Law Commons^™

Law Enforcement Recruitment, Why It Matters, And Key Management Decisions, Patrick Oliver

History and Government Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploring Perceptions Of Control Within Offender Cognition And Recidivism Paradigms, Anistasha H. Lightning, Danielle Polage

Student Published Works

Elements of perceived control are associated with recidivism in offender populations. We investigated the application of locus of control to the frequency of personal involvement with the law and to beliefs surrounding the likelihood of future contact with the legal system. We hypothesized that, as the number of sentencings or legal experiences increased, locus of control would externalize. We also predicted that increased legal involvement would lead to greater belief in the likelihood of future involvement. A statistically significant path model suggests that locus of control appears to be a predictor of increased criminality, as opposed to the other way …

The Effects Of True Crime Media Consumption On Jurors’ Criminal Justice Orientations, Kendall Miller

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study sought to determine the relationship between True Crime Media (TCM) or pretrial publicity (PTP) consumption and jurors' criminal justice orientations. This study also looked at dispositional empathy, right-wing authoritarianism, the need for affect, and the need for cognition as potential moderators. It was hypothesized that the more TCM and PTP consumed, the more participants will lean toward crime control ideologies. It was also hypothesized that the more TCM and PTP consumed, the higher participants would score on right-wing authoritarian viewpoints, on dispositional empathy, and on need for cognition. Participants were presented with a screening question of, "Do you …

Regulating Harm: Tensions Between Data Privacy And Data Transparency, Kaitlyn Filip, Kat Albrecht

CJC Publications

In an era of massive digital data growth, data storage and dissemination has posed complex new problems for privacy regulations across agencies and institutions on a global scale. Laws about data privacy vary substantially by country, by state, and by industry. In formulating these policies, there exists a fundamental tension between a desire for data privacy and one for data transparency. This tension becomes particularly acute as new digital tools and access technologies have made these records more accessible and connectable than ever before. This tension is borne out in the enactment of law. Three states – California, Colorado, and …

Police Frisks, David S. Abrams, Hanming Fang, Priyanka Goonetilleke

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The standard economic model of police stops implies that the contraband hit rate should rise when the number of stops falls, ceteris paribus. We provide empirical corroboration of such optimizing models of police behavior by examining changes in stops and frisks around two extraordinary events of 2020 - the pandemic onset and the nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd. We find that hit rates from pedestrian and vehicle stops generally rose as stops and frisks fell dramatically. Using detailed data, we are able to rule out a number of alternative explanations, including changes in street population, crime, police …

Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers And Protect Abusers: A Book Talk With Author Deborah Tuerkheimer, Deborah Tuerkheimer, Emily Sack

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Unofficial Torturers And Helpless Victims: Applying The Convention Against Torture To Organized Criminal Groups, Emmanuel Orozco Castellanos

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Since its inception, the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT) conceived torture as a state crime. The Convention established a so-called “state-nexus” that effectively excludes torture committed by non-state actors. The Committee Against Torture as well as the world’s major anti-torture NGOs have almost exclusively focused on ill-treatment perpetrated by state entities. Yet, there have been efforts to extend the definition to private actors, including the “de facto authority” approach, and the due diligence doctrine. This article explores the effectiveness of these efforts to expand the scope of the UNCAT when applied to organized criminal organization such as gangs and …

La Crisis Carcelaria En El Ecuador: Las Causas, Manifestaciones Y Algunas Recomendaciones, Ava Lausch

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Esta monografía trata de la crisis carcelaria en Ecuador. Empieza con las causas multidimensionales de la crisis y las maneras en cómo se manifiesta. La próxima sección explica la narrativa del gobierno versus lo que realmente está haciendo y la política pública relacionada con el sistema penitenciario. La tercera sección tiene que ver con soluciones y recomendaciones por la crisis. Finalmente, hay una sección sobre la aplicación e importancia de la justicia restaurativa como una alternativa a la privación de la libertad. Para conseguir la información incluida, realice una revisión de fuentes secundarias e hice entrevistas con los varios funcionarios …

