Law Commons^™

The Intersection Between Young Adult Sentencing And Mass Incarceration, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This Article connects two growing categories of academic literature and policy reform: arguments for treating young adults in the criminal justice system less severely than older adults because of evidence showing brain development and maturation continue until the mid-twenties; and arguments calling for reducing mass incarceration and identifying various mechanisms to do so. These categories overlap, but research has not previously built in-depth connections between the two.

Connecting the two bodies of literature helps identify and strengthen arguments for reform. First, changing charging, detention, and sentencing practices for young adults is one important tool to reduce mass incarceration. Young adults …

Slow Dancing With Death: The Supreme Court And Capital Punishment, 1963-2006, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses four questions:

Why hasn't the Court left capital punishment unregulated, as it has other areas of substantive criminal law? The Court is compelled to decide the death penalty's constitutionality by the peculiar responsibility it bears for this form of state violence.

Why didn't the Court abolish the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia after finding every capital statute and verdict unconstitutional? The Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause was too opaque to reveal whether the death penalty was unlawful for some or all crimes and, if not, whether there were law-bound ways to administer it. So the Court …

Capital Punishment And Capital Murder: Market Share And The Deterrent Effects Of The Death Penalty, Jeffrey Fagan, Franklin Zimring, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

The modem debate on deterrence and capital punishment, now in its fourth decade, was launched by two closely timed events. The first was the 1976 United States Supreme Court decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which restored capital punishment after its brief constitutional ban following Furman v. Georgia in 1972. In 1975, Professor Isaac Ehrlich published an influential article saying that during the 1950s and 1960s, each execution averted eight murders. Although Ehrlich's article was a highly technical study prepared for an audience of economists, its influence went well beyond the economics profession. Ehrlich's work was cited favorably in Gregg …

Capital Attrition: Error Rates In Capital Cases, 1973-1995, James S. Liebman, Jeffery Fagan, Valerie West, Jonathan Lloyd

Faculty Scholarship

Americans seem to be of two minds about the death penalty. In the last several years, the overall number of executions has risen steeply, reaching a fifty year high this year. Although two-thirds of the public support the penalty, this figure represents a sharp decline from the four-fifths of the population that endorsed the death penalty only six years ago, leaving support for capital punishment at a twenty year low. When life without parole is offered as an alternative, support for the penalty drops even more – often below a majority. Grants of executive clemency reached a twenty year high …

The Overproduction Of Death, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, Professor Liebman concludes that trial actors have strong incentives to – and do – overproduce death sentences, condemning to death men and women who, under state substantive law, do not deserve that penalty. Because trial-level procedural rights do not weaken these incentives or constrain the overproduction that results, it falls to post-trial procedural review – which is ill-suited to the task and fails to feed back needed information to the trial level – to identify the many substantive mistakes made at capital trials. This system is difficult to reform because it benefits both pro-death penalty trial actors …

Conference On The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Panel 3: The Allocation Of Discretion Under The Guidelines, Daniel J. Freed, Gerard E. Lynch, Steven M. Salky, Maria Rodriguez Mcbride, Vincent L. Broderick

Faculty Scholarship

The guidelines have shifted the locus of discretion from the judge to the prosecutor. This transfer has drastically changed sentencing because the prosecutor's role is very different from the judge's role.

Before the guidelines, the prosecutor's role in sentencing was minimal. The prosecutor could put a cap on the sentence by accepting a plea to a charge with a low maximum, but there was virtually no instance in which the charge would put a floor under the judge's sentence. The judge, on the other hand, could sentence however he liked. Not only was the judge's decision correct because it was …

Self-Defense As A Justification For Punishment, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

There are few legal ideas as basic as the principle of legitimate self-defense. Every individual, it is said, has the right to defend his or her person, property or living space against wrongful aggression and, if necessary, to kill the aggressor. This principle is so deeply ingrained in our legal thinking that it is difficult to imagine a legal system that did not acknowledge it. The concept of having rights would be virtually toothless unless we could use force to vindicate our rights against aggression.

The notion of having rights is less well-accepted in Jewish law than are the ideas …

"Uncontrollable" Actions And The Eighth Amendment: Implications Of Powell V. Texas, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

No questions of criminal justice are more fundamental than the bases for imposing criminal punishment, yet the Federal Constitution says nothing explicit about them. It is, therefore, understandable that the increasing limitations imposed by constitutional interpretation upon procedures for ascertaining criminal guilt have not been accompanied by similar limits upon principles of criminal responsibility. That the difference in treatment is understandable does not, of course, necessarily mean it has been justified.

When the Court struck down a law punishing addiction in Robinson v. California in 1962, it was still unclear whether it was willing to become significantly implicated in developing …