Law Commons^™

When Victims Seek Closure: Forgiveness, Vengeance And The Role Of Government, Susan Bandes

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This article discusses the role of victims and their families in the sentencing of criminal defendants, including the emotional and ethical components of victims' desires to achieve justice and closure.

Forgiveness In The Criminal Justice System: If It Belongs, Then Why Is It So Hard To Find?, David M. Lerman

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This essay advocates the role of forgiveness within the criminal justice system, particularly from a prosecutor's perspective, and discusses common impediments to its increased presence and the leadership needed to allow it to develop within the system.

Criminal Aliens Get Pinched: Sandoval V. Reno, Aedpa's And Iirira's Effect On Habeas Corpus Jurisdiction, Matthew J. Droskoski

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is There A Place For Forgiveness In The Justice System?, Everett L. Worthington, Jr.

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This article discusses the role of forgiveness in the criminal justice system, and explores related concepts of empathy, restorative justice, and truth and reconciliation.

Forgiveness In The Criminal Law, Ian S. Weinstein (Moderator)

Fordham Urban Law Journal

A discussion of the role of forgiveness in criminal law, and the extent to which forgiveness should impact prosecutorial discretion. Includes a question and answer session with audience.

Forgiveness And The Law - A Redemptive Opportunity, Douglas B. Ammar

Fordham Urban Law Journal

A discussion of the role of forgiveness in criminal law. The author relates the approach of the Georgia Justice Project, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide justice to indigent criminal defendants and help them become productive citizens.

Teshuva: A Look At Repentance, Forgiveness And Atonement In Jewish Law And Philosophy And American Legal Thought, Samuel J. Levine

Fordham Urban Law Journal

A discussion of the Jewish concept of "Teshuva," which provides the possibility of atonement for wrongdoings. The article explores the process of "Teshuva" in depth and describes its relationship and significance to modern criminal law.

Is There A Place For Forgiveness In The Justice System?, Everett L. Worthington, Jr.

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This article discusses the role of forgiveness in the criminal justice system, and explores related concepts of empathy, restorative justice, and truth and reconciliation.

Forgiveness In The Criminal Law, Ian S. Weinstein (Moderator)

Fordham Urban Law Journal

A discussion of the role of forgiveness in criminal law, and the extent to which forgiveness should impact prosecutorial discretion. Includes a question and answer session with audience.

Forgiveness And The Law, Martha Minow

Fordham Urban Law Journal

A discussion of the role of forgiveness in the law, substituting forgiveness for the law, and whether or not the law can or should pursue higher moral ambitions

Forgiveness And The Criminal Law: Forgiveness Through Medicinal Punishment, Dennis M. Cariello

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This article discusses the role of forgiveness in criminal law, focusing specifically on the nature of forgiveness, how and when society should forgive wrongdoers, and the nature of punishment.

Forgiveness As A Problem-Solving Tool In The Courts: A Brief Response To The Panel On Forgiveness In Criminal Law, Derek A. Denckla

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This article is a response to Panel on Forgiveness in Criminal Law, and attempts to answer the following questions: Is there room for forgiveness in the criminal courts? If so, how does forgiveness manifest itself there? The article explores this issue in terms of the opportunities for forgiveness provided by "problem-solving" courts.

Drug Treatment Courts And Emergent Experimentalist Government, Michael C. Dorf, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the continuing "war on drugs," the last decade has witnessed the creation and nationwide spread of a remarkable set of institutions, drug treatment courts. In drug treatment court, a criminal defendant pleads guilty or otherwise accepts responsibility for a charged offense and accepts placement in a court-mandated program of drug treatment. The judge and court personnel closely monitor the defendant's performance in the program and the program's capacity to serve the mandated client. The federal government and national associations in turn monitor the local drug treatment courts and disseminate successful practices. The ensemble of institutions, monitoring, and pooling exemplifies …

Forgiveness And The Law, Martha Minow

Fordham Urban Law Journal

A discussion of the role of forgiveness in the law, substituting forgiveness for the law, and whether or not the law can or should pursue higher moral ambitions

Rico Rights For Erisa Wrongs: Can Plaintiffs Find Relief Despite Erisa Preemption Of State-Law Claims?, Alan R. Ross

Washington Law Review

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) preempts state laws that relate to employee benefit plans and allows only equitable relief for those who are injured by decisions of ERISA plan administrators. Even though the interpretation of ERISA's preemptive power has changed since 1974, ERISA still poses a significant challenge to plaintiffs in actions for damages against plan administrators. This Comment suggests that another federal law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which is explicitly not preempted by ERISA, may provide relief. The challenges that a plaintiff bringing an action against plan administrators may face include …

Defending Defending: The Case For Unmitigated Zeal On Behalf Of People Who Do Terrible Things, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although defending defending may be an endless pursuit, I cannot help taking it on. I am, after all, a defender myself, and defending fellow defenders seems to go with the territory. Of course, attacks on criminal defenders do not come out of nowhere - difficult and complex questions often arise in criminal defense work. Unfortunately, the questions that are raised in the aftermath of a high profile case such as the Abner Louima case are usually the easy ones - questions that have more to do with the nature of the adversarial system than with the values or ethics of …

Capital Punishment As Human Sacrifice: A Societal Ritual As Depicted In George Eliot's Adam Bede, Roberta M. Harding

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The purpose of this article is to identify, describe, and analyze the historic and contemporary connection between the practices of capital punishment and human sacrifice. After describing how human sacrifice constitutes an integral component of capital punishment, it will be argued that the institutionalization of this antiquated barbaric ritual, vis-a-vis the use of capital punishment, renders the present use of the death penalty in the United States incompatible with "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society"; and that consequently, this facet of capital punishment renders the penalty at odds with the Eighth Amendment's prohibition …

