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It Can’T Be A Farce: Teachers’ Perceptions Of Restorative Practices In An Urban Charter School, Ali Yehia Bazzi

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to understand teacher perceptions of restorative practices in an urban charter school. This study sought to illustrate how teachers conceptualize restorative practices and use it in their classrooms. This research study utilized a single-case study design. The study examined teacher perceptions of restorative practices through the lenses of five urban charter school teachers. The findings suggest that restorative practices have shown promising results in terms of building a collaborative school culture that embraces staff and students for who they are, helps build lasting relationships between students and teachers, and above all, encourages a more …

Increased Rape Victims Scale Attitudes After Relational Rejection: The Roles Of Entitlement And Shame, Lilah Clevey

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This project examined whether social or romantic rejection impacted participants’ endorsement of victim blaming beliefs toward sexual assault survivors. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of five vignettes, including a woman romantically rejecting a man, socially rejecting him, romantically accepting him, socially accepting him, or a neutral control story. After reading the vignette, participants were administered a scale assessing their endorsement of beliefs that blame survivors of sexual assault for their assault. It was hypothesized that cisgender men that read vignettes about being rejected by a woman would endorse significantly more victim blaming beliefs and that participants’ own levels …

Kisor V. Wilkie As A Limit On Auer Deference In The Sentencing Context, Jarrett Faber

Emory Law Journal

While there has been increased attention on the necessity of criminal justice reform in the United States, limited attention has been paid to the role that the United States Sentencing Commission has played in exacerbating the very problems that it was designed to address. Though the Sentencing Commission was initially envisioned as a body that would protect criminal defendants from sentencing disparities, it has morphed into a body that has limited effectiveness in reaching that goal due to its misuse of commentary as a tool to effect substantive change in sentencing policy to the detriment of criminal defendants. Commentary was …

The Automated Administrative State: A Crisis Of Legitimacy, Ryan Calo, Danielle Keats Citron

Emory Law Journal

The legitimacy of the administrative state is premised on our faith in agency expertise. Despite their extra-constitutional structure, administrative agencies have been on firm footing for a long time in reverence to their critical role in governing a complex, evolving society. They are delegated enormous power because they respond expertly and nimbly to evolving conditions. In recent decades, state and federal agencies have embraced a novel mode of operation: automation. Agencies rely more and more on software and algorithms in carrying out their delegated responsibilities. The automated administrative state, however, is demonstrably riddled with concerns. Legal challenges regarding the denial …

The Paradox Of Recidivism, Christopher Lewis

Emory Law Journal

The idea that we should respond more severely to repeated wrongdoing than we do to first-time misconduct is one of our most deeply held moral principles, and one of the most deeply entrenched principles in the criminal law and sentencing policy. Prior convictions trigger, on average, a six-fold increase in the length of punishment in states that use sentencing guidelines. And most of the people we lock up in the U.S. have at least one previous conviction. This Article shows that given the current law and policy of collateral consequences, and the social conditions they engender, judges and sentencing commissions …

Theory And Praxis Of The Barbara Drake Memorial Library At The Robert Redford Conservancy In Claremont, California, Sandra Sublette

Pitzer Senior Theses

The Barbara Drake Memorial Library project applies theoretical and practical elements of intercultural, decolonial, and social-justice frameworks in order to provide a space for Tongva cultural revitalization, education, and serve as a research tool for visitors. The project’s location at the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability optimizes the collaborative potential between Pitzer College and the Tongva community. The contents of the library, which center locality and Tongva relationships to the land, are classified and analyzed with respect to relevant theories and practices of place-specific Indigenous ontologies of classification that center Tongva terminology and worldviews. Whether for a student …

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …

Exposure To Parental Conflict And Anxiety In Justice-Involved Youth, Logan B. Ewing

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore the link between exposure to domestic violence (DV) and the presence of symptoms of anxiety in a population of justice-involved juveniles. The categories of DV were broken down into verbal abuse and physical abuse, along with a third category of juveniles that witnessed both forms of abuse within their households. This study compared the prevalence of anxiety in juveniles when faced with the different instances of DV through the use of data collected from a longitudinal study conducted by the Pathways to Desistance Project. The goal of the study was to further …

