Law Commons^™

Police Violence And Ferguson: (En)Racing Criminal Procedure, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

On The Argument That Execution Protocol Reform Is Biomedical Research, Paul J. Litton

Faculty Publications

Regardless of whether the Supreme Court rightly upheld Oklahoma’s execution protocol in Glossip, Oklahoma officials had inadequate reason to choose midazolam as the anesthetizing agent in its procedure. Their decision is one example illustrating Seema Shah’s point that death penalty states are engaged in “poorly designed experimentation that is not based on evidence.” Shah argues that “an important factor” causing the high rate of botched executions is that lethal injection reform is a type of human subjects research that is going unregulated. Shah argues that research requirements, such as informed consent and IRB review, are necessary to render the research …

Transforming Piecemeal Social Engineering Into "Grand" Crime Prevention Policy: Toward A New Criminology Of Social Control, Joshua D. Freilich, Graeme R. Newman

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This Article focuses on the Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) approach in criminology, which expands the crime reduction role well beyond the justice system. SCP sees criminal law in a more restrictive sense, as only part of the anticrime effort in governance. We examine the “general” and “specific” responses to crime problems in the SCP approach. Our review demonstrates that the most serious barrier to converting SCP techniques into policy remains the gap that exists between problem identification and problem response. We discuss past large-scale SCP interventions and explore the complex links between them and SCP’s better known specificity and piecemeal …

Correctional Education Can Make A Greater Impact On Recidivism By Supporting Adult Inmates With Learning Disabilities, Angela Koo

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

This Comment brings attention to a group that is overlooked within our prisons—adult inmates with learning disabilities. These inmates currently face challenges in receiving appropriate educational programming. Recognizing that several studies support the proposition that education reduces recidivism, this Comment argues that correctional education programs must make reforms to accommodate adult inmates with learning disabilities in order for education to fully impact recidivism rates.

Letting One Fly Over The Cuckoo's Nest: Why Automatic Reversal Is The Only Effective Remedy For Denial Of Counsel At A Mental Competency Hearing, Jenny Fehring

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Timing Brady, Miriam H. Baer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sonic Jihad — Muslim Hip Hop In The Age Of Mass Incarceration, Spearit

Articles

This essay examines hip hop music as a form of legal criticism. It focuses on the music as critical resistance and “new terrain” for understanding the law, and more specifically, focuses on what prisons mean to Muslim hip hop artists. Losing friends, family, and loved ones to the proverbial belly of the beast has inspired criticism of criminal justice from the earliest days of hip hop culture. In the music, prisons are known by a host of names like “pen,” “bing,” and “clink,” terms that are invoked throughout the lyrics. The most extreme expressions offer violent fantasies of revolution and …

The Dark Frontier: The Violent And Often Tragic Point Of Contact Between Law Enforcement And The Mentally Ill., Gary Howell

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

There currently exists a widespread and unacceptable risk of violence between law enforcement personnel and mentally ill suspects. The point of contact between law enforcement and the mentally ill has evolved over the last fifty years and can trace its origins to deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization aimed to close centralized, state mental health institutions in favor of decentralized, community-based mental health care facilities. Deinstitutionalization, however, created a number of consequences for the mentally ill and law enforcement. For example, in the years since deinstitutionalization, an excessive number of homeless mentally ill persons and their families have had little or no access to …

The Immortal Accusation, Lindsey Webb

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In the American criminal justice system, accusations have eternal life. Prosecutors, judges, and prison officials regularly consider dismissed charges and even prior acquittals in the defendant’s criminal history when making decisions ranging from the filing of charges to the imposition of punishment. This Article argues that the criminal justice system’s reliance on “accusation evidence” should be understood as furthering its larger allegiance to attaining and preserving findings of guilt.

Once the government obtains a guilty plea or verdict, appellate courts rarely overturn convictions based on concerns about the accuracy of the conviction; indeed, post-conviction review procedures often are structured to …

Introduction To The Symposium On Entrepreneurial Lawyering, Anthony J. Luppino, Ellen Suni

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

A Free Start: Community-Based Organizations As An Antidote To The Mass Incarceration Of Women Pretrial, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

In 1973, the feminist newsmagazine Off Our Backs featured a segment on women in jail awaiting trial in Washington, D.C. Many of the women faced minor charges, such as soliciting prostitution, but remained in detention because they could not afford to pay even very low amounts of monetary bail. The magazine interviewed Myrna Raeder, then a fellow at Georgetown, and other attorneys involved in a class action suit against D.C. corrections, who argued that low-income women were unjustly subjected to the punitive effects of pretrial detention, in violation of their due process rights. Raeder reported to the newsmagazine, “as a …

Discounting And Criminals' Implied Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

It is commonly assumed that potential offenders are more responsive to increases in the certainty than increases in the severity of punishment. An important implication of this assumption within the Beckerian law enforcement model is that criminals are risk-seeking. This note adds to existing literature by showing that offenders who discount future monetary benefits can be more responsive to the certainty rather than the severity of punishment, even when they are risk averse, and even when their disutility from imprisonment rises proportionally (or more than proportionally) with the length of the sentence.

