Law Commons^™

America's Paper Prisons: The Second Chance Gap, Colleen Chien

Michigan Law Review

Over the last decade, dozens of states and the federal government have enacted “second chance” reforms that increase the eligibility of individuals arrested, charged, or convicted of crimes to shorten their sentences, clear their criminal records, and/or regain the right to vote. While much fanfare has accompanied the increasing availability of “second chances,” little attention has been paid to their delivery. This study introduces the concept of the “second chance gap,” which it defines as the difference between eligibility and delivery of second chance relief; explores its causes; and approximates its size in connection with several second chance laws and …

Reassessing Prosecutorial Power Through The Lens Of Mass Incarceration, Jeffrey Bellin

Michigan Law Review

A review of John F. Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration - And How to Achieve Real Reform.

Criminal Justice And The Mattering Of Lives, Deborah Tuerkheimer

Michigan Law Review

A review of James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.

All Bathwater, No Baby: Expressive Theories Of Punishment And The Death Penalty, Susan A. Bandes

Michigan Law Review

A review of Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.

Constitutionally Tailoring Punishment, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

Michigan Law Review

Since the turn of the century, the Supreme Court has regulated noncapital sentencing under the Sixth Amendment in the Apprendi line of cases (requiring jury findings of fact to justify sentence enhancements) as well as under the Eighth Amendment in the Miller and Graham line of cases (forbidding mandatory life imprisonment for juvenile defendants). Although both lines of authority sound in individual rights, in fact they are fundamentally about the structures of criminal justice. These two seemingly disparate doctrines respond to structural imbalances in noncapital sentencing by promoting morally appropriate punishment judgments that are based on individualized input and that …

Criminal Sanctions In The Defense Of The Innocent, Ehud Guttel, Doron Teichman

Michigan Law Review

Under the formal rules of criminal procedure, fact finders are required to apply a uniform standard of proof in all criminal cases. Experimental studies as well as real world examples indicate, however, that fact finders often adjust the evidentiary threshold for conviction in accordance with the severity of the applicable sanction. All things being equal, the higher the sanction, the higher the standard of proof that fact finders will apply in order to convict. Building on this insight, this Article introduces a new paradigm for criminal punishments-a paradigm that focuses on designing penalties that will reduce the risk of unsubstantiated …

Falling Through The Crack: How Courts Have Struggled To Apply The Crack Amendment To Nominal Career And Plea Bargain Defendants, Maxwell Arlie Halpern Kosman

Michigan Law Review

Under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, a defendant is normally obligated to attend all of the proceedings against her. However Rule 43(b)(2) carves out an exception for organizational defendants, stating that they "need not be present" if represented by an attorney. But on its face, the language of 43(b)(2) is ambiguous: is it the defendant or the judge who has the discretion to decide whether the defendant appears? That is, may a judge compel the presence of an organizational defendant? This Note addresses the ambiguity in the context of the plea colloquy, considering the text of several of the …

Federalism And Criminal Law: What The Feds Can Learn From The States, Rachel E. Barkow

Michigan Law Review

Criminal law enforcement in the United States is multijurisdictional. Local, state, and federal prosecutors all possess the power to bring criminal charges. An enduring question of criminal law is how authority should be allocated among these levels of government. In trying to gain traction on the question of when crime should be handled at the federal level and when it should be left to local authorities, courts and scholars have taken a range of approaches. Oddly, one place that commentators have not looked for guidance on how to handle the issue of law enforcement allocation is within the states themselves. …

The Offense: Interpreting The Indictment Requirement In 21 U.S.C. § 851, Christopher Serkin

Michigan Law Review

Congress enacted the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 ("the Act") to unify and rationalize its treatment of drug offenses. The Act was an enormous piece of legislation, requiring months of congressional hearings before it was passed. Today, the Act encompasses over 150 sections of title 21 of the U.S. Code and regulates behavior ranging from manufacturing and mislabeling to prescribing controlled substances. Like any piece of complex legislation, the Act has spawned its share of litigation. One controversy has defied satisfactory resolution: the meaning of the innocuous phrase, "the offense," in section 851(a)(2). The statute's structure …

