Law Commons^™

The Informed Jury, Daniel Epps, William Ortman

Vanderbilt Law Review

The right to a criminal jury trial is a constitutional disappointment. Cases almost never make it to a jury because of plea bargaining. In the few cases that do, the jury is relegated to a narrow factfinding role that denies it normative voice or the ability to serve as a meaningful check on excessive punishment.

One simple change could situate the jury where it belongs, at the center of the criminal process. The most important thing juries do in criminal cases is authorize state punishment. But today, when a jury returns a guilty verdict, it authorizes punishment without any idea …

What’S The Deference? Interpreting The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines After Kisor, Liam Murphy

Vanderbilt Law Review

For more than three decades, the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines have constrained the punishment doled out by federal judges, limiting discretion that was once nearly unlimited and bringing standardization to the penological decisionmaking process. For twice as long, the Supreme Court has constrained judges in a different way—by requiring that administrative agencies receive deference when they interpret the meaning of their own regulations. At the convergence of these two domains sits “commentary,” or interpretive notes the U.S. Sentencing Commission appends to the otherwise congressionally approved Guidelines. In Stinson v. United States, the Court made clear that commentary should be reviewed and …

The Language Of Mens Rea, Matthew R. Ginther, Francis X. Shen, Richard J. Bonnie, Morris B. Hoffman, Owen D. Jones, Rene Marois, Kenneth W. Simons

Vanderbilt Law Review

To be guilty of a crime, generally one must commit a bad act while in a culpable state of mind. But the language used to define, partition, and communicate the variety of culpable mental states (in Latin, mens rea) is crucially important. For depending on the mental state that juries attribute to him, a defendant can be convicted-for the very same act and the very same consequence-of different crimes, each with different sentences.

The influential Model Penal Code ("MPC") of 1962 divided culpable mental states into four now-familiar kinds: purposeful, knowing, reckless, and negligent.' Both before the MPC and since, …

Memory And Punishment, O. Carter Snead

Vanderbilt Law Review

Developments in cognitive neuroscience-the science of how the brain enables the mind--continue to prompt profound scholarly debate and reflection on the practice and theory of criminal law. Advances in the field have raised vexing questions relating to lie detection, interrogation methods, the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination, competency to stand trial, defenses to guilt (such as diminished capacity and insanity), sentencing, and the relationship between moral responsibility and punishment. Similarly, for the past decade, philosophers, scientists, clinicians, and legal scholars have been engaged in a major debate about the cognitive neuroscience of memory and new capacities to modify it …

The Civilization Of The Criminal Law, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law Review

The boundaries of the criminal justice system are eroding. A vast amount of relatively innocuous behavior is now criminalized. The line between criminal penalties and administrative sanctions is dissolving, as criminal law relaxes its mens rea requirements and government bureaucracies aggressively pursue regulatory violations. Distinctions between criminal and civil forfeiture, contempt, and deportation proceedings have been vanishingly subtle for some time. Perhaps the most serious assault on the integrity of today's criminal justice system, however, is the increasing prominence of the "dangerousness criterion" as justification for confinement by the government. Governmental deprivations of liberty have usually been the province of …

Retribution For Rats: Cooperation, Punishment, And Atonement, Michael A. Simons

Vanderbilt Law Review

To mobsters, he is a "rat"; to drug dealers, a "snitch." To school children, he is a "tattletale"; to corporate executives, a "whistle- blower." To cops, he is an "informant"; to prosecutors, a "cooperator." By whatever name he is known, the person who betrays his associates to the authorities is almost universally reviled. In movies, on television, in literature, the cooperator embodies all that society holds in contempt: he is disloyal, deceitful, greedy, selfish, and weak. The cooperator, though, has long been a mainstay of our criminal justice system. For centuries, criminal defendants have received leniency in return for testimony …

Criminal Law: The Missing Element In Sentencing Reform, Michael H. Tonry

Vanderbilt Law Review

The thesis of this Article is that the substantive criminal law is the missing element in sentencing reform. If comprehensive sentencing reform strategies are to have lasting effect, legislatures must reintroduce the criminal law to the sentencing process. This step will require a rekindled interest in a moral analysis of the substantive criminal law and the enactment of greatly reduced statutory sentence maximums, along with more conventional institutional changes to structure discretion and increase official accountability.

Objections to American sentencing procedures range from the principled to the practical. Part II of this Article summarizes the basic objections that have influenced …

Book Reviews, Frank J. Remington, George B. Tindall

Vanderbilt Law Review

Fair and Certain Punishment

Review by Frank J. Remington

Punishing Criminals. By Ernest van den Haag. New York: BasicBooks, Inc., 1975. Thinking About Crime. By James Q. Wilson. New York: BasicBooks, Inc., 1975.

Times change. So also do opinions about important social problems such as crime and government's response to crime. The books of both van den Haag and Wilson reflect changing opinions on crime and on what to do about crime. Both urge that we abandon the view that social conditions are an important cause of crime and that an improvement in social conditions will reduce crime substantially.Both urge …

Book Reviews, Edward R. Hayes, Bennett B. Patterson, Elston Roady

Vanderbilt Law Review

Anatomy of a Murder

By Robert Traver

This novel of a killing and its consequences has great dramatic qualities and is outstanding in its description of the lawyer's role in defending one accused of crime. The author, who has written several other books under the name of Robert Traver, qualifies as a legal expert through many years of practice in the Upper Peninsula; he has also recently become a Justice on the Supreme Court of Michigan.

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Groups and the Constitution

By Robert A. Horn

The first chapter in the book, which deals with the growth of the freedom of …