Examining Legal Financial Obligations In Washington State, Bryan Lewis

PPPA Paper Prize

After criminal offenders are convicted of a crime, they must return to the court where a judge will determine their sentence. Sentencing often includes jail time, but it always includes monetary penalties, or Legal Financial Obligations (LFOs). There are many reasons these penalties are given, from restitution for the victims of criminal offenses, to providing government revenue and funding the court, to punishment for the offender. However, these fines, and the interest rates that come with them, often leave offenders with an enormous amount of debt. There are a lot of interests at stake when it comes to LFO sentencing …

Reform In Name Only: The Difficulties Of Dismantling Mass Supervision In Pennsylvania, Srinidhi Ramakrishna

CUREJ - College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal

Pennsylvania has one of the highest rates of people on probation in the United States. Probation reform legislation has repeatedly emerged in the Pennsylvania legislature since controversy arose in 2017 over rapper Meek Mill’s long probation sentence. However, probation reform initiatives that would reduce the use of probation in Pennsylvania have been obstructed or amended to actually increase its use and severity. To understand what makes achieving such probation reform difficult, this thesis analyzes three significant roadblocks – the phenomenon of devolution and the actions of two advocacy groups. This thesis is grounded in ten interviews conducted with key actors …

The Trouble With Time Served, Kimberly Ferzan

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Every jurisdiction in the United States gives criminal defendants “credit” against their sentence for the time they spend detained pretrial. In a world of mass incarceration and overcriminalization that disproportionately impacts people of color, this practice appears to be a welcome mechanism for mercy and justice. In fact, however, crediting detainees for time served is perverse. It harms the innocent. A defendant who is found not guilty, or whose case is dismissed, gets nothing. Crediting time served also allows the state to avoid internalizing the full costs of pretrial detention, thereby making overinclusive detention standards less expensive. Finally, crediting time …

Internal And External Challenges To Culpability, Stephen J. Morse

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This article was presented at “Guilty Minds: A Virtual Conference on Mens Rea and Criminal Justice Reform” at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. It is forthcoming in Arizona State Law Journal Volume 53, Issue 2.

The thesis of this article is simple: As long as we maintain the current folk psychological conception of ourselves as intentional and potentially rational creatures, as people and not simply as machines, mental states will inevitably remain central to ascriptions of culpability and responsibility more generally. It is also desirable. Nonetheless, we are in a condition of unprecedented internal challenges to …

Cannibalizing The Constitution: On Terrorism, The Second Amendment, And The Threat To Civil Liberties, Francesca Laguardia

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article explores the links between internet radicalization, access to weapons, and the current threat from terrorists who have been radicalized online. The prevalence of domestic terrorism, domestic hate groups, and online incitement and radicalization have led to considerable focus on the tension between counterterror efforts and the First Amendment. Many scholars recommend rethinking the extent of First Amendment protection, as well as Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment protections, and some judges appear to be listening. Yet the Second Amendment has avoided this consideration, despite the fact that easy access to weapons is a necessary ingredient for the level of …

Decarceration's Inside Partners, Seema Saifee

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This Article examines a hidden phenomenon in criminal punishment. People in prison, during their incarceration, have made important—and sometimes extraordinary—strides toward reducing prison populations. In fact, stakeholders in many corners, from policy makers to researchers to abolitionists, have harnessed legal and conceptual strategies generated inside the walls to pursue decarceral strategies outside the walls. Despite this outside use of inside moves, legal scholarship has directed little attention to theorizing the potential of looking to people on the inside as partners in the long-term project of meaningfully reducing prison populations, or “decarceration.”

Building on the change-making agency and revolutionary ideation inside …

The Criminogenic Effects Of Damaging Criminal Law’S Moral Credibility, Paul H. Robinson, Lindsay Holcomb

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The criminal justice system’s reputation with the community can have a significant effect on the extent to which people are willing to comply with its demands and internalize its norms. In the context of criminal law, the empirical studies suggest that ordinary people expect the criminal justice system to do justice and avoid injustice, as they perceive it – what has been called “empirical desert” to distinguish it from the “deontological desert” of moral philosophers. The empirical studies and many real-world natural experiments suggest that a criminal justice system that regularly deviates from empirical desert loses moral credibility and thereby …

Individualizing Criminal Law’S Justice Judgments: Shortcomings In The Doctrines Of Culpability, Mitigation, And Excuse, Paul H. Robinson, Lindsay Holcomb

