Law Commons^™

Abuse And Potential Misuse Of Resources In U.S. Terrorism Prosecutions, Human Rights Institute

Human Rights Institute

New York, July 21, 2014 – Prosecutions of American Muslims for terrorism offenses are rife with abuse, the Columbia Human Rights Institute says in a new report released today and produced jointly with Human Rights Watch. The report, Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions, examines 27 federal terrorism cases, some involving aggressive sting operations and others amounting to overbroad prosecutions for material support of terrorism. It also documents the significant human cost of solitary confinement and other restrictive conditions of confinement in these cases.

Remaking Indians, Remaking Citizens: Peruvian And Mexican Perspectives On Criminal Law And National Integration, Lior Ben David

Studio for Law and Culture

At the end of the 20th century, recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights in Latin American constitutions has undergone significant evolution, while legal reforms officially “turned” some of these countries into multicultural nations. For many scholars, this multicultural shift was particularly prominent against a background of many years, during which the legal systems of Latin America ignored, excluded, assimilated and repressed indigenous peoples, portraying “The Indian” as an anomaly in a society of free end equal citizens. This article examines the images, representations and treatment of the Indians and “the Indian Question” in Peruvian and Mexican Criminal Law during the first …

Executing Whiteness: Fictional And Nonfictional Accounts Of Capital Punishment In The United States, 1915-1940, Daniel Lachance

Studio for Law and Culture

Over the course of the nineteenth century, elites in the United States increasingly sought to privatize executions and rationalize execution protocols. The source of this change is well known to historians of punishment: a fear that public executions had become unwieldy spectacles drove state actors to move these events into jail yards, at first, and then, with the advent of new technologies, into the interior of centralized prisons that were often far from the county in which the crime had occurred. The centralization of executions and the rationalization of execution protocols reflected and reinforced a more bureaucratic image of the …

Fifteen Years Of Supreme Court Criminal Procedure Work: Three Constitutional Brushes, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

This essay – written in connection with a French National Research Agency project on “Neo or Retro Constitutionalisms” – is an effort to pull together the last fifteen years of Supreme Court criminal procedure cases expanding constitutional protections. It identifies three different styles: thin and clear doctrinal lines on miniature doctrinal canvases that have only passing connections to criminal justice realities; episodic and self-limiting engagements with a potentially larger regulatory space; and a grand style that hints at sweeping structural ambitions but collaborates with other regulatory authorities. Readers undoubtedly can come up with more than three styles. But, in any …

Beccaria's On Crimes And Punishments: A Mirror On The History Of The Foundations Of Modern Criminal Law, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Beccaria’s treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764) has become a placeholder for the classical school of thought in criminology, for deterrence-based public policy, for death penalty abolitionism, and for liberal ideals of legality and the rule of law. A source of inspiration for Bentham and Blackstone, an object of praise for Voltaire and the Philosophes, a target of pointed critiques by Kant and Hegel, the subject of a genealogy by Foucault, the object of derision by the Physiocrats, rehabilitated and appropriated by the Chicago School of law and economics — these ricochets and reflections on Beccaria’s treatise reveal multiple dimensions …

Law And Neuroscience: Recommendations Submitted To The President's Bioethics Commission, Owen D. Jones, Richard J. Bonnie, Bj Casey, Andre Davis, David L. Faigman, Morris B. Hoffman, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer A. Richeson, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Anthony Wagner, Gideon Yaffe

Faculty Scholarship

It has become increasingly clear that implications for criminal justice – both negative and positive – emerge from the rapid, important, and challenging developments in cognitive neuroscience, the study of how the brain thinks. Two examples will illustrate.

First, lawyers are ever more frequently bringing neuroscientific evidence into the courtroom, often in the forms of testimony about, and graphic images of, human brains. This trend has produced many new challenges for judges as they attempt to provide fair rulings on the admissibility of such technical evidence, consider its proper interpretation, and assess whether the probative value of such testimony may …

Justice Policy Reform For High-Risk Juveniles: Using Science To Achieve Large-Scale Crime Reduction, Jennifer L. Skeem, Elizabeth S. Scott, Edward Mulvey

Faculty Scholarship

After a distinctly punitive era, a period of remarkable reform in juvenile crime regulation has begun. Practical urgency has fueled interest in both crime reduction and research on the prediction and malleability of criminal behavior. In this rapidly changing context, high-risk youth – the small proportion of the population where crime is concentrated – present a conundrum. Research indicates that these are precisely the individuals to intensively treat to maximize crime reduction, but there are both real and imagined barriers to doing so. Institutional placement or criminal court processing can exclude these youths from interventions that would better protect public …

Framing The Prosecution, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

The enormous value of Dan Simon’s In Doubt lies not just in its nuanced exploration of the challenges to accurate criminal factfinding, but also in its challenge to us to rethink trials themselves. Even as we endeavor to give criminal defendants the means and license to raise reasonable doubts, we need to think more about when and how those doubts can be allayed. Just because most jurisdictions have not come out of the first round of play – the one in which defendants get the tools to poke holes in the cases against them – does not mean it is …

Ending Mass Incarceration: Some Observations And Responses To Professor Tonry, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

We should all be grateful for Michael Tonry’s (2014, this issue) characteristically thoughtful article proposing 10 concrete steps to reduce the excessive reliance on incarceration in the United States. It would behoove legislatures and judges to think carefully about each of his proposals. The following remarks constitute an attempt to expand on some of his observations and offer a few cautionary notes about some of his proposals.

At the outset, however, it is important to note that I fully agree with the general premise of Tonry’s (2014) article, which is by now conventional wisdom among criminal law scholars and practitioners …