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Full-Text Articles in Law
Down To The Last Strike: The Effect Of The Jury Lottery On Criminal Convictions, Scott Kostyshak, Neel U. Sukhatme
Down To The Last Strike: The Effect Of The Jury Lottery On Criminal Convictions, Scott Kostyshak, Neel U. Sukhatme
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
How much does luck matter to a criminal defendant in a jury trial? We use rich data on jury selection to causally estimate how parties who are randomly assigned a less favorable jury (as proxied by whether their attorneys exhaust their peremptory strikes) fare at trial. Our novel identification strategy uniquely captures variation in juror predisposition using data unobserved by the econometrician but observed by attorneys. Criminal defendants who lose the “jury lottery” are more likely to be convicted than similarly-situated counterparts, with a significant increase (18-20 percentage points) for Black defendants. Our results are robust to alternate specifications and …
Reforming Competence Restoration Statutes: An Outpatient Model, Susan A. Mcmahon
Reforming Competence Restoration Statutes: An Outpatient Model, Susan A. Mcmahon
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Defendants who suffer from mental illness and are found incompetent to stand trial are often ordered committed to an inpatient mental health facility to restore their competence, even if outpatient care may be the better treatment option. Inpatient facilities are overcrowded and place the defendants on long waiting lists. Some defendants then spend weeks, months, or even years in their jail cell, waiting for a transfer to a hospital bed.
Outpatient competence restoration programs promise to relieve this pressure. But even if every state suddenly opened a robust outpatient competence restoration program, an obstacle looms: the statutes governing competence restoration, …