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In judging an offender’s culpability, mitigation, or excuse, there seems to be general agreement that it is appropriate for the criminal law to take into account such things as the offender’s youthfulness or her significantly low IQ. There is even support for taking account of their distorted perceptions and reasoning induced by traumatic experiences, as in battered spouse syndrome. On the other hand, there seems to be equally strong opposition to taking account of things such as racism or homophobia that played a role in bringing about the offense. In between these two clear points, however, exists a large collection …

White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis

Articles

Although the United States tends to treat crimes against humanity as a danger that exists only in authoritarian or war-torn states, in fact, there is a real risk of crimes against humanity occurring within the United States, as illustrated by events such as systemic police brutality against Black Americans, the federal government’s family separation policy that took thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, and the dramatic escalation of White supremacist and extremist violence culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In spite of this risk, the United States does not have …

Pretrial Detention And The Value Of Liberty, Megan Stevenson, Sandra G. Mayson

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

How dangerous must a person be to justify the state in locking her up for the greater good? The bail reform movement, which aspires to limit pretrial detention to the truly dangerous—and which has looked to algorithmic risk assessments to quantify danger—has brought this question to the fore. Constitutional doctrine authorizes pretrial detention when the government’s interest in safety “outweighs” an individual’s interest in liberty, but it does not specify how to balance these goods. If detaining ten presumptively innocent people for three months is projected to prevent one robbery, is it worth it?

This Article confronts the question of …

The War On Drugs And Its Legal Effects On Black Americans, Alexia L. Howard-Mullins

2022 Symposium

The differences in treatment between Black and white Americans in the past fifty years has been a topic of thought in the minds of political and sociological scholars since the inception of the War on Drugs in 1971. These differences in treatment may lead to discrimination legally, resulting in longer prison sentences and a higher proportion of Black Americans in prison. This study analyzes the results of the War on Drugs that led to disproportionate imprisonment of Black Americans, including mandatory sentencing laws, drug classifications, and discrimination within law enforcement and the legal system. This study will use primary sources …

Corporate Crime And Punishment: An Empirical Study, Dorothy S. Lund, Natasha Sarin

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

For many years, law and economics scholars, as well as politicians and regulators, have debated whether corporate criminal enforcement overdeters beneficial corporate activity or in the alternative, lets corporate criminals off too easily. This debate has recently expanded in its polarization: On the one hand, academics, judges, and politicians have excoriated enforcement agencies for failing to send guilty bankers to jail in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis; on the other, the U.S. Department of Justice has since relaxed policies that encouraged individual prosecutions and reduced the size of fines and number of prosecutions. A crucial and yet understudied …

Criminal Law’S Core Principles, Paul H. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Modern criminal law scholars and policymakers assume they are free to construct criminal law rules by focusing exclusively on the criminal justice theory of the day. But this “blank slate” conception of criminal lawmaking is dangerously misguided. In fact, lawmakers are writing on a slate on which core principles are already indelibly written and realistically they are free only to add detail in the implementation of those principles and to add additional provisions not inconsistent with them. Attempts to do otherwise are destined to produce tragic results from both utilitarian and retributivist views.

Many writers dispute that such core principles …

Creating A Home Base For Treatment In Homeless Courts, Kyle C. Troeger

Student Publications

As the number of unsheltered homeless increases, an alternative to criminalization, homeless courts, have also become more common. 18 States currently have one or more specialty court programs dedicated to meting out alternative sentencing to the local homeless. Homeless courts are a rehabilitative process with the end goal of reintegration into society. They allow nonviolent misdemeanors to be resolved without jail time or fines. In lieu of traditional sentencing is community service and mandated self-improvement. This chapter examines the current criminalization, and history, of homelessness in the United States. Of primary interest is the development of homeless courts as an …

Blameworthiness, Desert, And Luck, Mitchell N. Berman

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Philosophers disagree about whether outcome luck can affect an agent’s “moral responsibility.” Focusing on responsibility’s “negative side,” some maintain, and others deny, that an action’s results bear constitutively on how “blameworthy” the actor is, and on how much blame or punishment they “deserve.” Crucially, both sides to the debate assume that an actor’s blameworthiness and negative desert are equally affected—or unaffected—by an action’s results. This article challenges that previously overlooked assumption, arguing that blameworthiness and desert are distinct moral notions that serve distinct normative functions: blameworthiness serves a liability function (removing a bar to otherwise impermissible treatments), whereas desert serves …

