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Full-Text Articles in Law
An Analysis Of The Economic Costs Of Seeking The Death Penalty In Washington (Report), Peter A. Collins, Robert C. Boruchowitz, Matthew J. Hickman, Mark A. Larranaga
An Analysis Of The Economic Costs Of Seeking The Death Penalty In Washington (Report), Peter A. Collins, Robert C. Boruchowitz, Matthew J. Hickman, Mark A. Larranaga
Faculty Articles
Professor Boruchowitz and colleagues published the results of a seven-month study into the costs of the death penalty in Washington state and has found a more than $1 million price break in cases where capital punishment is not sought.
Asymmetry As Fairness: Reversing A Peremptory Trend, Anna Roberts
Asymmetry As Fairness: Reversing A Peremptory Trend, Anna Roberts
Faculty Articles
A recent Ninth Circuit decision, prohibiting peremptory challenges on the basis of sexual orientation, reveals the continuing evolution of the Batson doctrine. Meanwhile, contrary judicial voices demand the abolition of the peremptory challenge. This article uncovers two phenomena that militate against abolition of the peremptory challenge, and in favor of allowing Batson’s evolution. First, the justifications for abolition apply asymmetrically to prosecution and defense, suggesting that an asymmetrical approach is more apt. Second, the states historically adopted an asymmetrical approach — unequal allocation of peremptory challenges to prosecution and defense — and yet many state legislatures have recently abandoned asymmetry, …
Impeachment By Unreliable Conviction, Anna Roberts
Impeachment By Unreliable Conviction, Anna Roberts
Faculty Articles
This article offers a new critique of Federal Rule of Evidence 609, which permits impeachment of criminal defendants by means of their prior criminal convictions. The article draws on three aspects of the contemporary criminal justice system to show that in admitting convictions for impeachment courts are wrongly assuming that they are necessarily reliable indicators of relative culpability. First, courts assume that convictions are the product of a fair fight, despite the adversarial collapse revealed by the nature of plea-bargaining, the crisis in public defense, and the data on wrongful convictions; second, courts assume that convictions demonstrate relative culpability, despite …
Casual Ostracism: Jury Exclusion On The Basis Of Criminal Convictions, Anna Roberts
Casual Ostracism: Jury Exclusion On The Basis Of Criminal Convictions, Anna Roberts
Faculty Articles
Statutes in forty-eight states permit the exclusion of those with felony convictions from criminal juries; thirteen states permit the exclusion of those with misdemeanor convictions. The reasons given for these exclusions, which include the assumption that those with convictions are embittered against the state, do not justify their costs. Procedural justice theories indicate that embitterment of those with criminal convictions need not – and should not – be assumed. Rather, policymakers should do what they can to avoid such embitterment. This article therefore proposes that automatic statutory exclusions on the basis of criminal convictions should be abandoned. If a juror …
Prison Is Prison, Brooke Coleman
Prison Is Prison, Brooke Coleman
Faculty Articles
Two indigent men stand before two separate judges. Both will be sent to prison if they lose their cases. One receives appointed counsel, but the other does not. This discrepancy seems terribly unjust, yet the Supreme Court has no problem with it. It recently affirmed in Turner v. Rogers, that where an indigent individual is subject to criminal charges that can result in incarceration, he has a right to appointed counsel, but where an indigent individual is subject to civil proceedings where incarceration is a consequence, he does not. In other words, criminal and civil proceedings have different rules, and …
Review Of Colin Dayan’S The Law Is A White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make And Unmake Persons, Dean Spade
Review Of Colin Dayan’S The Law Is A White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make And Unmake Persons, Dean Spade
Faculty Articles
Professor Dean Spade reviews Colin Dayan’s The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons.
