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Full-Text Articles in Law
Internal And External Challenges To Culpability, Stephen J. Morse
Internal And External Challenges To Culpability, Stephen J. Morse
All Faculty Scholarship
This article was presented at “Guilty Minds: A Virtual Conference on Mens Rea and Criminal Justice Reform” at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. It is forthcoming in Arizona State Law Journal Volume 53, Issue 2.
The thesis of this article is simple: As long as we maintain the current folk psychological conception of ourselves as intentional and potentially rational creatures, as people and not simply as machines, mental states will inevitably remain central to ascriptions of culpability and responsibility more generally. It is also desirable. Nonetheless, we are in a condition of unprecedented internal challenges to …
Is Executive Function The Universal Acid?, Stephen J. Morse
Is Executive Function The Universal Acid?, Stephen J. Morse
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains (MIT Press, 2018), which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to our …
Crime, Punishment, And Causation: The Effect Of Etiological Information On The Perception Of Moral Agency, Paul J. Litton, Philip Robbins
Crime, Punishment, And Causation: The Effect Of Etiological Information On The Perception Of Moral Agency, Paul J. Litton, Philip Robbins
Faculty Publications
Moral judgments about a situation are profoundly shaped by the perception of individuals in that situation as either moral agents or moral patients (Gray & Wegner, 2009; Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012), Specifically, the more we see someone as a moral agent, the less we see them as a moral patient, and vice versa. As a result, casting the perpetrator of a transgression as a victim tends to have the effect of making them seem less blameworthy (Gray & Wegner, 201 1). Based on this theoretical framework, we predicted that criminal offenders with a mental disorder that predisposes them to …
Predicting The Knowledge–Recklessness Distinction In The Human Brain, Iris Vilares, Michael J. Wesley, Woo-Young Woo-Young Ahn, Richard J. Bonnie, Morris B. Hoffman, Owen D. Jones, Stephen J. Morse, Gideon Yaffe, Terry Lohrenz, Read Montague
Predicting The Knowledge–Recklessness Distinction In The Human Brain, Iris Vilares, Michael J. Wesley, Woo-Young Woo-Young Ahn, Richard J. Bonnie, Morris B. Hoffman, Owen D. Jones, Stephen J. Morse, Gideon Yaffe, Terry Lohrenz, Read Montague
All Faculty Scholarship
Criminal convictions require proof that a prohibited act was performed in a statutorily specified mental state. Different legal consequences, including greater punishments, are mandated for those who act in a state of knowledge, compared with a state of recklessness. Existing research, however, suggests people have trouble classifying defendants as knowing, rather than reckless, even when instructed on the relevant legal criteria.
We used a machine-learning technique on brain imaging data to predict, with high accuracy, which mental state our participants were in. This predictive ability depended on both the magnitude of the risks and the amount of information about those …
Punishment And Blame For Culpable Indifference, Kenneth Simons
Punishment And Blame For Culpable Indifference, Kenneth Simons
Faculty Scholarship
In criminal law, the mental state of the defendant is a crucial determinant of the grade of crime that the defendant has committed and of whether the conduct is criminal at all. Under the widely accepted modern hierarchy of mental states, an actor is most culpable for causing harm purposely, and progressively less culpable for doing so knowingly, recklessly, or negligently. Notably, this hierarchy emphasizes cognitive rather than conative mental states. But this emphasis, I argue, is often unjustified. When we punish and blame for wrongful acts, we should look beyond the cognitive dimensions of the actor’s culpability, and should …
Empirical Desert, Individual Prevention, And Limiting Retributivism: A Reply, Paul H. Robinson, Joshua Samuel Barton, Matthew J. Lister
Empirical Desert, Individual Prevention, And Limiting Retributivism: A Reply, Paul H. Robinson, Joshua Samuel Barton, Matthew J. Lister
All Faculty Scholarship
A number of articles and empirical studies over the past decade, most by Paul Robinson and co-authors, have suggested a relationship between the extent of the criminal law's reputation for being just in its distribution of criminal liability and punishment in the eyes of the community – its "moral credibility" – and its ability to gain that community's deference and compliance through a variety of mechanisms that enhance its crime-control effectiveness. This has led to proposals to have criminal liability and punishment rules reflect lay intuitions of justice – "empirical desert" – as a means of enhancing the system's moral …
The Language Of Mens Rea, Kenneth Simons, Matthew R. Ginther, Francis X. Shen, Richard J. Bonnie
The Language Of Mens Rea, Kenneth Simons, Matthew R. Ginther, Francis X. Shen, Richard J. Bonnie
Faculty Scholarship
This article answers two key questions. First: Do jurors understand and apply the criminal mental state categories the way that the widely influential Model Penal Code (MPC) assumes? Second: If not, what can be done about it?
