz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sexual violence among college women is a widespread and severe public health issue in the United States. When compared to women in the general public, collegiate women are at an increased risk of sexual violence. Sexual violence can result in damaging and long-term consequences for the victim. Consequences of sexual violence include physical injuries, psychological distress, social withdrawal, poor grades and participation in health risk behaviors. While a connection between sexual violence victimization and negative outcomes is well established, most of the research in this area is atheoretical. To address this gap in the literature this study relied on Robert …

Jail Mental Health Innovations: Factors Influencing Mental Health Services Innovations For Jails, Orville Clayton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The U.S. is recognized for uniquely high incarceration rates. Over recent decades, there has been a concurrent dramatic increase of jail detainees with mental disorders. Provision of adequate mental health services for jail inmates is constitutionally mandated, and has legal, ethical, quality of care, and fiscal implications for jails, families, communities, and detainees. Significant variation exists in the provision of mental health services across jails, and increased understanding of the factors that influence the adoption of such services may help guide jails to implement beneficial services, and ensure that such services reflect, reflect quality standards. This study used a mixed …

Open Educational Resource 2017 Textbook List, Zachariah Claybaugh, Chelsea Stone

Librarian Publications

This is an updated, discipline specific OER textbook list for departments at Sacred Heart University, compiled by Zach Claybaugh and Chelsea Stone.

Nature Of Formal Intimate Partner Violence Help Seeking: The Influence Of Individual And Community Characteristics, Desiree Ruth Wiesen-Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

Intimate partner violence is a public health concern, and intimate partner violence victim help seeking is the focus of many intervention/prevention policies and programs. Help seeking by victims of intimate partner violence from formal support services, such as the police, domestic violence shelters, and/or rape crisis centers, is relatively low (Kaukinen 2002; Davies, Block, and Campbell 2007; Campbell 2008; Kaukinen, Meyer, and Akers 2013; Zaykowski 2014), and the research which considers the nature of help seeking among those victims who seek help is quite limited. This dissertation investigates the nature of formal help seeking among intimate partner violence victims who …

Mental Disability Law: Cases And Materials, 3rd Ed (2017), Michael L. Perlin, Heather Ellis Cucolo, Alison Lynch

Books

This comprehensive casebook covers all areas of civil commitment law, institutional rights law, community rights law, sex offenders law, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Mental Disability Law also explores all aspects of the criminal process, including all criminal competencies, the insanity defense, trial practice issues, sentencing and the death penalty. It is the only casebook available that considers the important factors that have shaped mental disability law — sanism, pretextuality, heuristics and false “ordinary common sense.” The third edition includes expanded new sections on therapeutic jurisprudence and international human rights law.

Structuring Pre-Plea Criminal Discovery, Daniel S. Mcconkie

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Ninety-seven percent of federal convictions come from guilty pleas. Defendants rely on prosecutors for much of the information about the government’s case on which the decision to plead is based. Although federal prosecutors routinely turn over most necessary discovery to the defense, the law does not generally require them to turn over any discovery before the guilty plea. This can lead to innocent defendants pleading guilty and to guilty defendants pleading guilty without information that could have affected the agreed-upon sentence.

This Article argues that the lack of a judicially enforceable pre-plea discovery regime flouts structural protections that due process …

Project Safe Neighborhoods In Chicago: Looking Back A Decade Later, Ben Grunwald, Andrew V. Papachristos

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) is a federally funded initiative that brings together federal, state, and local law enforcement to reduce gun violence in urban centers. In Chicago, PSN implemented supply-side gun policing tactics, enhanced federal prosecution of gun crimes, and notification forums warning offenders of PSN’s heightened criminal sanctions. Prior evaluations provide evidence that PSN initiatives have reduced crime in the first few years of their operation. But over a decade after the program was established, we still know little about whether these effects are sustained over an extended period of time. This Article examines PSN Chicago, an anti-violence program …

Profit-Driven Prosecution And The Competitive Bidding Process, Maybell Romero

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Prosecutors are the most powerful organs of the criminal justice system, enjoying discretion in decision-making far beyond that of law enforcement officials, defense attorneys, and judges. Perhaps due to this exceptional position, contemporary understandings and perceptions of criminal prosecutors have tended to be largely positive; evidence of such a normative understanding of the prosecutor and its role may be found from a variety of sources, from (other) law review articles to pop cultural touchstones in television and movies. The prevailing “prosecutorial norm” in the public consciousness embodies 1) a full-time government employee, 2) who devotes all of their time and …

Organizational Conformity And Punishment: Federal Court Communities And Judge-Initiated Guidelines Departures, Jeffery T. Ulmer Ph.D, Brian D. Johnson Ph.D