Death Is The Whole Ball Game, Jeffrey A. Fagan, James S. Liebman, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

In Capital Appeals Revisited and The Meaning of Capital Appeals, Barry Latzer and James N.G. Cauthen argue that a study of capital appeals should focus only on overturned findings of guilt, and complain that in A Broken System we examine all overturned capital verdicts. But the question they want studied cannot provide an accurate evaluation of a system of capital punishment. By proposing to count only "conviction" error and not "sentence" error, Latzer and Cauthen ignore that if a death sentence is overturned, the case is no longer capital and the system of capital punishment has failed to achieve its …

Death Matters – A Reply To Latzer And Cauthen, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

The legal treatment of capital punishment in the United States "rests squarely on the predicate that the penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment, however long. Death, in its finality, differs more from life imprisonment than a 100-year prison term differs from one of only a year or two. This predicate is among "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" and determine whether a punishment is "cruel and unusual" in violation of the Constitution. Because "'[f]rom the point of view of the defendant, [death] is different in both its severity …

Sex & Surveillance: Gender, Privacy & The Sexualization Of Power In Prison, Teresa A. Miller

Journal Articles

In prison, surveillance is power and power is sexualized. Sex and surveillance, therefore, are profoundly linked. Whereas numerous penal scholars from Bentham to Foucault have theorized the force inherent in the visual monitoring of prisoners, the sexualization of power and the relationship between sex and surveillance is more academically obscure. This article criticizes the failure of federal courts to consider the strong and complex relationship between sex and surveillance in analyzing the constitutionality of prison searches, specifically, cross-gender searches.

The analysis proceeds in four parts. Part One introduces the issues posed by sex and surveillance. Part Two describes the sexually …

Defending The Innocent, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Of the legal scholarship examining the representation of the innocent accused, most has to do with guilty pleas, not trial or post-trial advocacy. Most of this literature is concerned with the pressure put on innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to receive a more lenient sentence than what they would get if found guilty at trial. This problem is compounded by the inability of poor defendants to make bail. Unfortunately, there are other, equally insidious ways to pressure innocent defendants to plead guilty. When addressing the question of defending the innocent at trial or in a post-conviction challenge, most …

Race, Class And Criminal Prosecutions: The Supreme Court’S Role In Targeting Minorities, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In No Equal Justice, I examine the ways in which race and class disparities have an effect at each stage of the criminal justice system. Much of the disparity concerns discriminatory police practices. My argument is that the Supreme Court, and our society, have constructed a set of rules that virtually ensure there will be racially disparate prosecution of the criminal law by the police. The way the Court has done that, I suggest, is by creating pockets of discretion that police can use without having to identify any objective, individualized basis for suspicion. When the police are free to …

The "Normal" Successes And Failures Of Feminism And The Criminal Law, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

To write of feminist reform in the criminal law is to write of simultaneous success and failure. We have seen marked changes in the doctrines and the practice of rape law, domestic violence law, and the law of self-defense. There is not a criminal law casebook in America today, nor a state statute book, that does not tell this story. Yet for all of this success, we also live in a world in which reform seems to suffer routine failures. Many believe, for example, that feminist reforms have rid rape law of the resistance requirement; however, recent scholarship makes it …

Human Rights And International Mutual Legal Assistance: Resolving The Tension, Robert Currie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

If indeed, as has been said, "it is fashionable nowadays to discuss the problems that arise from the application of general human rights to extradition", then it is also true that human rights concerns are increasingly being raised with regard to other forms of international criminal co-operation as well. As compliance with international human rights norms has become the subject of greater scrutiny by both States and international adjudicative bodies, concerns have been raised regarding their application to the various processes by which States aid each other in combating transnational crime. Prosecuting authorities are presented with problems of how the …

Human Rights And International Mutual Legal Assistance: Resolving The Tension, Robert Currie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

If indeed, as has been said, "it is fashionable nowadays to discuss the problems that arise from the application of general human rights to extradition", then it is also true that human rights concerns are increasingly being raised with regard to other forms of international criminal co-operation as well. As compliance with international human rights norms has become the subject of greater scrutiny by both States and international adjudicative bodies, concerns have been raised regarding their application to the various processes by which States aid each other in combating transnational crime. Prosecuting authorities are presented with problems of how the …

A Proposal For A New Massachusetts Notoriety For Profit Law: The Grandson Of Sam, Sean J. Kealy

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, two women stood convicted of highly publicized major crimes in Massachusetts. Katherine Ann Power ("Power") was a fugitive who committed felony-murder in 1970. She led a life on the run as a fugitive until 1993 when she revealed her true identity and surrendered to authorities to face the consequences of her crimes. Louise Woodward ("Woodward"), an au pair originally from England, gained notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean when she was convicted of killing the baby entrusted to her care. Both women captured the attention of the national media for months and reportedly had opportunities …

Criminal Procedure: Examples And Explanations, Robert Bloom, Mark Brodin

Robert M. Bloom

No abstract provided.

With An Evil Eye And An Unequal Hand: Pretextual Stops And Doctrinal Remedies To Racial Profiling, Wesley Oliver

Wesley M Oliver

No abstract provided.

Roman And Canonical Roots Of Hearsay Doctrine, Frank Herrmann

Frank R. Herrmann, S.J.

No abstract provided.

Equality Trouble: Sameness And Difference In Twentieth-Century Race Law, Angela Harris

Angela P Harris

No abstract provided.