Proportionality, Constraint, And Culpability, Mitchell N. Berman

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Philosophers of criminal punishment widely agree that criminal punishment should be “proportional” to the “seriousness” of the offense. But this apparent consensus is only superficial, masking significant dissensus below the surface. Proposed proportionality principles differ on several distinct dimensions, including: (1) regarding which offense or offender properties determine offense “seriousness” and thus constitute a proportionality relatum; (2) regarding whether punishment is objectionably disproportionate only when excessively severe, or also when excessively lenient; and (3) regarding whether the principle can deliver absolute (“cardinal”) judgments, or only comparative (“ordinal”) ones. This essay proposes that these differences cannot be successfully adjudicated, and one …

U.S. Policing As Racialized Violence And Control: A Qualitative Assessment Of Black Narratives From Ferguson, Missouri, Jason M. Williams

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

U.S. policing has long been captured within a master narrative of colorblind consensus; however, distinct lived experiences between community groups depict grave disparities in law enforcement experiences and perceptions. Orthodox conceptions of law enforcement ultimately silence marginalized voices disproportionately affected by negative contacts with law enforcement. Centering data in critical theory, this study will present thematic results from semi-interviews gathered in Ferguson, M.O., during a critical ethnographic research project. Themes reveal experiences and perceptions of racialized and violent policing, the unique position of Black officers, and regard for the impact police have on children. Results also help to foreground new …

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (Lvmpd) Budget Review, Fiscal Years 2018-2021, Olivia K. Cheche, Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Criminal Justice

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s (LVMPD) annual budget increased every fiscal year (FY) from 2018 to 2021. Using data provided by the LVMPD’s final budget reports for FY 2018 to 2021, this Fact Sheet details LVMPD funding increases and summarizes budget expenditures by unit and area command.

After The Crime: Rewarding Offenders’ Positive Post-Offense Conduct, Paul H. Robinson, Muhammad Sarahne

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

While an offender’s conduct before and during the crime is the traditional focus of criminal law and sentencing rules, an examination of post-offense conduct can also be important in promoting criminal justice goals. After the crime, different offenders make different choices and have different experiences, and those differences can suggest appropriately different treatment by judges, correctional officials, probation and parole supervisors, and other decision-makers in the criminal justice system.

Positive post-offense conduct ought to be acknowledged and rewarded, not only to encourage it but also as a matter of fair and just treatment. This essay describes four kinds of positive …

The Problem With Assumptions: Revisiting The Dark Figure Of Sexual Recidivism, Tamara Rice Lave, Jj Prescott, Grady Bridges

Law & Economics Working Papers

What is the actual rate of sexual recidivism given the well-known fact that many crimes go unreported? This is a difficult and important problem, and in The Dark Figure of Sexual Recidivism, Nicholas Scurich and Richard S. John (2019) attempt to make progress on it by “estimate[ing] actual recidivism rates given observed rates of reoffending” (p.172). In this article, we show that the math in their probabilistic model is flawed, but more important, we demonstrate that their conclusions follow ineluctably from their empirical assumptions and the unrepresentative empirical research they cite to benchmark their calculations. Scurich and John contend that …

To “Defund” The Police, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Much public debate circles around grassroots activists’ demand to “defund the police,” raised in public consciousness in the summer of 2020. Yet confusion about the demand is pervasive. This Essay adopts a literal interpretation of “defund” to clarify and distinguish four alternative, substantive policy positions that legal reforms related to police funding can validate. It argues that the policy debates between these positions exist on top of the ideological critique launched by grassroots activists, who use the term “defund the police” as a discursive tactic to make visible deeper transformations in government practices that normalize the structural marginalization of black …

First Amendment Knowledge And Competence In United States Residents, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Kimberly M. Bernstein

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Lacking adequate knowledge about one's rights could inhibit the likelihood of exercising one's rights or lead one to unwittingly violate laws that place legitimate limits on these rights. Thus, the present research examines First Amendment knowledge as well as competence to apply this knowledge in relevant circumstances. Results revealed that one-quarter of participants failed a test of objective knowledge on First Amendment rights. Furthermore, participants' belief in their ability varied depending on their level of knowledge, in line with the Dunning–Kruger effect. Participants also failed to transfer their limited objective knowledge to “real-world” situations, exhibiting impaired First Amendment competence. These …