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines represent a uniform set of formal rules that are implemented across a broad range of diverse social contexts. Drawing from neo-institutional theory and kindred perspectives on criminal courts, we argue that the federal courts represent an organizational field in which local influences play a key role in conformity to institutional rules. We use unique survey data from federal judges, aggregated to the district court level and combined with individual-level federal sentencing data, to examine hierarchical models of judicial departures from the Guidelines. Our analysis includes more proximate measures of court community culture than prior research. We …

What Happens If Autopsy Reports Are Found Testimonial?: The Next Steps To Ensure The Admissibility Of These Critical Documents In Criminal Trials, Dana Amato

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The Sixth Amendment guarantees a criminal defendant the right to confront the witnesses against her. This right to confrontation, known as the Confrontation Clause, applies to hearsay testimony. Therefore, even if a hearsay statement is admissible pursuant to the Federal Rules of Evidence, the Sixth Amendment may prohibit its admission. Whether hearsay runs afoul of the Confrontation Clause depends on whether that hearsay is “testimonial” in nature. However, the Supreme Court has refused to define “testimonial.” Furthermore, what little guidance the Court has released about the correct interpretation of “testimonial” is fractured, conflicting, and confusing. This is especially troubling with …

Congress Blewett By Not Explicitly Making The Fair Sentencing Act Of 2010 Retroactive, Andrew Cockroft

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

In 2013, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals was the first Circuit Court to retroactively apply the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. The Fair Sentencing Act sought to end the discriminatory effects of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and its treatment of one gram of crack cocaine as the equivalent to one hundred grams of powder cocaine. The Fair Sentencing Act was meant to remedy the injustices brought about by the infamous 100:1 ratio in crack-cocaine and powder cocaine minimum sentencing. Despite this purpose, the Fair Sentencing Act does not contain language that explicitly and unequivocally requires that the …

Let Them Frye: Frye Hearings For Determination Of "Mental Disorders" In The Sexually Violent Persons Act, Hannah Henkel

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Specific laws aimed at the confinement of mentally disabled sexually violent persons have existed for years. Originally, these laws aimed to rehabilitate a person within a mental hospital and help him with his disorders, aiming to help him enter back into society. However, throughout the years, the laws morphed into ways to keep convicted criminals from society after their prison sentence ended for fear of potential future crimes. In Illinois, the courts find a man falls within the sexually violent persons law when he remains too dangerous to be released after his criminal confinement. A person must have a “mental …

Revisiting The Public Safety Exception To Miranda For Suspected Terrorists: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev And The Bombing Of The 2013 Boston Marathon, Hannah Lonky

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This Comment examines the application of the public safety exception to Miranda to cases of domestic terrorism, looking particularly at the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. By comparing the Department of Justice’s War on Terror policies to the Warren Court’s rationale for Miranda, this Comment argues that courts should require law enforcement officers to have reasonable knowledge of an immediate threat to public safety before they may properly invoke the Quarles public safety exception.

What Happens After The Right To Counsel Ends? Using Technology To Assist Petitioners In State Post-Conviction Petitions And Federal Habeas Review, Margaret Smilowitz

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

Examining Jurors: Applying Conversation Analysis To Voir Dire In Capital Cases, A First Look, Barbara O'Brien, Catherine M. Grosso, Abijah P. Taylor

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Scholarship about racial disparities in jury selection is extensive, but the data about how parties examine potential jurors in actual trials is limited. This study of jury selection for 792 potential jurors across twelve randomly selected North Carolina capital cases uses conversation analysis to examine the process that produces decisions about who serves on juries. To examine how race influences conversations in voir dire, we adapted the Roter Interaction Analysis System, a widely used framework for understanding the dynamics of patient–clinician communication during clinical encounters, to the legal setting for the first time. This method allows us to document the …

Race And Death Sentencing For Oklahoma Homicides Committed Between 1990 And 2012, Glenn L. Pierce, Michael L. Radelet, Susan Sharp

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This Article examines 4,668 Oklahoma homicide cases with an identified suspect that occurred during a twenty-three year period between January 1, 1990, and December 31, 2012. Among these, we identified 153 cases that ended with a death sentence. Overall we found that while the defendant’s race did not correlate with a death sentence, there was a strong correlation with the race of the victim, with cases with white victims significantly more likely to end with a death sentence than cases with non-white victims. Homicides with female victims were also more likely to result in a death sentence than other cases. …

The Rhetoric Of Abolition: Continuity And Change In The Struggle Against America's Death Penalty, 1900-2010, Austin Sarat, Robert Kermes, Haley Cambra, Adelyn Curran, Margaret Kiley, Keshav Pant