The Persistence And Disproportionate Impact Of Felon Disenfranchisement, Rebecca Jaffe

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This paper seeks to understand the persistence of disenfranchisement policies and the disproportionate impact these policies have on marginalized groups of the American electorate, specifically black Americans. Felon disenfranchisement, or the restriction of voting rights for criminals convicted of felonies, has been a long-standing policy throughout the United States. Using public opinion data from the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS), this paper analyzes how certain characteristics, such as race, age, and political party identification, can influence opinions about democratic rights and whether criminals should lose theirs once convicted. The results of this analysis could help explain why disenfranchisement policies have …

An Application Of Economic Norms Theory To Brazilian Corruption, Nina B. Neto

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study aims to explore the relationship between clientelistic economies and systemic corruption under the framework of Economic Norms Theory. Pointedly, it examines the evolution of contractual mortgage credit as a percentage of GDP (representing the growth of a non-self-enforcing contract market) compared to both actual and perceived levels of corruption in Brazil in order to assess whether Brazil is exemplary of a transitioning economy under the theory of Economic Norms. The hypothesis of this paper is two-fold. First, I expect that as mortgage credit as a percentage of GDP generally increases, actual corruption will decrease. Secondly, I expect that …

Using Geographic Information Systems To Analyze The Effects Of Residential Location On Student Academic Success, Courtney Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Purpose: This study aims to assess the impact of social disorganization indicators (i.e., employment, median-household income, owner-occupied housing, crime, poverty, and minority percentage) on academic performance (i.e., GPA) for 6th and 7th-grade students attending seven K-8 designated Orange County Public Schools (OCPS) in central Florida. Methods: A hot spot cluster analysis was used to identify areas where high and low GPA clustering occurs based on the individual block level GPA data obtained from OCPS. Visual map comparison of cluster results and social disorganization indicators were used to understand if high GPA cluster outcomes occur in areas of social disorganization. Moreover, …

Mental Health Care Disparity: The Highs And Lows Of Parity, Julie Gabella

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

Outstanding Note of the Year (2020)

2021-2022 Halmos College Of Arts And Sciences Graduate Program Catalog, Nova Southeastern University

Halmos College of Arts and Sciences Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Unshackling Plea Bargaining From Racial Bias, Elayne E. Greenberg

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, [but] if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

Dr. Maya Angelou

When an African American male defendant tries to plea bargain an equitable justice outcome, he finds that the deep-rooted racial bias that casts African American men as dangerous, criminal and animalistic, compromises his justice rights. Plea bargaining has become the preferred process used to secure convictions for upwards of 97 percent of cases because of its efficiency. This efficiency, however, comes at a cost. The structure and process of plea bargaining makes it more likely that the historical racial …

Peremptory Challenges: Preserving An Unequal Allocation And The Potential Promise Of Progressive Prosecution, Savanna R. Leak

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

In the United States, the relative allocation of peremptory challenges afforded to the defense and prosecution is at once in a state of paralysis and flux. The federal system maintains an unequal allocation of peremptory challenges between the defense and prosecution in noncapital offenses, while many states have moved toward equalization of the number of peremptory challenges afforded to each side over the last few decades. Currently, only five states and the federal system have retained an allocation of peremptory challenges that affords the defense a greater number of peremptory challenges in noncapital offenses. Further, only nine states and the …

Slouching Towards Autonomy: Reenvisioning Tribal Jurisdiction, Native American Autonomy, And Violence Against Women In Indian Country, Joseph Mantegani

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Native American women face rates of sexual violence far beyond those experienced by any other race. But when those women live on reservations, their own tribes are restricted in their authority to protect their members. A maze of criminal jurisdiction overlies Indian country, one that depends on the location of the crime, the agreements a particular tribe has with local or federal authorities, the applicable federal jurisdictional statutes, and the offender’s race.

