Law Commons^™

Strict Liability's Criminogenic Effect, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

It is easy to understand the apparent appeal of strict liability to policymakers and legal reformers seeking to reduce crime: if the criminal law can do away with its traditional culpability requirement, it can increase the likelihood of conviction and punishment of those who engage in prohibited conduct or bring about prohibited harm or evil. And such an increase in punishment rate can enhance the crime-control effectiveness of a system built upon general deterrence or incapacitation of the dangerous. Similar arguments support the use of criminal liability for regulatory offenses. Greater punishment rates suggest greater compliance.

But this analysis fails …

Root Cause Analysis: A Tool To Promote Officer Safety And Reduce Officer Involved Shootings Over Time, John Hollway, Calvin Lee, Sean Smoot

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article proposes the use of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) as a tool for reducing or preventing officer-involved shootings (OIS). RCA is a method of problem solving designed to identify core underlying factors that contributed to generate an undesirable outcome, organizational accident, or adverse event. Once these core underlying causative factors have been identified, participants in the system can fashion remedies that will prevent future occurrences of similar undesirable outcomes. RCA is part of a prospective, non-blaming “systems approach” to preventing error in complex human systems that has been successfully used to reduce errors in aviation, healthcare, manufacturing, nuclear power, …