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Full-Text Articles in Law
Addressing Racial Inequities In The Criminal Justice System Through A Reconstruction Sentencing Approach, Jelani Jefferson Exum
Addressing Racial Inequities In The Criminal Justice System Through A Reconstruction Sentencing Approach, Jelani Jefferson Exum
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
Justice reform is having a moment. Across the nation and in the federal government, legislation has passed “to reduce the scale of incarceration and the impact of collateral consequences of a felony conviction.” While some of these reforms were the result of fiscal concerns over mass incarceration, others were in response to the criminal justice reckoning brought on by events of 2020 and intensified calls for racial justice. In the summer of 2020 media attention on the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked nationwide and global protests and accompanying antiracism pledges by individuals and institutions. This …
Blind Injustice: The Supreme Court, Implicit Racial Bias, And The Racial Disparity In The Criminal Justice System, Tyler Rose Clemons
Blind Injustice: The Supreme Court, Implicit Racial Bias, And The Racial Disparity In The Criminal Justice System, Tyler Rose Clemons
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” This statement by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2007 is alluring in both its grammatical symmetry and its logical simplicity. Yet it encapsulates the naiveté of the view of racial discrimination currently held by the majority of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Chief Justice Roberts’s assertion contains the implied assumption that the only racial discrimination that exists—or at least the only kind that matters under the Constitution—is explicit and susceptible to conscious control. Decades of …