Digital Commons Network^™

Executing White Masculinities: Lessons From Karla Faye Tucker, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

Gender is a constant struggle. Throughout our lives, we contend with multiple unstable and oppositional social constructions of gender, or hierarchies of masculinities and femininities. Knowing, or trying to know, who is male and who is female, and how men and women should act, is a major part of the structure of our identities, our societies, and our democracy. These gender questions are not separate from race or class; together for example, they shape what is expected of a poor young White man or a middle-class, African American grandmother. Racialized and class-based, gender helps to tell us who is frightening, …

Race Prosecutors, Race Defenders, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Law Of Race (Book Review), Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Race, Peremptories, And Capital Jury Deliberations, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

In Lonnie Weeks's capital murder trial in Virginia in 1993, the jury was instructed: If you find from the evidence that the Commonwealth has proved beyond a reasonable doubt, either of the two alternative aggravating factors], and as to that alternative you are unanimous, then you may fix the punishment of the defendant at death or if you believe from all the evidence that the death penalty is not justified, then you shall fix the punishment of the defendant at life imprisonment ... This instruction is plainly ambiguous, at least to a lay audience. Does it mean that if the …

Healing The Blind Goddess: Race And Criminal Justice, Mark D. Rosenbaum, Daniel P. Tokaji

Michigan Law Review

Once again, issues of race, ethnicity, and class within our criminal justice system have been thrust into the public spotlight. On both sides of the country, in our nation's two largest cities, police are being called to account for acts of violence directed toward poor people of color. In New York City, a West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo was killed by four white police officers, who fired forty-one bullets at the unarmed man as he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building in a poor section of the Bronx. Did race influence the officers' decisions to fire the …

Use Of Race In "Stop-And-Frisk": Stereotypical Beliefs Linger, But How Far Can The Police Go?, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The power of police to detain persons for a brief period to investigate suspected criminal activity--commonly known as “stop-and-frisk”--has always been one of the most contentious issues in law enforcement. Although there is general consensus that street stops are an important weapon in crime prevention, the belief has always existed that stop-and-frisk tactics are often used indiscriminately and abusively against minority groups.

The "Darden Dilemma": Should African Americans Prosecute Crimes?, Kenneth B. Nunn

UF Law Faculty Publications

Christopher Darden (prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial) has come to epitomize the burdens that African American prosecutors face as they perform their professional tasks. Moreover, the "Darden Dilemma" has become a generic term for the anguish that these prosecutors endure as they negotiate between competing allegiances to the African American community and the State. Much has been written about the sense of isolation that African American prosecutors feel when confronting the conflict between their roles as prosecutors and their obligations to the African American community. This article argues that African Americans should not prosecute crimes in the current criminal …

"The Mis-Characterization Of The Negro": A Race Critique Of The Prior Conviction Impeachment Rule, Montrè D. Carodine

Indiana Law Journal

The election of Barack Obama as the nation's first Black President was a watershed moment with respect to race relations in the United States. Obama's election removed what to many seemed a nearly insurmountable racial barrier. Yet as he transitions into his historic role and his family becomes the first Black occupants of the White House, scores of Blacks are housed in jails and prisons across the country. The mass incarceration of Blacks, among other serious issues, demonstrates that race still matters in the United States. As then-presidential candidate Obama acknowledged in the speech that many viewed to be pivotal …

Before Brown: Charles H. Houston And The Gaines Case, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

In 1895 in Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court announced the legal principle, separate but equal, that would guide American race relations for over half a century. For Charles Houston, the training of black lawyers was a key to mounting an attack on segregation. While at Harvard, Houston wrote that there must be Negro lawyers in every community and that the great majority of these lawyers must come from Negro schools. It was, he concluded, in the best interests of the United States - to provide the best teachers possible at law schools where Negroes might be trained. After graduating …

Head To Head, Heart To Heart, Hand To Hand: Together, We Can Make A Difference! : A Ten Week Training Experience For Becoming Leaders Of Racial Reconciliation, Todd Wiley Grant

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Trends. A Profile Of Racial Profiles, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses profiling as an approach to prevent crime and to apprehend criminal perpetrators.