Abolition Of The Insanity Defense Violates Due Process, Stephen J. Morse, Richard J. Bonnie
Abolition Of The Insanity Defense Violates Due Process, Stephen J. Morse, Richard J. Bonnie
All Faculty Scholarship
This article, which is based on and expands on an amicus brief the authors submitted to the United States Supreme Court, first provides the moral argument in favor of the insanity defense. It considers and rejects the most important moral counterargument and suggests that jurisdictions have considerable leeway in deciding what test best meets their legal and moral policies. The article then discusses why the two primary alternatives to the insanity defense, the negation of mens rea and considering mental disorder at sentencing, are insufficient to achieve the goal of responding justly to severely mentally disordered offenders. The last section …
Blaming As A Social Process: The Influence Of Character And Moral Emotion On Blame, Janice Nadler
Blaming As A Social Process: The Influence Of Character And Moral Emotion On Blame, Janice Nadler
Faculty Working Papers
For the most part, the law eschews the role of moral character in legal blame. But when we observe an actor who causes harm, legal and psychological blame processes are in tension. Procedures for legal blame assume an assessment of the actor's mental state, and ultimately of responsibility, that is independent of the moral character of the actor. In this paper, I present experimental evidence to suggest that perceptions of intent, foreseeability, and possibly causation can be colored by independent reasons for thinking the actor is a bad person, and are mediated by the experience of negative moral emotion. Our …
Moral Character, Motive, And The Psychology Of Blame, Janice Nadler, Mary-Hunter Morris Mcdonnell
Moral Character, Motive, And The Psychology Of Blame, Janice Nadler, Mary-Hunter Morris Mcdonnell
Faculty Working Papers
Blameworthiness, in the criminal law context, is conceived as the carefully calculated end product of discrete judgments about a transgressor's intentionality, causal proximity to harm, and the harm's foreseeability. Research in social psychology, on the other hand, suggests that blaming is often intuitive and automatic, driven by a natural impulsive desire to express and defend social values and expectations. The motivational processes that underlie psychological blame suggest that judgments of legal blame are influenced by factors the law does not always explicitly recognize or encourage. In this Article we focus on two highly related motivational processes – the desire to …
Severe Environmental Deprivation (Aka Rsb): A Tragedy, Not A Defense, Stephen J. Morse
Severe Environmental Deprivation (Aka Rsb): A Tragedy, Not A Defense, Stephen J. Morse
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This article is a contribution to a symposium issue of the Alabama Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review devoted to whether severe environmental deprivation, sometimes termed rotten social background, should be a defense to crime and why it has not been adopted. I begin by presenting the framework I apply for thinking about such problems. I then identify the main theses Professors Richard Delgado and Andrew Taslitz present and consider their merits. Next, I turn to the arguments of the other papers by Professors Paul Robinson, Erik Luna and Angela Harris. I make two general arguments: first, that SED …
Proportional Mens Rea, Stephen F. Smith
Proportional Mens Rea, Stephen F. Smith
Journal Articles
This Essay makes the case for "proportional mens rea," a proportionality-based approach to mens rea selection. Proportional mens rea would provide proportionality safeguards that are otherwise entirely lacking in substantive criminal law and,as a practical matter, unavailable in constitutional law. Creating implied mens rea requirements, where necessary to ensure proportional punishment, is not a judicial usurpation of a legislative function. Rather, it is to take seriously the role that courts play, under both constitutional and substantive criminal law, to ensure that punishment "fits" the crime. Moreover, proportional mens rea would represent a needed counterweight to prosecutorial behavior whereas current doctrine …
Concordance & Conflict In Intuitions Of Justice, Paul H. Robinson, Robert O. Kurzban
Concordance & Conflict In Intuitions Of Justice, Paul H. Robinson, Robert O. Kurzban
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The common wisdom among criminal law theorists and policy makers is that the notion of desert is vague and the subject to wide disagreement. Yet the empirical evidence in available studies, including new studies reported here, paints a dramatically different picture. While moral philosophers may disagree on some aspects of moral blameworthiness, people's intuitions of justice are commonly specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself – physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions – people's shared intuitions cut across demographics and cultures. The findings raise …
Beyond Blame—Mens Rea And Regulatory Crime, Arthur Leavens
Beyond Blame—Mens Rea And Regulatory Crime, Arthur Leavens
Faculty Scholarship
In the first part of this Article, the Author briefly outlines the conceptual underpinnings of the common law approach to mens rea, with its blame focus, and the Supreme Court's early efforts to develop a different approach in interpreting regulatory criminal statutes. The Author begins the second part of this Article with Lambert v. California, in which the Court staked out the constitutional limits for the employment of strict liability in public welfare or regulatory crimes, and, first employed notice-based mens rea. This part goes on to examine the ensuing cases in which the Court, at least implicitly, fleshes out …
The Uneasy Entente Between Legal Insanity And Mens Rea: Beyond Clark V. Arizona, Stephen J. Morse, Morris B. Hoffman
The Uneasy Entente Between Legal Insanity And Mens Rea: Beyond Clark V. Arizona, Stephen J. Morse, Morris B. Hoffman
All Faculty Scholarship
There is uneasy tension in the criminal law between the doctrines of mens rea and the defense of legal insanity. Last term, the Supreme Court addressed both these issues, but failed to clarify the relation between them. Using a wide range of interdisciplinary materials, this article discusses the broad doctrinal, theoretical, and normative issues concerning responsibility that arise in this context. We clarify the meaning of mental disorder, mens rea and legal insanity, the justification for and the relation between the latter two, and the relation among all three. Next we consider the reasoning in Clark, and for the most …
Before And After: Temporal Anomalies In Legal Doctrine, Leo Katz
Before And After: Temporal Anomalies In Legal Doctrine, Leo Katz
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Legal doctrine exhibits some striking temporal anomalies, previously not much adverted to. Wrongdoing looked at before it has occurred, and after is has occurred, is apt to look very different. I take up the two key components of wrongdoing seriatim, the harm-portion and the misconduct-portion: the "damage" part and the "liability" part. We tend to look at harm in a harm-agnifying way before it has occurred, and in a harm-inimizing way afterwards. We thus tend to think about negligence and the harm it wreaks in seemingly inconsistent ways. I examine and reject some possible explanations of this. Misconduct too looks …