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Articles 1 - 30 of 51
Full-Text Articles in Law
Newsroom: The Jail Trap: Mass Incarceration In Ri, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Newsroom: The Jail Trap: Mass Incarceration In Ri, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Life of the Law School (1993- )
No abstract provided.
Alternative Visions For The Federal Criminal Justice And Corrections System: Is True Change Possible?, Nora V. Demleitner
Alternative Visions For The Federal Criminal Justice And Corrections System: Is True Change Possible?, Nora V. Demleitner
Scholarly Articles
None available.
Dispatches From Two Fronts Of The Battle For Sentencing Reform: Parole And Federal Sentencing Legislation, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Dispatches From Two Fronts Of The Battle For Sentencing Reform: Parole And Federal Sentencing Legislation, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Faculty Publications
This Issue of FSR reports on two fronts in the ongoing national battle for sentencing reform. The first half of the Issue is devoted to evolving views and new initiatives on parole. The second half of the Issue is a report on the content and prospects for success of a number of bills pending in Congress that would reform federal criminal sentencing, corrections, and back-end release practices.
Dividing Crime, Multiplying Punishments, John F. Stinneford
Dividing Crime, Multiplying Punishments, John F. Stinneford
John F. Stinneford
When the government wants to impose exceptionally harsh punishment on a criminal defendant, one of the ways it accomplishes this goal is to divide the defendant’s single course of conduct into multiple offenses that give rise to multiple punishments. The Supreme Court has rendered the Double Jeopardy Clause, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, and the rule of lenity incapable of handling this problem by emptying them of substantive content and transforming them into mere instruments for effectuation of legislative will. This Article demonstrates that all three doctrines originally reflected a substantive legal preference for life and liberty, and a …
Evading Miller, Robert S. Chang, David A. Perez, Luke M. Rona, Christopher M. Schafbuch
Evading Miller, Robert S. Chang, David A. Perez, Luke M. Rona, Christopher M. Schafbuch
Seattle University Law Review
Miller v. Alabama appeared to strengthen constitutional protections for juvenile sentencing that the United States Supreme Court recognized in Roper v. Simmons and Graham v. Florida. In Roper, the Court held that executing a person for a crime committed as a juvenile is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. In Graham, the Court held that sentencing a person to life without parole for a nonhomicide offense committed as a juvenile is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. In Miller, the Court held that a mandatory sentence of life without parole for a homicide offense committed by a juvenile is also unconstitutional under …
Criminal Law And Procedure, Aaron J. Campbell
Criminal Law And Procedure, Aaron J. Campbell
University of Richmond Law Review
No abstract provided.
From Peer-To-Peer Networks To Cloud Computing: How Technology Is Redefining Child Pornography Laws, Audrey Rogers
From Peer-To-Peer Networks To Cloud Computing: How Technology Is Redefining Child Pornography Laws, Audrey Rogers
St. John's Law Review
(Excerpt)
This Article traces the history of the child pornography laws and sentencing policy in Part I. Part II explains the technologies that have caused some of the current controversies, and then Part III describes how these technologies have blurred the offenses. Finally, Part IV makes suggestions as to how the law could better reflect technology and comport with a refined harm rationale. Courts, legal scholars, and medical experts have explained the harm includes the sexual abuse captured in the images and the psychological injury the victim endures knowing the images are being viewed. This Article further develops the harm …
Resentencing In The Shadow Of Johnson V. United States, Leah Litman
Resentencing In The Shadow Of Johnson V. United States, Leah Litman
Articles
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court handed down a decision many years in the making—Johnson v. United States. Johnson held that the ‘‘residual clause’’ of the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) is unconstitutionally vague. Although Johnson may have been overshadowed in the final days of a monumental Supreme Court term, the decision is a significant one that will have important consequences for the criminal justice system. ACCA’s residual clause imposed a severe 15-year mandatory minimum term of imprisonment, and many federal prisoners qualify for ACCA’s mandatory minimum. Johnson did away with ACCA’s residual clause such that defendants will no …
Sentencing And The Salience Of Pain And Hope, Benjamin Berger
Sentencing And The Salience Of Pain And Hope, Benjamin Berger
Benjamin L. Berger
What would a jurisprudence of sentencing that was induced from the experience of punishment, rather than deduced from the technocracy of criminal justice, look like? Rather than focusing narrowly on the question of quantum, such a jurisprudence would be concerned with the character and quality of punishment. A fit sentence would account for pain, loss, estrangement, alienation, and other features of the offender’s aggregate experience of suffering at the hands of the state in response to his or her wrongdoing. This would be a broader, more resolutely political conception of criminal punishment. This article shows that the jurisprudence of the …