A Shot In The Dark: Why Virginia Should Adopt The Firing Squad As Its Primary Method Of Execution, P. Thomas Distanislao, Iii

Law Student Publications

This comment recommends that Virginia cease its use of lethal injection because of its high botch rates and growing impracticability due to drug shortages. Instead, the Commonwealth should use the firing squad as a more effective means of execution, thereby leading the nation in a transition towards a more efficient and reliable method.

The Twilight Zone: Perspectives From A Man On Death Row, Leah Stiegler

Law Student Publications

This interview was conducted through a series of written correspondences between Gerald Dean Cruz and Leah Stiegler, the Allen Chair Editor for Volume 49 of the University of Richmond Law Review. This exchange was reproduced, in excerpts, for the sole purpose of giving readers a rare glimpse into the perspective of a death row inmate.

Making Sure We Are Getting It Right: Repairing "The Machinery Of Death" By Narrowing Capital Eligibility, Ann E. Reid

Law Student Publications

This comment argues that, starting with the framework of the federal system, there is a way to reconcile modern concerns about the death penalty with society's need for leverage over those criminals who truly are the worst of the worst-those who present grave threats to society even after incarceration. This reconciliation can be achieved by amending the Federal Death Penalty Act to require prosecutors to establish one additional element before they can secure a capital conviction: future dangerousness of the defendant in prison..

The Promise And Peril Of The Anti-Commandeering Rule In The Homeland Security Era: Immigrant Sanctuary As An Illustrative Case, Trevor George Gardner

Scholarship@WashULaw

Despite the broad powers wielded by the federal government in security administration, the Supreme Court’s holding in Printz v. United States serves as a substantial check against federal overreach. Hand wringing by legal scholars over the Court’s reasoning in Printz and the rigid rules against commandeering attached to this reasoning have obscured the fact that the case now stands as a bulwark against the expansion of federal authority over state, county, and local police. Given the holding in Printz, ICE cannot require the active participation of subnational police in immigration enforcement and must instead—despite its previous assertions to the contrary—solicit …

When Theory Met Practice: Distributional Analysis In Critical Criminal Law Theorizing, Aya Gruber

Publications

Progressive (critical race and feminist) theorizing on criminal law exists within an overarching American criminal law culture in which the U.S penal system has become a "peculiar institution" and a defining governance structure. Much of criminal law discourse is subject to a type of ideological capture in which it is natural to assume that criminalization is a valid, if not preferred, solution to social dysfunction. Accordingly, progressives’ primary concerns about harms to minority victims takes place in a political-legal context in which criminalization is the technique of addressing harm. In turn, progressive criminal law theorizing manifests some deep internal tensions. …

Revisiting The Mansions And Gatehouses Of Criminal Procedure: Reflections On Yale Kamisar's Famous Essay, William T. Pizzi

Publications

In 1965, Yale Kamisar published a now-famous essay entitled, Equal Justice in the Gatehouses and Mansions of American Criminal Procedure: From Powell to Gideon, from Escobedo to... to make his case that the Court needed to take action to protect citizens in interrogation rooms, Kamisar used the powerful metaphors of the gatehouse and the mansion to contrast the treatment received in interrogation rooms in the back of police stations with the way defendants were treated when they arrived at courthouses where the power of the state was restricted and they had strong constitutional protections.

On its 50th anniversary since publication, …

Emergence From Civil Death: The Evolution Of Expungement In West Virginia, Valena Beety, Michael Aloi, Evan Johns

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Ninety-two million Americans have a criminal record—nearly one in three adults. This criminal record can include an arrest that did not lead to a conviction, a conviction for which the person did not serve time in prison, or a conviction for a nonviolent crime. All can have a similar impact on an individual’s job prospects and on local economies. Incarcerating adult Americans costs a combined $68 billion annually at the local, state, and federal levels. The cost of lost wages and lost financial contributions to society by ex-offenders is even higher.

