Law Commons^™

Effective Community Policing Performance Measures, Geoffrey P. Alpert, Daniel Flynn, Alex R. Piquero

Faculty Publications

As the philosophy of policing moves from a traditional to a community-oriented approach, performance measures must shift as well. Unlike the typical police performance measures of arrest and crime rates found in traditional police philosophies, community-oriented policing performance measures are more general and tend to measure the extent to which police affect the quality of life in the communities they serve as well as the problems they solve. This manuscript begins the process of developing effective community policing performance measures and presents three case studies through which objectives and performance measures are conceptualized.

The Ex Ante Function Of The Criminal Law, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley, Kevin M. Carlsmith

All Faculty Scholarship

Criminal legal codes draw clear lines between permissible and illegal conduct, and the criminal justice system counts on people knowing these lines and governing their conduct accordingly. This is the "ex ante" function of the law; lines are drawn, and because citizens fear punishments or believe in the moral validity of the legal codes they do not cross these lines. But do people in fact know the lines that legal codes draw? The fact that several states have adopted laws that deviate from other state laws enables a field experiment to address this question. Residents (N = 203) of states …

Sexual Abuse Against Women In Prison, Brenda V. Smith

Project on Addressing Prison Rape - Articles

One of the by-products of the influx of women into correctional settings has been the emergence of sexual misconduct against women in prison as a major issue for corrections officials and attorneys who represent women. This article advocates for laws criminalizing sexual abuse of women inmates, as well as training to prevent such abuse.

Innocence Protection Act: Death Penalty Reform On The Horizon, Ronald Weich

All Faculty Scholarship

The criminal justice pendulum may be swinging back in the direction of fairness. The Innocence Protection Act of 2001, introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives earlier this year, promises meaningful reforms in the administration of capital punishment in the United States.

Unlike previous slabs at reform, the Innocence Protection Act (lPA) has a real chance to become law because it commands unusually broad bipartisan support. The Senate bill (S. 486) is sponsored by Democrat Pat Leahy of Vermont and Republican Gordon Smith of Oregon. The House bill (H.R. 912) is sponsored by Democrat Bill Delahunt of …

Punishing Dangerousness: Cloaking Preventative Detention As Criminal Justice, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Laypersons have traditionally thought of the criminal justice system as being in the business of doing justice: punishing offenders for the crimes they commit. Yet during the past several decades, the justice system's focus has shifted from punishing past crimes to preventing future violations through the incarceration and control of dangerous offenders. Habitual-offender statutes, such as "three strikes" laws, authorize life sentences for repeat offenders. Jurisdictional reforms have decreased the age at which juveniles may be tried as adults. Gang membership and recruitment are now punished. "Megan's Law" statutes require community notification of convicted sex offenders. "Sexual predator" statutes provide …

Accountability Solutions In The Consent Search And Seizure Wasteland, José F. Anderson

All Faculty Scholarship

The legal and social issues that have emerged out of the doctrine that people in America have a right against unreasonable government instituted searches and seizures have dominated the dialogue and controversy in the American criminal justice system over the last three decades. A large portion of the debate has centered around the controversial exclusionary rule, which frees the sometimes unmistakably guilty because of irregularities in police procedure.

The notion that society suffers when criminals go free because of the constable's blunder has struck a decidedly political note in the discussion over criminal justice reform. Many observers are quick to …

Community Policing In Local Police Departments, 1997 And 1999, Us Department Of Justice

National Institute of Justice Office of Justice Programs

No abstract provided.

Why Do People Support Capital Punishment? The Death Penalty As Community Ritual, 33 Conn. L. Rev. 765 (2001), Donald L. Beschle

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review, David S. Tanenhaus

Scholarly Works

This ambitious book impressively chronicles forms of imprisonment in American history from Columbus’s crossing in 1492, with at least four convicts among his crew, to the rise of five hundred years later of a “prison-industrial complex,” which employs over half a million people and incarcerates more than one million others. According to Christianson, a former investigative reporter and gubernatorial aide who is now contributing editor of The Criminal Law Bulletin, director of the New York Death Penalty Documentation Project, and chairman of the Board of the Safer Society Foundation, With Liberty for Some “is a history of how we …

Criminal Justice And Black Families: The Collateral Damage Of Over-Enforcement, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Law Enforcement By Stereotypes And Serendipity: Racial Profiling And Stops And Searches Without Cause, David Rudovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judicial Fact-Finding And Sentence Enhancements In A World Of Guilty Pleas, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law Scholarship: Three Illusions, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

The paper criticizes criminal law scholarship for helping to construct and failing to expose analytic structures that falsely claim a higher level of rationality and coherence than current criminal law theory deserves. It offers illustrations of three such illusions of rationality. First, it is common in criminal law discourse for scholars and judges to cite any of the standard litany of "the purposes of punishment" -- just deserts, deterrence, incapacitation of the dangerous, rehabilitation, and sometimes other purposes -- as a justification for one or another liability rule or sentencing practice. The cited "purpose" gives the rules an aura of …