Since Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe in 1978, tribes have not had criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit crimes on their reservations. Rather, tribes must rely on state …

Prison Abolition: From Naïve Idealism To Technological Pragmatism, Mirko Bagaric, Dan Hunter, Jennifer Svilar

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The United States is finally recoiling from the mass incarceration crisis that has plagued it for half a century. The world’s largest incarcerator has seen a small drop in prison numbers since 2008. However, the rate of decline is so slow that it would take half a century for incarceration numbers to reduce to historical levels. Further, the drop in prison numbers has occurred against the backdrop of piecemeal reforms, and there is no meaningful, systematic mechanism to reduce incarceration levels. Despite this, there is now, for the first time, a growing public acceptance that prison is a problematic, possibly …

Defending Constitutional Rights In Imbalanced Courtrooms, Esther Nir, Siyu Liu

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Safeguarding Fourth Amendment protections is critical to preserving individual privacy rights and fostering positive perceptions of police legitimacy within communities. Maintaining an effective accountability structure for police stops, searches, and seizures is a necessary step toward achieving these objectives. In this article, we use qualitative interviews and survey data with defense attorneys to explore—from a court community perspective— their use of discretion to uphold the Exclusionary Rule through bringing suppression motions. Data demonstrate that power dynamics within the court community lead defense attorneys to conclude that litigating rights violations is often a futile effort that interferes with favorable case outcomes …

The Modern Common Law Of Crime, Robert Leider

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Two visions of American criminal law have emerged. The first vision is that criminal law is statutory and posits that legislatures, not courts, draft substantive criminal law. The second vision, like the first, begins with legislative supremacy, but it ends with democratic dysfunction. On this view, while contemporary American criminal law is statutory in theory, in practice, American legislatures badly draft and maintain criminal codes. This effectively delegates the “real” drafting of criminal law to prosecutors, who form the law through their charging decisions.

This Article offers a third vision: that modern American criminal law is primarily conventional. That is, …

Regional International Juvenile Incarceration Models As A Blueprint For Rehabilitative Reform Of Juvenile Criminal Justice Systems In The United States, Robert Laird

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Adolescence marks a unique and transformative time in a person’s physical, emotional, and intellectual development and requires special considerations in the realm of criminal justice. This Comment explores how rehabilitative models of criminal justice are better suited than punitive models to recognize and accommodate the intricacies and special factors inherent in juvenile delinquency and uses examples from regional international bodies to illustrate how the United States can adopt measures that align with modern-day neurology and psychiatry. First, this Comment explores the unique characteristics of juvenile offenders as adolescent, semi-autonomous individuals who are more likely to be incompetent to stand trial …

"Defund The (School) Police"? Bringing Data To Key School-To-Prison Pipeline Claims, Michael Heise, Jason P. Nance

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Nationwide calls to “Defund the Police,” largely attributable to the resurgent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, have motivated derivative calls for public school districts to consider “defunding” (or modifying) school resource officer (“SRO/police”) programs. To be sure, a school’s SRO/police presence—and the size of that presence—may influence the school’s student discipline reporting policies and practices. How schools report student discipline and whether that reporting involves referrals to law enforcement agencies matters, particularly as reports may fuel a growing “school-to-prison pipeline.” The school-to-prison pipeline research literature features two general claims that frame debates about changes in how public schools approach student discipline …

Minding The Gap In Domestic Violence Legislation: Should States Adopt Course Of Conduct Laws?, Teresa Manring

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

In the United States, there is a gap between the way that sociologists, psychologists, legal scholars, and advocates define domestic violence and the way that criminal laws define domestic violence. Experts largely agree: domestic violence occurs when a partner exercises continuous power and control over the other. In this view, domestic violence occurs via a pattern of abusive behaviors that unfolds over time, and its manifestations include both physically-violent and emotionally-abusive behaviors. In contrast, criminal statutes throughout the United States continue to conceptualize domestic violence as single acts of physical violence or threats of physical violence. During the past several …

A Comparative Analysis Of The Treatment Of Transgender Prisoners: What The United States Can Learn From Canada And The United Kingdom, Stephanie Saran Rudolph

Emory International Law Review

The treatment of transgender people while incarcerated is an issue that was catapulted into the national spotlight in 2019 when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of providing a transgender inmate gender confirmation surgery. This decision created a circuit split within the United States regarding the medically necessary treatment a state is legally required to provide an inmate with gender dysphoria. This Comment examines the legal and policy approaches of the United Kingdom and Canada to inform the current circuit split and provide suggestions for improvements that could be made in the United States. Through exploration and …