This financially immobilized population of former offenders may be …

The Maryland Access To Justice Story: Indigent Defendants’ Right To Counsel At First Appearance, Douglas L. Colbert

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

The Prior Convictions Exception—A Comment, Matthew Engle

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taking Another Look At Second-Look Sentencing, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

A historically unprecedented number of Americans are currently behind bars. Our high rate of incarceration, and the high bills that it generates for American taxpayers, has led to a number of proposals for sentencing reform. For example, bills were recently introduced in both the House and Senate that would roll back federal mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug offenders, and the Obama Administration has announced a plan to grant clemency to hundreds of non-violent drug offenders. Perhaps the most revolutionary proposal, though, is one advanced by the drafters of the Model Penal Code, namely that judges be given the power …

Instrumentalizing The Expressive: Transplanting Sentencing Circles Into The Canadian Criminal Trial, Toby S. Goldbach

All Faculty Publications

This Article examines reforms to criminal sentencing procedures in Canada, focusing on Aboriginal healing circles, which were incorporated as “sentencing circles” into the criminal trial. Using the lens of comparative law and legal transplants, this Article recounts the period of sentencing reform in Canada in the 1990s, when scholars, practitioners, and activists inquired into Aboriginal confrontation with the criminal justice system by comparing Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal justice values and principles. As a way to bridge the gap between vastly differing worldviews and approaches to justice, judges and Aboriginal justice advocates transplanted sentencing circles into the sentencing phase of the criminal …

Me And Mr. Jones: A Systems-Based Analysis Of A Catastrophic Defense Outcome, Pamela R. Metzger

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Leo S. Jones spent four months in jail, accused of a probation that had long since expired. His incarceration was illegal. It was also preventable.

In this essay, I describe the unique data collection project that identified Mr. Jones’ case. Then, I analyze the various individual, institutional, and systemic practices that contributed to Mr. Jones’ illegal incarceration. I show how an investigation of Mr. Jones’ case led to the discovery of widespread latent errors that may have adversely affected innumerable other detainees. I conclude by explaining what this case reveals about how data collection and analysis can improve public defender …

Policing Sex: The Colonial, Apartheid, And New Democracy Policing Of Sex Work In South Africa, I. India Thusi

Faculty Scholarship

The history of the policing of sex work in South Africa reveals the surprisingly contradictory manners that legal regulations, police action, and public discourses have all “policed” sex work to meet competing goals. Sex work has generally been subject to formal state policing in the form of legal regulations and laws, which mostly focus on the public nuisance aspects of it. However, there has also been a more informal policing of sex work through public discourses in the media, medical community, and amongst activists. These various forms of policing are at times contradictory, and may result in various approaches toward …

The Jury's Constitutional Judgment, Nathan Chapman

Scholarly Works

Despite the early American jury’s near-mythical role as a check on overreaching government agents, the contemporary jury’s role in constitutional adjudication remains opaque. Should the jury have the right to nullify criminal statutes on constitutional grounds? Should the jury apply constitutional doctrine in civil rights suits against government officers? Should courts of appeals defer to the jury’s application of constitutional law, or review it de novo?

This Article offers the first holistic analysis of the jury’s role in constitutional adjudication. It argues that the Constitution’s text, history, and structure strongly support the jury’s authority to apply constitutional law to the …

Justice As A Rounding Error?: Evidence Of Subconscious Bias In Second-Degree Murder Sentences In Canada, Craig E. Jones, Micah B. Rankin

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

There are few areas of law that grant judges as much discretion as the sentencing of criminal offenders. This discretion necessarily leads to concerns about the influence of biases, including those that result from subconscious processes associated with human cognition; that is to say, heuristics. In this article, the authors explore one heuristic—number preference—through an examination of all reported second degree murder parole ineligibility decisions between 1990 and 2012. Number preference leads individuals to predictably round off measurements to certain favoured numbers. The authors identify a tendency for parole ineligibility decisions to cluster around even numbers and multiples of five, …

The Moral Vigilante And Her Cousins In The Shadows, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

By definition, vigilantes cannot be legally justified – if they satisfied a justification defense, for example, they would not be law-breakers – but they may well be morally justified, if their aim is to provide the order and justice that the criminal justice system has failed to provide in a breach of the social contract. Yet, even moral vigilantism is detrimental to society and ought to be avoided, ideally not by prosecuting moral vigilantism but by avoiding the creation of situations that would call for it. Unfortunately, the U.S. criminal justice system has adopted a wide range of criminal law …

Merit-Based Sentencing Reductions: Moving Forward On Specifics, And Some Critique Of The New Model Penal Code, Rory Little

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Risk As A Proxy For Race: The Dangers Of Risk Assessment, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Actuarial risk assessment in the implementation and administration of criminal sentencing has a long history in this country – a long and fraught history. Today, many progressive advocates promote the use of actuarial risk assessment instruments as part of a strategy to reduce the problem of "mass incarceration." Former Attorney General Eric Holder has called on the U.S. Sentencing Commission to hold hearings to further consider the matter of risk assessment and prediction tools in sentencing and parole.

The objective – to reduce our massive over-incarceration in this country – is critical and noble. But risk assessment tools are simply …