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This article seeks to understand when, how, and where the framing of arguments against capital punishment has changed. While others have focused exclusively on the national level, we studied the framing of abolitionist arguments in three American states: Connecticut, Kansas, and Texas. Each is located in a different region of the country, and each has its own distinctive death penalty history. We studied the framing of arguments against the death penalty from 1900 to 2010. Our study suggests that the rhetorical reframing of the campaign against capital punishment that has occurred at the national level has had deep resonance at …

The Prisoner As One Of Us: Norwegian Wisdom For American Penal Practice, Emily Labutta

Emory International Law Review

The United States has some of the highest crime and recidivism rates in the world, while Norway has some of the lowest. This Comment explores the factors behind these rates, including each country's penal goals, structures, and laws. Major differentiating factors between the two systems include the sentencing structure of the U.S. and the Norwegian principle of normality. Under the principle of normality, Norway seeks to reintegrate its offenders into society. Norway combats the negative side effects of prison that isolate the prisoner from society, reinforce bad habits, and make reintegration upon release nearly impossible. This Comment proposes that the …

Policing In Partnership: Nicaraguan Policies With Implications For U.S. Police Forces, J. Thomas Ratchford Iii

Emory International Law Review

In the midst of surging gang-fueled violence in Central America, Nicaragua has developed a community policing model that's results call into question the efficacy of the militarized model employed by both her neighbors and many jurisdictions in the United States. This Comment argues that, while the United States may have pioneered the concept of community policing, the Nicaraguan National Police has perfected it. This approach has the potential to inform implementation worldwide, specifically in the United States. Rather than militarization, which has eroded trust between residents and police forces, the Nicaraguan model offers a return to policing in partnership with …

The Daily Gamecock, Monday, April 10, 2017, University Of South Carolina, Office Of Student Media

April

No abstract provided.

Lower Federal Courts And State Courts

The Journal of Law and Education

No abstract provided.

Intimate Partner Violence-Related Hospitalizations In Appalachia And The Non-Appalachian United States, Danielle M. Davidov, Stephanie M. Davis, Motao Zhu, Tracie O. Afifi, Melissa Kimber, Abby L. Goldstein, Nichole Pitre, Kelly K. Gurka, Carol Stocks

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The highly rural region of Appalachia faces considerable socioeconomic disadvantage and health disparities that are recognized risk factors for intimate partner violence (IPV). The objective of this study was to estimate the rate of IPV-related hospitalizations in Appalachia and the non-Appalachian United States for 2007–2011 and compare hospitalizations in each region by clinical and sociodemographic factors. Data on IPV-related hospitalizations were extracted from the State Inpatient Databases, which are part of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. Hospitalization day, year, in-hospital mortality, length of stay, average and total hospital charges, sex, age, payer, urban-rural location, income, diagnoses and procedures were …

Development Of A Sexual Assault Legal Education (Sale) Certification Program For Advanced Healthcare Providers Precepting Novice Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners In Arkansas, Heather Dawn Thompson

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Caring for victims of sexual violence requires evidence based didactic education combined with clinical preceptorship by a qualified advanced practice provider. With less than twenty certified sexual assault nurse examiners in the state of Arkansas, it is imperative to increase access to qualified examiners. Despite available didactic courses, access to qualified clinical preceptors/mentors is an obstacle that has yet to be addressed. To assess the interest of advanced providers in completing a certification course in forensics that would qualify them as a preceptor for novice sexual assault nurse examiners, a pilot study was conducted. Majority of respondents (80%) were interested …

Crm 4700 : Contemporary Topics In Criminology And Criminal Justice, Sociology, Anthropology, & Criminology

Approved Course Proposals

No abstract provided.

Crm 3650 : Criminological Theory, Sociology, Anthropology, & Criminology

Approved Course Proposals

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews

New Mexico Historical Review

No abstract provided.

Special Education In Adult Correctional Facilities: A Right Not A Privilege, Melissa Edelson

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the Legislature shall encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvement. – California Constitution art. IX §1.

Adult Justice In Nebraska 2017, Nebraska Center For Justice Research, University Of Nebraska At Omaha, Ryan E. Spohn, Emily Wright, Joselyne Chenane, Sara Toto

Reports

From the Director: The Nebraska Center for Justice Research was established in 2014 with a mission to develop and sustain research capacity internal to the State of Nebraska, assist the Legislature in research, evaluation, and policymaking to reduce recidivism, promote the use of evidence-based practices in corrections, and improve public safety. The primary purpose of this report is to provide an overview of recent trends in Nebraska’s adult criminal justice system. Most of the data in this report is presented statewide as well as separated into Nebraska’s twelve judicial districts. Nebraska’s two most metropolitan counties are represented by District 4 …