Privately Failing: Recidivism In Public And Private Prisons, Lee N. Gilgan
Privately Failing: Recidivism In Public And Private Prisons, Lee N. Gilgan
Lee N Gilgan
This study would add to available research regarding recidivism rates following incarceration in private prisons in contrast to incarceration in government-run prisons. This is a non-experimental meta-analysis viewing numerous studies discussing the effects of multiple covariants within public and private prisons. Based on the information and conclusion in these studies, we find that there is little overall consensus concerning the effects of increased privatization on recidivism. While many studies find certain aspects of privatization to have some potential effect on recidivism, there are many other aspects that either are out of scope or have a negative effect on recidivism. However, …
Dying To Appeal: The Long-Lasting And Ineffective Appeal Process Of The Death Sentence, Marlene Brito
Dying To Appeal: The Long-Lasting And Ineffective Appeal Process Of The Death Sentence, Marlene Brito
Marlene Brito
The appeal process for death sentences in Florida must be revised to correct the ineffectiveness that is currently in place. The long-lasting procedure allows inmates to indefinitely delay their execution and live via the appeal process for over fifteen years because the statute does not provide a definite time limit. The comment discusses the death penalty in the United States, the jury override law and its consequences, the appeal process itself, and proposes an amendment to section 921.141, Florida Statutes.
A Return To Rehabilitation: Mandatory Minimum Sentencing In An Era Of Mass Incaraceration, Matthew C. Lamb
A Return To Rehabilitation: Mandatory Minimum Sentencing In An Era Of Mass Incaraceration, Matthew C. Lamb
Journal of Legislation
In 2013 Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced the Smarter Sentencing Act to decrease mandatory minimum sentences for federal drug crimes and enlarge the existing safety valve for federal drug offenses.1 The Smarter Sentencing Act reduces the statutory minimum sentence of specific federal drug offenses and permits judges to deviate from mandatory minimum sentences for controlled sub- stance offenses under certain circumstances.2 Similarly in 2013, Senators Leahy and Rand Paul (R-KY), as well as Representatives Bobby Scott (D-VA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), introduced the Justice Safety Valve Act.3 The Justice Safety Valve Act would …
Do We Know How To Punish?, Benjamin L. Apt
Do We Know How To Punish?, Benjamin L. Apt
Benjamin L. Apt
A number of current theories attempt to explain the purpose and need for criminal punishment. All of them depend on some sort of normative basis in justifying why the state may penalize people found guilty of crimes. Yet each of these theories lacks an epistemological foundation; none of them explains how we can know what form punishments should take. The article analyses the epistemological gaps in the predominant theories of punishment: retributivism, including limited-retributivism; and consequentialism in its various versions, ranging from deterrence to the reparative theories such as restorative justice and rehabilitation. It demonstrates that the common putative epistemological …
Does The Calculation Matter - The Federal Sentencing Guidelines And The Doctrine Of Alternate Variance Sentences, James W. Harlow
Does The Calculation Matter - The Federal Sentencing Guidelines And The Doctrine Of Alternate Variance Sentences, James W. Harlow
South Carolina Law Review
No abstract provided.
To Catch The Lion, Tether The Goat: Entrapment, Conspiracy, And Sentencing Manipulation, Derrick Augustus Carter
To Catch The Lion, Tether The Goat: Entrapment, Conspiracy, And Sentencing Manipulation, Derrick Augustus Carter
Akron Law Review
This article examines how sentencing enhancement schemes play into undercover operations and manipulation ploys. This article reviews entrapment doctrines, starting with the common law principles of unclean hands and estoppel, to settled principles of objective and subjective entrapment. Through principles of conspiracy, the undercover operation ensnares perpetrators who intend factually impossible crimes, as long as an overt step is taken. Sentencing enhancement crimes, induced by government agents, must be proven before a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. A reciprocal corollary is that the accused must be able to defend enhancement accusations through defenses such as sentencing manipulation and sentencing entrapment. …
Damp Squib: The Disappointing Denouement Of The Sentencing Commission's Economic Crime Project (And What They Should Do Now), Frank O. Bowman Iii
Damp Squib: The Disappointing Denouement Of The Sentencing Commission's Economic Crime Project (And What They Should Do Now), Frank O. Bowman Iii
Faculty Publications
The consolidated fraud and theft guideline, U.S.S.G. S2B1.I, has been a subject of sustained comment and critique since its adoption in 2001. Some of the critiques are technical and relate to issues such as the importance of "loss" in economic crime sentencing and the proper definition of concepts like "intended loss" and "sophisticated means." However, for the last decade or so, the dominant complaint has been that 22 Bi.i prescribes sentences that, particularly for many defendants in cases involving high loss amounts, are far too long.