Demystifying The Legitimacy Of International Tribunals: Case Study Of The International Court Of Justice And Its Decisions On Armed Activities In The Congo, Roger-Claude Liwanga, Casondra Turner

Emory International Law Review

Over the last seven decades, there has been a proliferation of international tribunals. Yet, they have not received unanimous approval, raising questions about their legitimacy. A legitimate international tribunal is one whose authority to adjudicate international disputes is perceived as justified. Using the case study of the International Court of Justice (I.C.J.), this Article highlights the three criteria that should be considered in assessing the legitimacy of an international tribunal, which include legal, sociological, and moral elements. It also contends that the I.C.J. cannot claim “full” legitimacy if any of these components are missing in its decisions. The Article further …

Should We Be Merciful To The Merciless—Mercy In Sentencing, Doron Menashe

Emory International Law Review

The aim of this Article is to present a normative argument for mercy as a legitimate consideration in judicial proceedings, defining it as a distinct and independent element not encompassed by normal concerns of justice, retribution and individuation of sentencing. The Article addresses two meanings of mercy in the judicial context, both of which have—in the view of the author—a rightful part in the process of judgment and sentencing. These are “mercy” in the weak sense, i.e., a deliberative state of mind which accompanies the judicial proceedings (“Lesser Mercy”), and “mercy” in the strong sense, i.e., the judicial prerogative of …

Icwa’S Irony, Marcia A. Yablon-Zug

Faculty Publications

The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) is a federal statute that protects Indian children by keeping them connected to their families and culture. The Act’s provisions include support for family reunification, kinship care preferences, cultural competency considerations and community involvement. These provisions parallel national child welfare policies. Nevertheless, the Act is relentlessly attacked as a law that singles out Indian children for unique and harmful treatment. This is untrue but, ironically, it will be if challenges to the ICWA are successful. To prevent this from occurring, the defense of the Act needs to change. For too long, this defense has …

Barbara Powers: Witch Or Myth? The Last Case Of Witchcraft In South Carolina, Brandon Smith, Bobbie Jo Wimberly, Courtney Mcdonald

University of South Carolina Upstate Student Research Journal

Was an elderly woman from the upstate of South Carolina the last to be accused of and put on trial for witchcraft in the United States? In this paper, we investigate claims from an old letter sent to the president of South Carolina College to determine whether or not Barbara Powers was truly accused of witchcraft during a criminal trial. After thoroughly investigating census data, court records, marriage records, and other historical data in the named counties and those surrounding them, we were unable to determine conclusively if the trial was real or fabricated. Despite not knowing if the case …

The Role Of Vocal Hostility On Mood: Initial Development Of An Alternative Stress Paradigm, Jaquoy Sowell, Jennifer Gray, Christa C. Christ

University of South Carolina Upstate Student Research Journal

Maltreatment, such as physical or emotional abuse, can alter one’s later emotional regularity and responses to stimuli. To be able to study the effect of maltreatment on later stimuli response, appropriate laboratory paradigms need to be available, which is not currently true. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of vocal hostility stimuli on mood change as preliminary steps toward the creation of a laboratory paradigm. Participants were recruited from a regional university in southeast United States and asked to react to recorded audio with a hostile tone. Study 1 found that participants’ mood did not differ …

Forensic Evidence In Arizona: Reforms For Victims And Defendants, Valena Beety

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Arizona is nationally recognized as a leader in forensic science. Our state court judges serve on the Legal Resource Committee for the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and provide guidance to NIST’s Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science. Our Phoenix lab analysts and lab directors have national reputations. And Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law has been home to many leading academics in the field of forensics and the law, among them Michael Saks, David Kaye, and Jay Koehler. We have a robust forensic science community in Arizona and in Phoenix in particular. …

Still Strangers In The Land: Achievement Barriers, Burdens, And Bridges Facing African American Students Within Predominantly White Law Schools, Cristal E. Jones

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

No abstract provided.