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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Law
Against Proportional Punishment, Adam J. Kolber
Against Proportional Punishment, Adam J. Kolber
Vanderbilt Law Review
Many criminal defendants are held in detention while they await trial. Though conditions in pretrial detention are much like those in prison, detention is technically not punishment. Since detainees are merely accused of crimes, they are presumed innocent.' Their detention is not intended to punish them, and so, the Supreme Court has said, it is not punishment at all. Rather, detention is a means of promoting public safety, reducing witness intimidation, and preventing people accused of crimes from fleeing before trial. Nevertheless, defendants who are convicted generally receive credit at sentencing for time served in pretrial detention. An offender who …
Putting Desert In Its Place, Christopher Slobogin, Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein
Putting Desert In Its Place, Christopher Slobogin, Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Based on an impressive array of studies, Paul Robinson and his coauthors have developed a new theory of criminal justice, which they call empirical desert. The theory asserts that, because people are more likely to be compliant with a legal regime that is perceived to be morally credible, a criminal justice system that tracks empirically derived lay views about how much punishment is deserved is the most efficient way of achieving utilitarian goals, or at least is as efficient at crime prevention as a system that focuses solely on deterrence and incapacitation. This Article describes seven original studies that test …
The Exclusionary Rule: Is It On Its Way Out? Should It Be?, Christopher Slobogin
The Exclusionary Rule: Is It On Its Way Out? Should It Be?, Christopher Slobogin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This symposium, comprising six articles in addition to this one, was triggered by a spate of Supreme Court opinions occurring over the last seven years, all of which raise the two questions in the title to this article (which is also the title of the symposium). Since 1974, when United States v. Calandra definitively established deterrence as the primary objective of the suppression remedy, the Court has nibbled away at the exclusionary rule from a number of different directions. But the Court's decisions in Hudson v. Michigan (2006), Herring v. United States (2009), and Davis v. United States (2011) reveal …
Reconceptualizing The Burden Of Proof, Edward K. Cheng
Reconceptualizing The Burden Of Proof, Edward K. Cheng
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The preponderance standard is conventionally described as an absolute probability threshold of 0.5. This Essay argues that this absolute characterization of the burden of proof is wrong. Rather than focusing on an absolute threshold, the Essay reconceptualizes the preponderance standard as a probability ratio and shows how doing so eliminates many of the classical problems associated with probabilistic theories of evidence. Using probability ratios eliminates the so-called Conjunction Paradox, and developing the ratio tests under a Bayesian perspective further explains the Blue Bus problem and other puzzles surrounding statistical evidence. By harmonizing probabilistic theories of proof with recent critiques advocating …