Dividing Crime, Multiplying Punishments, John F. Stinneford
Dividing Crime, Multiplying Punishments, John F. Stinneford
UF Law Faculty Publications
When the government wants to impose exceptionally harsh punishment on a criminal defendant, one of the ways it accomplishes this goal is to divide the defendant’s single course of conduct into multiple offenses that give rise to multiple punishments. The Supreme Court has rendered the Double Jeopardy Clause, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, and the rule of lenity incapable of handling this problem by emptying them of substantive content and transforming them into mere instruments for effectuation of legislative will.
This Article demonstrates that all three doctrines originally reflected a substantive legal preference for life and liberty, and a …
Residual Impact: Resentencing Implications Of Johnson's Potential Ruling On Acca's Constitutionality, Leah Litman
Residual Impact: Resentencing Implications Of Johnson's Potential Ruling On Acca's Constitutionality, Leah Litman
Articles
In January 2015, the Supreme Court directed the parties to brief and argue an additional question in Johnson v. United States: “Whether the residual clause in the Armed Career Criminal Act of 1984, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(2)(B)(ii), is unconstitutionally vague.” The order represents an unusual move because the defendant had not raised the vagueness issue and the Court issued the order after it had already heard argument on the question raised in the petition for certiorari. Commentators therefore view the order as a signal that the Court will likely invalidate the residual clause. This decision will have been several years …
Can Judges Make Reliable Numeric Judgments? Distorted Damages And Skewed Sentences, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew J. Wistrich, Chris Guthrie
Can Judges Make Reliable Numeric Judgments? Distorted Damages And Skewed Sentences, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew J. Wistrich, Chris Guthrie
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
In a series of studies involving over six hundred trial judges in three countries, we demonstrate that trial judges' civil damage awards and criminal sentences are subject to influences that make them erratic. We found that the presence of misleading numeric reference points (or "anchors") affected judges' decisions in a series of hypothetical cases. Specifically, judges imposed shorter sentences when assigning sentences in months rather than in years; awarded higher amounts of compensatory damages when informed of a cap on damage awards; imposed different sentences depending upon the sequence in which criminal cases were presented to them; and were influenced …
Mercy By The Numbers: An Empirical Analysis Of Clemency And Its Structure, Michael Heise
Mercy By The Numbers: An Empirical Analysis Of Clemency And Its Structure, Michael Heise
Michael Heise
Clemency is an extrajudicial measure intended both to enhance fairness in the administration of justice, and allow for the correction of mistakes. Perhaps nowhere are these goals more important than in the death penalty context. The recent increased use of the death penalty and concurrent decline in the number of defendants removed from death row through clemency call for a better and deeper understanding of clemency authority and its application. Questions about whether clemency decisions are consistently and fairly distributed are particularly apt. This study uses 27 years of death penalty and clemency data to explore the influence of defendant …
Post-Sentencing Appellate Waivers, Kevin Bennardo
Post-Sentencing Appellate Waivers, Kevin Bennardo
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
A sentencing appellate waiver is a criminal defendant’s promise not to appeal her sentence. These provisions routinely appear in federal defendants’ plea agreements. With a few narrow exceptions, a knowing and voluntary sentencing appellate waiver bars a defendant from appealing all issues within the waiver’s scope. Using models of judicial behavior and empirical studies, this Article argues that the inclusion of sentencing appellate waivers in plea agreements creates bargaining inefficiencies and removes important incentives from the sentencing process. As a solution, the Article proposes that sentencing appellate waivers should take the form of separate post-sentencing agreements.
Excuses In Exile, Anders Kaye
Excuses In Exile, Anders Kaye
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Suppose that I have intentionally killed another person and that I have done so without any justification. At first glance, it appears that I am guilty of murder, a very serious crime. Since I am guilty of this very serious crime, the state may inflict a very serious punishment on me—at least many years in prison, if not my whole life or the death penalty. But suppose that one of the following is also true in my case: (A) At the time that I killed my victim, I suffered from a mental disease and, as a result, lacked the substantial …
Sentencing Pregnant Drug Addicts: Why The Child Endangerment Enhancement Is Not Appropriate, Monica Carusello
Sentencing Pregnant Drug Addicts: Why The Child Endangerment Enhancement Is Not Appropriate, Monica Carusello
Monica B Carusello
No abstract provided.