Race, Peremptories, And Capital Jury Deliberations, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

In Lonnie Weeks's capital murder trial in Virginia in 1993, the jury was instructed: If you find from the evidence that the Commonwealth has proved beyond a reasonable doubt, either of the two alternative aggravating factors], and as to that alternative you are unanimous, then you may fix the punishment of the defendant at death or if you believe from all the evidence that the death penalty is not justified, then you shall fix the punishment of the defendant at life imprisonment ... This instruction is plainly ambiguous, at least to a lay audience. Does it mean that if the …

Guns, Crime, And Punishment In America, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

There are over 200 million firearms in private hands in the United States, more than a third of which are handguns. In 1993 alone, it is estimated that 1.3 million victims of serious violent crime faced an offender with a gun. In 1999, there were approximately 563,000 such victims. Estimates of defensive uses of firearms – situations where individuals used a gun to protect themselves, someone else, or their property – range from 65,000 to 2.5 million per year. Punishments for crimes committed with a firearm are severe: under the federal firearms enhancement statute, the mandatory minimum sentence for use …

Rule Of Law And The Limits Of Sovereignty: The Private Prison In Jurisprudential Perspective, Ahmed A. White

Publications

No abstract provided.

Damages To Deter Police Shootings, W. Kip Viscusi, S. Jeffrey

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Many fatal shootings by police are not warranted. These shootings impose losses on the victims and their families and reflect the failure of existing administrative and legal restraints to deter these unwarranted shootings. This Article proposes a revamping of existing incentives to both provide more adequate compensation to the victims' families and to establish levels of deterrence that are sufficient to curtail unjust fatalities. There are legal criteria for what level of force is "reasonable," but determining reasonableness in practice may be difficult. Practical guidance such as the "21-foot rule" for the threat to warrant a shooting is often problematic. …

Racial Profiling: A Status Report Of The Legal, Legislative, And Empirical Literature, Katheryn Russell-Brown

UF Law Faculty Publications

In recent years, there have been several widely-publicized cases in which racial profiling became police brutality. As well, there have been scores of famous Black men who have offered their personal accounts as victims of racial profiling. All of these have helped to propel the issue onto the nation's front burner. The varied responses to racial profiling indicate the range of groups affected by and concerned about the practice. Notably, this includes former President Bill Clinton, who shared his belief that racial profiling is a national problem. The issue of racial profiling has evoked a wide range of policy responses, …

As Freedom Advances: The Paradox Of Severity In American Criminal Justice, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

According to the Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, "as freedom advances, the severity of the penal law decreases."' Montesquieu's notion is in the United States Constitution's Eighth Amendment, a provision that reflects a Montesquieuan faith that punishments acceptable today will become cruel and unusual tomorrow. Yet the United States in the year 2000 presents a serious challenge to Montesquieu's notion of the progress of freedom. The United States is simultaneously a leader of the "free world" and of the incarcerated world. We celebrate and export our commitment to free markets, civil rights, and civil liberties, yet we are also a world leader …

Formalism, Realism, And The War On Drugs, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

One of the ways our legal system has avoided confronting this ugly reality is through a commitment to legal formalism. Legal formalism allows us to ignore the social determinants that my AUSA friend saw every day as he prosecuted federal drug cases. As my colleague Professor Michael Seidman has suggested, legal formalism, which has been effectively critiqued and displaced by legal realism in many other areas of law, continues to exercise considerable influence over the way we think about criminal law. This formalist approach, in my view, has strongly affected the way we approach the drug problem. One consequence is …

'Suitable Targets'? Parallels And Connections Between 'Hate Crimes' And 'Driving While Black', Lu-In Wang

Articles

While hate crimes may tend to be less routine and more violent than discriminatory traffic stops, closer examination of each shows the need to complicate our understanding of both. The work of social scientists who have studied racial profiling reveals striking similarities and connections between these two practices. In particular, both hate crimes and racial profiling tend to be condemned only at extremes, in situations where they appear to be irrational and excessive, but overlooked in cases where they seem logical or are expected. The tendency to see only the most extreme cases as problematic, however, fails to recognize that …

Joel Feinberg On Crime And Punishment: Exploring The Relationship Between The Moral Limits Of The Criminal Law And The Expressive Function Of Punishment, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

When I was originally approached to participate in this Symposium on the work and legacy of Joel Feinberg, I immediately began thinking about the influence of his essay The Expressive Function of Punishment on contemporary criminal law theory in the United States. That essay has contributed significantly to a growing body of scholarship associated with the resurgence of interest inexpressive theories of law. In the criminal law area, the expressivist movement traces directly and foremost to Feinberg's essay. As Carol Steiker observes, "Joel Feinberg can be credited with inaugurating the "expressivist" turn in punishment theory with his influential essay, The …

A Claim For Third Party Standing In America's Prisons, N. Jeremi Duru

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Lawyers, Jails, And The Law’S Fake Bargains, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.