Jural Districting: Selecting Impartial Juries Through Community Representation, Kim Forde-Mazrui

Vanderbilt Law Review

Court reformers continue to debate over efforts to select juries more diverse than are typically achieved through existing procedures. Controversial proposals advocate race-conscious methods for selecting diverse juries. Such efforts, however well-intentioned, face constitutional difficulties under the Equal Protection Clause, which appears to preclude any use of race in selecting juries. The challenge thus presented by the Court's equal protection jurisprudence is whether jury selection procedures can be designed that effectively enhance the representative character of juries without violating constitutional norms.

Professor Forde-Mazrui offers a novel insight for resolving this challenge. Analogizing juries to legislatures, he applies electoral districting principles …

(Er)Race-Ing An Ethic Of Justice, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Domestic Violence In The Hyperreal: An Examination Of Race And Ethnicity In "Real Life" Police Drama, Melissa J Monson

UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

This project investigates public representations of domestic violence by highlighting televised reality-based police dramas (e.g., COPS, L.A.P.D.: Life on the Beat, Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, etc.). Specifically, it focuses on the intersection of race, class, and gender in the portrayal of police treatment of victims and suspects of domestic violence. The data for this research were gathered through the use of latent and manifest content analysis. Seventy-two hours (including commercials) of reality based programing were recorded for analysis, making 144 total individual shows and 48 episodes of each program; In general, police officers were portrayed as treating domestic …

Setting An Agenda For A Study Of Tax And Black Culture, Beverly I. Moran

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

At present the Internal Revenue Code unthinkingly reflects many aspects of white culture including historical opportunities that whites have received for wealth building and marriage. In order for the federal tax laws to tax fairly all cultures within the purview of taxation must also find their values reflected. The article sets out how the tax laws might begin to incorporate black culture.

Comparison By Race Of Juvenile Referrals In Alaska: Phase Ii Report, N. E. Schafer

Reports

Phase I of this study analyzed data on over 28,000 referrals to the Alaska Division of Family and Youth Services (DFYS) for 1992–1995 to provide comparative information on referrals of Alaska Native, African American, and white youth to the Alaska juvenile justice system. In Phase II, a stratified sample of 112 individual files was examined in an attempt to identify factors, such as race, residence in rural or urban locations, alcohol involvement, age at first referral, family and living situations, and local priorities which might be associated with the decision to refer a child to DFYS. This examination supported the …

The Struggle Against Hate Crime: Movement At A Crossroads, Terry A. Maroney

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed an extraordinary amount of police, legislative, judicial, scholarly, and community activity around hate crime. Such activity was attributable to a new "anti-hate-crime movement," conditions for which were created by the convergence in previous decades of two very different social movements - civil rights and victims' rights. This anti-hate-crime movement has been radiply assimilated into the institutions of criminal justice, with the result that anti-hate-crime measures now reflect the culture and priorities of those institutions. The civil rights and victims' rights movements created collective beliefs, structural resources, and political opportunities that facilitated the emergence of a …

A Comparison By Race Of Juvenile Referrals In Alaska, N. E. Schafer

Conference papers

A data set comprised of all juveniles referred to Alaska youth corrections in the fiscal years 1992–1996 shows disproportionate referral of Alaska Native and African American youth when compared to their proportions in the general population. Minorities also appear more likely than white youth to accumulate multiple referrals. Random samples selected within each racial group are used to seek extra-legal factors which may account for some of the disparity. Information on family and home life, school, personal problems, and the details of each referrals and each referral outcome were extrapolated from the files of the sample which included 39 white …

Prosecution And Race: The Power And Privilege Of Discretion, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article examines prosecutorial discretion and argues it is a major cause of racial inequality in the criminal justice system. It asserts that prosecutorial discretion may instead be used to construct effective solutions to racial injustice. The article maintains that since prosecutors have more power than any other criminal justice officials, with practically no corresponding accountability to the public they serve, they have the responsibility to use their discretion to help eradicate the discriminatory treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system.

