Law Commons^™

Presuming Lawyers Competent To Protect Fundamental Rights: Is It An Affordable Fiction?, Robert G. Lawson

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article explores the ramifications of Wainwright v. Sykes, a case decided before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1977. The broad question before the Court in Sykes concerned the extent to which state prisoners should have access to federal court by use of the writ of habeas corpus. The narrow issue before the Court concerned the impact on a prisoner's claim for habeas relief of procedural defaults (such as a failure to object to evidence, a failure to perfect an appeal, etc.) that occur in the state proceeding under attack. In considering these important issues Justice …

Changing The Public Drunkenness Laws: The Impact Of Decriminalization, David Aaronson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Laws that decriminalize public drunkenness continue to use the police as the major intake agent for public inebriates under the "new" public health model of detoxification and treatment. Assuming that decriminalization introduces many disincentives to police intervention using legally sanctioned procedures, we hypothesize that it will be fol- lowed by a statistically significant decline in the number of public inebriates formally handled by the police in the manner designated by the "law in the books." Using an "interrupted time-series quasi- experiment" based on a "stratified multiple-group single-I design," we confirm this hypothesis for Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis, Minnesota. However, through …

The Repressed Issues Of Sentencing: Accountability, Predictability, And Equality In The Era Of The Sentencing Commission, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The existence of disparities in the sentences imposed on equally culpable offenders has long been a subject of jurisprudential concern. The author provides a critique of recent efforts to objectify the sentencing process that rely on a matrix table prescribing guideline sentence lengths on the basis of offense severity and predictions of recidivism. With particular emphasis on the Sentencing Commission authorized by pending federal legislation, he urges the need for political accountability in the body that inevitably makes value judgments in the preparation and administration of such a guideline system. Finally, the author discusses the normative issues that surround the …

Changing The Public Drunkenness Laws: The Impact Of Decriminalization, David Aaronson

David Aaronson