Sentencing And The Salience Of Pain And Hope, Benjamin Berger
Sentencing And The Salience Of Pain And Hope, Benjamin Berger
Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper Series
What would a jurisprudence of sentencing that was induced from the experience of punishment, rather than deduced from the technocracy of criminal justice, look like? Rather than focusing narrowly on the question of quantum, such a jurisprudence would be concerned with the character and quality of punishment. A fit sentence would account for pain, loss, estrangement, alienation, and other features of the offender’s aggregate experience of suffering at the hands of the state in response to his or her wrongdoing. This would be a broader, more resolutely political conception of criminal punishment. This article shows that the jurisprudence of the …
Unreasonable Doubt: Warren Hill, Aedpa, And The Unconstitutionality Of Georgia's Reasonable Doubt Standard, Adam Lamparello
Unreasonable Doubt: Warren Hill, Aedpa, And The Unconstitutionality Of Georgia's Reasonable Doubt Standard, Adam Lamparello
Adam Lamparello
Georgia’s “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for determining intellectual disability has led to an absurd—and arbitrary—result. A Georgia state court held that defendant Warren Hill was intellectually disabled, yet still sentenced Hill to death. Seven experts—and the court—deemed Hill disabled under a preponderance of the evidence standard. He remains on death row, however, because Georgia’s “preposterous burden of proof” requires that intellectual disability be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, a standard experts have said is nearly impossible to satisfy. It “effectively limits the constitutional right protected in Atkins,” and creates a conditional, not categorical, ban.
Co-Occurring Substance Use Disorder And Mental Illness In Criminal Offenders, Jayme M. Reisler
Co-Occurring Substance Use Disorder And Mental Illness In Criminal Offenders, Jayme M. Reisler
Jayme M Reisler
The high rate of comorbid substance use disorder and other mental illness (“dual diagnosis”) poses an enormous obstacle to public policy and sentencing in criminal cases. It is estimated that almost half of all Federal, State, and jail inmates suffer from dual diagnosis – a significantly higher prevalence than in the general population. Yet such inmates lack access to proper and effective treatments for their conditions. Several etiological theories have been put forth to explain the occurrence of dual diagnosis in general. However, virtually no studies have explored possible etiological reasons for the higher prevalence of dual diagnosis specifically in …
Taking Another Look At Second-Look Sentencing, Meghan J. Ryan
Taking Another Look At Second-Look Sentencing, Meghan J. Ryan
Meghan J. Ryan
An 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, a bill recently introduced in Congress 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 to resentence offenders who have been …
Sentencing Rules And Standards: How We Decide Criminal Punishment, Jacob Schuman
Sentencing Rules And Standards: How We Decide Criminal Punishment, Jacob Schuman
Journal Articles
Over the course of the past 300 years, American sentencing policy has alternated between “determinate” and “indeterminate” systems of deciding punishment. Debates over sentence determinacy have so far focused on three main questions: Who should decide punishment? What makes punishment fair? And why should we punish wrongdoers at all?
In this Article, I ask a new, fourth, question: How should we decide punishment? I show that determinate sentencing uses rules to determine sentences, while indeterminate sentencing relies on standards. Applying this insight to federal sentencing practice, I demonstrate that district court judges “depart” or “vary” from the United States Sentencing …
Probability And Punishment: How To Improve Sentencing By Taking Account Of Probability, Jacob Schuman
Probability And Punishment: How To Improve Sentencing By Taking Account Of Probability, Jacob Schuman
Journal Articles
The United States Sentencing Guidelines place little emphasis on probability. Instead, the Guidelines recommend a sentence in each case based only on whether certain facts about the offender’s crime exceed a “threshold” level of likelihood. Guidelines sentences therefore fail to reflect the precise odds of each defendant’s wrongdoing, which makes them both inefficient and unfair. This model of decision-making is particularly problematic in drug sentencing, where judges often impose lengthy sentences based on drug quantity calculations that carry a high risk of error. To address these problems, district courts should exercise their discretion and policymakers should implement reforms that incorporate …
Evolving Standards Of Domination: Abandoning A Flawed Legal Standard And Approaching A New Era In Penal Reform, Spearit
Articles
This Article critiques the evolving standards of decency doctrine as a form of Social Darwinism. It argues that evolving standards of decency provided a system of review that was tailor-made for Civil Rights opponents to scale back racial progress. Although as a doctrinal matter, evolving standards sought to tie punishment practices to social mores, prison sentencing became subject to political agendas that determined the course of punishment more than the benevolence of a maturing society. Indeed, rather than the fierce competition that is supposed to guide social development, the criminal justice system was consciously deployed as a means of social …