Part I of the Article explains the importance and impact of the prosecution function. Part II discusses …

Law, Life, And Literature: A Critical Reflection Of Life And Literature To Illuminate How Laws Of Domestic Violence, Race, And Class Bind Black Women Based On Alice Walker's Book The Third Life Of Grange Copeland, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

Consider Law, Life and Literature. Which of the three is the most real, honest, and inclusive? Many would answer the law because it takes into consideration all of the facts and circumstances to formulate a clear and consistent rule, and literature is the most unreal, the most fictional of the three. However, that is not accurate. Of the three, literature is actually the most real, honest, and inclusive. It is real because, with brutal honesty, it deals with all of our realities. It is more honest than life, for often in our outer (and even inner) lives we are afraid …

[Review Of] Katheryn K. Russell. The Color Of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment, And Other Macroaggressions, Calvin E. Harris

Ethnic Studies Review

Is Crime a problem or color or race? What about the question of disproportionality: Do blacks commit more crimes in proportion to their percentage of the total population? Does disproportionality, as one measure of crime statistics, tell the whole story? What is black protectionism? Probably the most critical question Russell raises is does a racial bias exist in the reporting of crime statistics in the United States? This is not the first time such an issue has been raised. These are among the major questions dealt with in The Color of Crime.

Striking The Rock: Confronting Gender Equality In South Africa, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

This Article analyzes the status of women's rights in the newly democratic South Africa. It examines rights guaranteed in the Constitution and conflicts between the principle of gender equality and the recognition of indigenous law and institutions. The Article focuses on the South African transition to democracy and theinfluence that feminist agitation at the international level has had on South African women's attempts at political organization. After dissecting the historical position of customary law in South Africa and questioning its place in the new democratic regime, the author argues that, although South African women have benefited from the global feminist …

Race Trials, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Prosecution And Race: The Power And Privilege Of Discretion, Angela J. Davis

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Preliminary Examination Of Minority Referrals To The Alaska Juvenile Justice System, N. E. Schafer, Richard W. Curtis, Cassie Atwell

Conference papers

The disproportionate processing of minorities in the justice system has been noted with growing concern nationally as well as at the state level. In Alaska, as in other states, the primary basis for concern is that minorities are overrepresented among the adult prison population. The realization that this disproportionality appears in other justice system venues has led nationally to a number of research initiatives with a focus on the overrepresentation of juveniles. This paper analyzes referral data from the Alaska Division of Family and Youth Services (DFYS) for 1992–1995 to provide a statistical overview of disproportionate minority contact in the …

Race And Record: A Study Of Juvenile Referrals In Alaska, N. E. Schafer

Reports

The disproportionate representation of minorities in the justice system of the U.S. has been viewed with growing alarm by both researchers and policymakers. Studies of the problem tend to focus on African Americans and on the end points of the process — sentencing disparities and, especially, sentences to death at the adult level and on court outcomes and detention decisions at the juvenile level. The research presented here explores the relationship between race and prior record using juvenile referral data from Alaska. White, Alaska Native, and African American youth are compared using four years of statewide data. The research includes …

African-American Males' Perception Of Law Enforcement: A Psychophysiological Perspective, Adolph Brown Iii

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

This study compared the psychophysiological reactivity of African American and European American males to authority. Nineteen African American males and 23 European American males were randomly assigned to either be interrogated by a police officer, or see a police officer interrogate that experimenter or view a videotape of police activity. Participants' physiological reactivity, acceptance of authority, fear of negative evaluation or social anxiety, and apprehension and anxiety in stressful situations as well as EMG, SCR, heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure were measured. African American males were hypothesized to show greater physiological response than European American males and participants who …

Classifying Race, Racializing Class, Fran Ansley

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

[Review Of] Wahneema Lubiano, Ed. The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, Clarence Spigner

Ethnic Studies Review

The House that Race Built is a fascinating account of race and racism upon the terrain of United States' culture in the 1990s. Seventeen scholars, brought together at a Race Matters Conference at Princeton University, produced various essays and were evidently given plenty of leeway by the book's editor, Wahneema Lubiano. Various disciplines of law, history, sociology, fine arts, ethnic studies, literature, divinity, and politics are represented. Contributors addressed issues ranging from homosexuality, affirmative action, O.J. Simpson and religion, to perspectives on work vis-a-vis play, culture, Black Nationalism, whiteness, crime, and the black diaspora. A common denominator, in my view, …

Race, Cops, And Traffic Stops, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article discusses the Supreme Court's failure to provide a clear and effective remedy for discriminatory pretextual traffic stops. The first part explores the discretionary nature of pretextual stops and their discriminatory effect on African-Americans and Latinos. Then, the article examines Whren v. United States, a Supreme Court case in which the petitioners claimed that these “pretextual stops” violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and are racially discriminatory. The Supreme Court rejected the claim, upholding the constitutionality of pretextual stops based on probable cause and noting that claims of racial discrimination must be challenged under the Equal Protection Clause. …