Crimes Of Misery And Theories Of Punishment, John B. Mitchell
Crimes Of Misery And Theories Of Punishment, John B. Mitchell
Faculty Articles
Increasingly, one sees the homeless on the streets, alleys, and doorways of commercial, recreational, and living spaces of our cities otherwise populated by the affluent and relatively affluent. At the same time, there has been an increase in the creation and use of so-called “public order laws,” such as forbidding sitting on sidewalks, lying down on benches, and panhandling in certain tourist areas. Together with laws already on the books forbidding public intoxication, open containers of liquor in public and urinating in public, this suite of laws provide police with a means to control the day-to-day lives of the homeless …
Methademic: Drug Panic In An Age Of Ambivalence, Deborah Ahrens
Methademic: Drug Panic In An Age Of Ambivalence, Deborah Ahrens
Faculty Articles
The story of criminal sanctions in modern America is a familiar-and depressing narrative. According to the narrative, we live in an era where the dynamics of popular politics, the practices of the media, and the (often racialized) anxieties of modern life combine to create a one-way ratchet, in which we identify perceived new threats to public order and respond unthinkingly with harsh new criminal sanctions. On the surface, the wave of concern over methamphetamine that swept the nation in the middle part of this decade followed this script, as a media panic led to substantial popular concern and significant new …
Calling Your Bluff: How Prosecutors And Defense Attorneys Adapt Pleas Bargaining Strategies To Increased Formalization, Deirdre Bowen
Calling Your Bluff: How Prosecutors And Defense Attorneys Adapt Pleas Bargaining Strategies To Increased Formalization, Deirdre Bowen
Faculty Articles
This ethnographic work examines the inner workings of a highly formalized plea bargaining unit in a large urban prosecutor's office from the lawyers' point of view. Observations of forty-two plea negotiations between prosecutors and defense attorneys along with both formal and informal interviews reveal how the legal actors adapt to institutional rules in the pursuit of both efficiency and justice. In the face of ever increasing prosecutorial power, defense attorneys find ways to equalize the balance when cases do not fit the "normal crimes" model. Examination of negotiating strategy and discourse give further insight into whether prosecutors and defense attorneys …
When Prosecutors Control Criminal Court Dockets: Dispatches On History And Policy From A Land Time Forgot, Andrew Siegel
When Prosecutors Control Criminal Court Dockets: Dispatches On History And Policy From A Land Time Forgot, Andrew Siegel
Faculty Articles
The decision as to who has the authority to bring a matter up for resolution before a criminal court is one of the most basic decisions a system of criminal adjudication must make. Despite - or perhaps because of - the elemental nature of this structural matter, historians and scholars of criminal procedure have thus far offered a startling paucity of evidence as to the history and policy consequences of different docket control regimes. This article offers the first comprehensive examination of this issue, rescuing the history of criminal court calendar control from the dustbin of history and grappling in …
In (Slightly Uncomfortable) Defense Of ‘Triage’ By Public Defenders, John B. Mitchell
In (Slightly Uncomfortable) Defense Of ‘Triage’ By Public Defenders, John B. Mitchell
Faculty Articles
This article argues that triaging is necessary for public defenders and is a response to the work of Professor Freedman. Because states lack money in areas of greater community concern, the defense of indigent criminals is neglected and substantial resources are not likely to be forthcoming. The author previously set out a solution of triaging, which can be conducted either haphazardly or according to some set of rational principles based on ethical theory. The author concurs with Professor Freedman to the extent that the United States Supreme Court in Strickland v. Washington effectively ensures that Sixth Amendment Constitutional guarantees will …
Sentencing Reform In The Other Washington, David Boerner, Roxanne Lieb
Sentencing Reform In The Other Washington, David Boerner, Roxanne Lieb
Faculty Articles
Washington State's sentencing reform in the early 1980s encompassed all felonies, including those resulting in sentences to prison and jail; the state also enacted the first and only sentencing guidelines for juvenile offenders. Several lessons are suggested from Washington's experience: sentencing guidelines can change sentencing patterns and can reduce disparities among offenders who are sentenced for similar crimes and have similar criminal histories; a sentencing commission does not operate as an independent political force, except when such delegation serves the legislature's purpose; guidelines are policy-neutral technologies that can be harnessed to achieve the legislature's will; in states where citizen initiatives …
Why Should The Prosecutor Get The Last Word?, John B. Mitchell
Why Should The Prosecutor Get The Last Word?, John B. Mitchell
Faculty Articles
This article examines reasons the prosecutor should make the closing arguments in the United States. It also examines the importance of closing arguments; the advantages of going first and the scientific bases of primacy; and the advantages of rebuttal.
Youth Justice In A Unified Court: Response To Critics Of Juvenile Court Abolition, Janet Ainsworth
Youth Justice In A Unified Court: Response To Critics Of Juvenile Court Abolition, Janet Ainsworth
Faculty Articles
In this article, Professor Ainsworth argues that a unified criminal justice system is preferable to our present two-tiered adult-juvenile court system. In fact, she contends that the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin the current two-tiered justice system not only engender many of the serious shortcomings of the juvenile justice system, but also serve to exacerbate the very policies and practices of the adult criminal justice system that make it so abhorrent to defenders of the juvenile court. Critics of juvenile court abolitionists thus miss the point when they argue that juveniles would be worse off than they are at …
Plea Bargaining: The Experiences Of Prosecutors, Judges, And Defense Attorneys, James E. Bond
Plea Bargaining: The Experiences Of Prosecutors, Judges, And Defense Attorneys, James E. Bond
Faculty Articles
James E. Bond reviews Heuman’s Plea Bargaining: The Experiences of Prosecutors, Judges, and Defense Attorneys.