Is Hiv "Extraordinary"?, Jordan B. Hansell

Michigan Law Review

The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (the "Act") attempts to reduce inconsistencies in the sentences of defendants convicted of comparable crimes. The Act created a Sentencing Commission (the "Commission") and authorized it to promulgate a set of sentencing guidelines to steer judicial decisionmaking. To fulfill this mandate, the Commission drafted the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (the "Guidelines"), which Congress enacted in 1987. Although Congress wanted to eliminate sentencing disparities, it also wanted to allow some degree of individualized sentencing. To achieve the correct balance, the Commission created three categories of characteristics: those a court must consider in sentencing each defendant; those …

A Question Of Intent: Aiding And Abetting Law And The Rule Of Accomplice Liability Under § 924©, Tyler B. Robinson

Michigan Law Review

Firearms are common tools of the violent-crime and drugtrafficking trades. Their prevalence is reflected in the frequency with which federal prosecutors charge, juries apply, and courts review 18 U.S.C. §924(c). That provision imposes heavy penalties for either the use or carrying of a firearm "during and in relation to any crime of violence or drug trafficking crime," in addition to the punishment provided for the underlying violent or drug-related offense. A conviction under section 924(c) carries at the very least a mandatory, consecutive five-year sentence, even when the underlying crime already provides enhanced punishment for use of a dangerous weapon …

The Limits Of Legal Language: Decisionmaking In Capital Cases, Jordan M. Steiker

Michigan Law Review

To make the case for the proposed changes, I will first describe briefly in Parts I and II the structure of pre- and post-Furman capital decisiorurtaking and the weaknesses of those approaches. I then will set forth in Part III the specific rationales for each proposed reform.

The scheme I propose raises a significant constitutional question. Can the death penalty be retained as a punishment if we abandon the pretense of providing meaningful guidance through detailed sentencing instructions? Would the reestablishment of relatively unstructured penalty phase deliberations similar to, but also importantly different from, those characteristic of pre-Furman …

When Discretion Leads To Distortion: Recognizing Pre-Arrest Sentence-Manipulation Claims Under The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Jeffrey L. Fisher

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that sentence manipulation should be a legally viable partial defense - a defense that does not warrant complete exoneration, but does warrant a reduced sentence when the government's investigative techniques place a quantity of drugs before the court that overrepresents the defendant's culpability, or individual blameworthiness. Part I describes the policies and objectives that underlie the Guidelines, but then demonstrates how the rigid application of quantity-based sentencing provisions can lead to sentence manipulation that thwarts these goals, particularly the goal of sentencing according to culpability. Part II describes how courts have responded to sentence manipulation claims. It …

Are Threats Always "Violent" Crimes?, Jeremy D. Feinstein

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that because the generally accepted legal meaning of violence is the use - or the risk of the use - of physical force so as to injure, damage, or abuse, threats only should be considered violent if they involve a risk of the use of physical force. Part I examines the substantive law of threats to determine if they inherently involve a risk of the use of physical force, and concludes that they do not. Part II studies the meaning of the term violence, and argues that both courts and dictionaries understand the term to mean the …

Putting Women First, Mary Coombs

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Gender, Crime, and Punishment by Kathleen Daly

Capital Punishment's Future, Welsh S. White

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Capital Punishment in America by Raymond Paternoster

Bright Lines, Dark Deeds: Counting Convictions Under The Armed Career Criminal Act, James E. Hooper

Michigan Law Review

The Armed Career Criminal Act of 1984 (ACCA) enables the federal government to help state authorities more effectively prosecute "career criminals.'' The ACCA imposes a mandatory sentence of at least fifteen years, and up to life imprisonment, for illegal possession of a firearm by anyone who has three prior convictions for violent felonies or serious drug offenses "committed on occasions different from one another."

To apply the ACCA, judges must determine first whether the defendant's prior convictions meet the definitions of "violent felony or serious drug offense," and secondly whether the offenses were committed on different occasions so that they …

Punishment: Desert And Crime Control, Ernest Van Den Haag

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Past or Future Crimes: Deservedness and Dangerousness in the Sentencing of Criminals by Andrew von Hirsch

Dangerousness And Criminal Justice, Franklin E. Zimring, Gordon Hawkins

Michigan Law Review

The first section of this paper surveys some recent writings on the topic of dangerousness for major inconsistencies, which we regard as illuminating the special problem of dangerousness in the jurisprudence of criminal sentencing.

