Law Commons^™

Retribution: The Central Aim Of Punishment, Gerard V. Bradley

Gerard V. Bradley

When I worked for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in the early 1980s, criminal sentences were consistently and dramatically too lenient. Though those years marked the ebb tide for the rehabilitative ideal of punishment and indeterminate "zip-to-ten" sentences, only career felons and those convicted of the most serious crimes were candidates for the sentences they justly deserved. Hamstrung by apparently silly rules of constitutional etiquette and bureaucratic sclerosis, the police were eclipsed in the mind of the public by the cold-blooded Everyman, bound only by the law of the jungle and some elusive sense of justice. Ultimately, popular demand required …

Teaching 'The Wire': Fiction As Pedagogical Tool, Roger Fairfax

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Searching For Solutions To The Indigent Defense Crisis In The Broader Criminal Justice Reform Agenda, Roger Fairfax

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Gideon v. Wainwright decision, the nearly universal assessment is that our indigent defense system remains too under-resourced and overwhelmed to fulfill the promise of the landmark decision, and needs to be reformed. At the same time, fiscal necessity and moral outrage have prompted a historic reexamination of outdated policies that have led to an overreliance on incarceration and inefficiencies in the administration of criminal justice. This Essay argues that there are synergies between the indigent defense reform agenda and the broader criminal justice reform agenda, which places a premium on cost-effective, evidence-based, …

Parole: Corpse Or Phoenix?, Paul J. Larkin Jr.

Paul J Larkin Jr.

Parole, once praised for its contribution to the rehabilitative ideal and later vilified for its close association with the same goal, no longer plays a major role in the twenty-first century federal criminal justice system, having been replaced by fixed mandatory sentences and sentencing guidelines. Congress believed a mandatory Sentencing Guidelines system was the ideal means of ending or ameliorating the nationwide sentencing disparities that had plagued the federal criminal justice process for most of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, after initially and repeatedly upholding that mandatory Sentencing Guidelines system, the Supreme Court ultimately kicked that approach to the curb as …

Public Choice Theory And Overcriminalization, Paul J. Larkin Jr.

Paul J Larkin Jr.

“Overcriminalization” is a neologism used to describe the overuse and misuse of the criminal law, oftentimes to punish conduct that society traditionally would not deem morally blameworthy. Overcriminalization is less a problem with the substantive criminal law than it is with the lawmaking process. Each new criminal law or sentence enhancement may be eminently sensible on its own, but may turn out to be utterly unreasonable when considered against the background of laws already on the books. In economic terms, the marginal benefit of each new criminal law may be nil, yet the marginal cost that each one imposes could …

Drugs, Dignity And Danger: Human Dignity As A Constitutional Constraint To Limit Overcriminalization, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Scholarly Articles

This Article proposes a constitutional constraint to limit criminalization of victimless crimes and, particularly, to alleviate the pressures on the criminal justice system emanating from its continuous “war on drugs.” To accomplish this goal, the Article explores the concept of human dignity, a fundamental right yet to be invoked in the context of substantive criminal law. The U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence invokes conflicting accounts of human dignity: liberty as dignity, on the one hand, and communitarian virtue as dignity, on the other. However, the Court has not yet developed a workable mechanism to reconcile these competing concepts in cases where …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

Effective Trial Counsel After Martinez V. Ryan: Focusing On The Adequacy Of State Procedures, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

Everyone knows that excessive caseloads, poor funding, and a lack of training plague indigent defense delivery systems throughout the states, such that the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright is largely unfulfilled. Commentators have disagreed about how best to breathe life into Gideon . Many disclaim any possibility that federal habeas corpus review of state criminal cases could catalyze reform give n the many procedural obstacle s that currently prevent state prisoners from getting into federal court. But the Supreme Court has recently taken a renewed interest in using federal habeas review to address the problem of ineffective attorneys in state …

Toward A Common Law Of Plea Bargaining, Wesley Macneil Oliver

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.