Law Commons^™

Discretionary Decision-Making In The Criminal Justice System And The Black Offender: Some Alternatives, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Discretionary Justice And The Black Offender, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Improving Police Discretion: Rationality In Handling Public Inebriates, David Aaronson , C. Dienes, Michael Musheno

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This two-part article reports on the findings of the "prescriptive" phase of the American University Law School's Project on Public Inebriation.' First, we provide a framework or model designed to contribute to efforts to improve the rationality of police discretion and the quality of discretionary justice. Second, we seek to increase understanding of, and provide the basis for improving, the intake process whereby public inebriates are delivered to designated facilities-jails, detoxification centers, etc.-in criminal and decriminalized jurisdictions. While the article focuses on the discretionary power of police officers to remove street inebriates, it should increase awareness of problems of decriminalizing …

Charge Reduction: An Intermediary Stage In The Process Of Labelling Criminal Defendants, Ilene Nagel Bernstein, Edward Kick, Jan T. Leung, Barbara Schulz

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The interactionist perspective emphasizes the imperfect correspondence between alleged deviance and societal reactions. Moreover, it is asserted that values of reactors, statuses of the alleged deviant, and bureaucratic constraints of deviance processing organizations help explain some of that imperfection. Focusing on one intermediary deviance processing stage, i.e., plea bargaining, we explore the degree to which our data are consonant with interactionist assumptions. For a sample of 1,435 male and female criminal defendants, we find the favorability of the charge reduction outcome is partly explained by values of reactors, statuses of the defendant, and bureaucratic constraints of the court. Thus, our …

Societal Reaction To Deviants: The Case Of Criminal Defendants, Ilene Nagel Bernstein, William R. Kelly, Patricia A. Doyle

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Recent reformulations of the societal reaction theory argue that the thesis is a perspective rather than a theory, and that the perspective is meant to provide a set of sensitizing concepts to those researching deviance. This research examines the degree of congruence between hypotheses deduced from those assertions and a set of real world occurrences. Data for a sample of male defendants charged with felony offenses are examined to estimate the effects of (1) deviants' social attributes, (2) the specific societal reactors, (3) the values placed on certain offenses and (4) the organizational imperatives of the deviance-controlling organization, controlling for …

Voir Dire Of Jurors: Constitutional Limits To The Right Of Inquiry Into Prejudice, Jeffrey M. Gaba

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Although the voir dire of jurors is one of the most significant mechanisms by which an impartial jury is secured, as a practical matter the right to examine prospective jurors is not unlimited. Vested with great discretion, a trial judge may at some point constitutionally preclude inquiry into possible prejudice, but determining that point has not proved to be easy. In 1976, the Supreme Court in Ristaino v. Ross directly considered the constitutional limits to voir dire and provided a test which could serve as a guide to trial court administration of the process. The Court suggested that questioning about …

The Twilight Of Welfare Criminology, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Restitution: A New Paradigm For Criminal Justice, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper will analyze the breakdown of our system of criminal justice in terms of what Thomas Kuhn would describe as a crisis of an old paradigm- punishment. I propose that this crisis could be solved by the adoption of a new paradigm of criminal justice-restitution. The approach will be mainly theoretical, though at various points in the discussion the practical implications of the rival paradigms will also be considered. A fundamental contention will be that many, if not most, of our system's ills stem from errors in the underlying paradigm. Any attempt to correct these symptomatic debilities without a …

The Second Circuit Review--1975-76 Term: Courts-- Evidence & Procedure: Commentary: The Second Circuit And The Federal Rules Of Evidence, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The most significant development in federal trial procedure in recent years has been the enactment of the Federal Rules of Evidence, effective July 1, 1975. In the intervening two years since the Rules became effective, the courts of the Second Circuit have bad occasion to make several illuminating applications of and references to them.

An examination of some of these decisions provides insight into the kinds of questions that are coming up not only in the Second Circuit, but around the country, and the kinds of answers that are being given. It is not the bizarre or unusual case that …

Improving Police Discretion: Rationality In Handling Public Inebriates, David Aaronson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Conspiracy And Federal Jurisdiction: From Crimmins To Feola, Mark Berger

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Attempt To Improve Criminal Defense Representation, Peter W. Tague

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Improvement of criminal defense representation is one of the most critical problems that faces the criminal justice system. The problem is extensive; some attorneys are frequently ineffective and probably all attorneys are occasionally inadequate because of error, overwork, personal problems or ethical conflicts.

The defendant's only remedy against his attorney's ineffectiveness is through direct appeal or collateral post-conviction attack. This article discusses the reasons why courts cannot improve defense representation through these avenues of review. Deep disagreement among judges about the purpose of post-conviction review has crippled any attempt at improvement. The key unresolved question is whether the standard for …

Beyond The Shut-Eyed Sentry: Toward A Theoretical View Of Corporate Misconduct And An Effective Legal Response, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Like hard cases, festering scandals make bad law. As public perceptions shift so that conduct once tolerated becomes seen as illicit, political pressures develop that can result in hastily improvised responses by the legal system to fill the newly perceived vacuum. This generalization is advanced to question neither the inalienable right of the public to be scandalized, nor the need for corporate reform, but to approach a highly problematic dilemma: hurried, moralistic responses to a perceived evil often prove not only ineffective, but even counterproductive. The serious student of complex organizations may recognize this assertion as a slightly altered variant …