The second section describes the "special problem of dangerousness," for, we believe, the first time. The special problem is the fear that any admission of calculations of dangerousness into sentencing decisions will lead to an overuse of dangerousness, which may be worse than the inefficiencies and hypocrisies we confront when denying that future dangerousness is relevant to decisions about prisons.

The third section attempts to reorganize …

Dangerous Offenders: The Elusive Target Of Justice, Elizabeth T. Lear

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Dangerous Offenders: The Elusive Target of Justice by Mark H. Moore, Susan Estrich, Daniel McGillis, and William Spelman

Capital Punishment: For Or Against, Jan Gorecki

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Death Penalty -- A Debate by Ernest van den Haag and John Conrad

Black Innocence And The White Jury, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Michigan Law Review

Racial prejudice has come under increasingly close scrutiny during the past thirty years, yet its influence on the decisionmaking of criminal juries remains largely hidden from judicial and critical examination. In this Article, Professor Johnson takes a close look at this neglected area. She first sets forth a large body of social science research that reveals a widespread tendency among whites to convict black defendants in instances in which white defendants would be acquitted. Next, she argues that none of the existing techniques for eliminating the influence of racial bias on criminal trials adequately protects minority-race defendants. She contends that …

Court Reform From Bail To Jail, Wade H. Mccree Jr.

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Court Reform on Trial: Why Simple Solutions Fail by Malcolm M. Feeley

Equality, "Anisonomy," And Justice: A Review Of Madness And The Criminal Law, Andrew Von Hirsch

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Madness and the Criminal Law by Norval Morris

The Sentencing Of White-Collar Criminals In Federal Courts: A Socio-Legal Exploration Of Disparity, Ilene H. Nagel, John L. Hagan

Michigan Law Review

This Article addresses that question by examining judicial sentencing philosophy as applied to white-collar criminality and reporting data that illuminate the operation of that philosophy. Part I of the Article argues that the traditional purposes and limits of criminal sentencing may plausibly justify either disparate or comparable sentences in cases of white-collar and common criminality. Part II describes the obstacles to an accurate empirical inquiry into how judges resolve these uncertainties in the theory of punishment. Part III presents a study designed to overcome as many of these obstacles as possible. What is most dramatic is that the resulting data …

From Pillory To Penitentiary: The Rise Of Criminal Incarceration In Early Massachusetts, Adam J. Hirsch

Michigan Law Review

While the transition from the old forms of criminal sanction to incarceration was perhaps not, as Jeremy Bentham claimed, "one of the most signal improvements that have ever yet been made in our criminal legislation," one does not overstate to call it a signal development in the history of Anglo-American criminal justice - a development, one may add, that still wants adequate examination, much less explanation. This Article attempts to do both for one sample region: Massachusetts. Though the jurisprudential movement from pillory to penitentiary took place throughout the new American republic, as well as much of western Europe, our …

Urban Politics And The Criminal Courts, Milton Heumann

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Urban Politics and the Criminal Courts by Martin A. Levin

The Future Of Sentencing Reform: Emerging Legal Issues In The Individualization Of Justice, John C. Coffee Jr.

Michigan Law Review

This article will focus on the mechanics of the individualization process: the manner in which dispositional information is collected, the quality of the resulting data, and the methodologies employed for its communication to and assessment by correctional decision makers. This focus is important because another distinctive feature of the American criminal justice system is the severity of the sentences it imposes. Not only is the average length of sentences imposed on American offenders far in excess of that imposed in other Western nations, but there is considerable evidence that the average length of sentences has increased in direct response to …

Mild Punishments, Robert Mcmurdy

Michigan Law Review

If life, freedom, or hope be taken from man, he is ashes. Therefore we ought not to take away any of them lightly. But some, restraint or punishment is necessary. We often miss our aim, however,'by prescribing punishments that are too severe, whereupon human nature revolts, so that it is "impossible to combine certainty with severity," a lesson we have long since learned from the experience of England.