Law Commons^™

Legislating Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Twenty years ago, in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court rejected a capital defendant's claim that statistical evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of Georgia's death penalty system constituted a violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Yet, even as McCleskey effectively bars constitutional challenges to racial disparities in the criminal justice system where invidious bias is difficult to establish, the Court invites advocates to pursue legislation as a remedy to racial disparities. Indeed, the McCleskey Court offers as a rationale for its ruling the judiciary's institutional incompetence to remedy these disparities, holding that "McCleskey's arguments are best …

The Silent Criminal Defendant And The Presumption Of Innocence: In The Hands Of Real Jurors, Is Either Of Them Safe, Mitchell J. Frank, Dawn Broschard

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Desert, Democracy, And Sentencing Reform, Alice Ristroph

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Integrated Perspective On The Collateral Consequences Of Criminal Convictions And Reentry Issues Faced By Formerly Incarcerated Individuals, Michael Pinard

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the emergent focus on the collateral consequences of criminal convictions and the reentry of formerly incarcerated individuals. Specifically, the article details the ways in which legal scholars, policy analysts, elected officials, legal services organizations and community based organizations have begun to address these components of the criminal justice system. The article argues that these various groups have compartmentalized collateral consequences and reentry by focusing almost exclusively on one component to the exclusion of the other. In doing so, they have narrowed the lens through which to view these components, and have therefore missed opportunities to develop integrated …

Ambiguity Aversion And The Criminal Process, Alex Stein, Uzi Segal

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Legality Of The Nsa Wiretapping Program, Evan Tsen Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Trial Of Bigger Thomas: Race, Gender, And Trespass, Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Coming Soon To A Court Near You – Convicting The Unrepresented At The Bail Stage: An Autopsy Of A State High Court’S Sua Sponte Rejection Of Indigent Defendants’ Right To Counsel, Douglas L. Colbert

Faculty Scholarship

Recently, the Maryland Court of Appeals became the first state court of last resort to reject Gideon v. Wainwright’s guarantee of counsel at the bail stage. In ruling sua sponte that bail is not a critical stage entitling indigent defendants to invoke their constitutional right to counsel, the Fenner Court held that statements offered by an unrepresented and non-Mirandized indigent defendant were admissible at trial. I contend that the Fenner ruling may transform the pretrial fact-gathering process by providing prosecutors with an additional source of evidence against indigent defendants, namely statements made at a judicial proceeding for the purpose …

Instituting Innocence Reform: Wisconsin's New Governance Experiment, Kate Kruse

Faculty Scholarship

The DNA exoneration cases of the past two decades have provided a window into what hasn't been working in the criminal justice system and an agenda for criminal justice reform. The challenge currently facing the innocence reform community is to translate this agenda into concrete reforms that institute and sustain best practices for the investigation and prosecution of crimes, while allowing flexibility for the understanding of best practices to continue to evolve. In 2005, Wisconsin underwent a breathtaking course of legal reform in two of the problem areas that have plagued wrongful convictions: mistaken eyewitness identification and false confession. The …

Aba Files Amicus Brief In Actual Innocence Case, Rory K. Little

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Revisiting The Legal Link Between Genetics And Crime, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

Unwarranted constraints on the admissibility of genetics evidence in death penalty cases can undercut some defendants' efforts to fight their executions. For example, genetics evidence can help validate some traditionally accepted mitigating factors (such as certain psychiatric or behavioral disorders) that can otherwise be difficult for defendants to prove. By imposing unreasonable limitations on genetics arguments, the criminal justice system may be undermining the very principles and progressive thinking the cap on genetics evidence was originally intended to achieve. Part II of this article briefly reviews the facts and legal arguments in Mobley v. State. Part III addresses the primary …

Trial By Jury Involving Persons Accused Of Terrorism Or Supporting Terrorism, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores issues in jury trials involving persons accused of committing acts of international terrorism or financially or otherwise supporting those who do or may commit such acts. The jury is a unique institution that draws upon laypersons to decide whether a person charged with a crime is guilty or innocent. Although the jury is instructed and guided by a trial judge and procedural rules shape what the jury is allowed to hear, ultimately the laypersons deliberate alone and render their verdict. A basic principle of the jury system is that at the start of trial the jurors should …

On Justitia, Race, Gender, And Blindness, Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Adolescence And The Regulation Of Youth Crime, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

I am delighted to be a part of this Symposium on Law and Adolescence. My talk today is about adolescent development and juvenile justice policy. Specifically, I will focus on why a legal regime that is grounded in scientific knowledge about adolescence and the role of criminal activity during this developmental period is better for young offenders and for society than the contemporary policy, which often pays little attention to differences between adolescents and adults.

My talk is based on a book on juvenile justice policy I am currently writing with Larry Steinberg, a developmental psychologist who is a leading …

Public Attitudes About The Culpability And Punishment Of Young Offenders, Elizabeth S. Scott, N. Dickon Reppucci, Jill Antonishak, Jennifer T. Degennaro

Faculty Scholarship

Conventional wisdom holds that the public supports harsh punishment of juvenile offenders, and politicians often argue that the public demands tough policies. But public opinion is usually gauged through simplistic polls, often conducted in the wake of highly publicized violent crimes by juveniles. This study seeks to probe public opinion about the culpability of young offenders as compared to adult counterparts through more nuanced and comprehensive measures in a neutral setting (i.e. not in response to a high profile crime or during a political campaign when the media focuses on the issue). The opinions of 788 community adults were individually …

Capital Punishment And Capital Murder: Market Share And The Deterrent Effects Of The Death Penalty, Jeffrey Fagan, Franklin Zimring, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

The modem debate on deterrence and capital punishment, now in its fourth decade, was launched by two closely timed events. The first was the 1976 United States Supreme Court decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which restored capital punishment after its brief constitutional ban following Furman v. Georgia in 1972. In 1975, Professor Isaac Ehrlich published an influential article saying that during the 1950s and 1960s, each execution averted eight murders. Although Ehrlich's article was a highly technical study prepared for an audience of economists, its influence went well beyond the economics profession. Ehrlich's work was cited favorably in Gregg …

Death And Deterrence Redux: Science, Law And Causal Reasoning On Capital Punishment, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

The essay shows that the new deterrence studies are fraught with numerous technical and conceptual errors: inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, failures to consider several relevant factors that drive murder rates such as drug epidemics, missing data on key variables in key states, the tyranny of a few outlier states and years, weak to non-existent tests of concurrent effects of incarceration, statistical confounding of murder rates with death sentences, failure to consider the general performance of the criminal justice system, artifactual results from truncated time frames, and the absence of any direct test of the components of contemporary theoretical constructions …

The Paradox Of The Drug Elimination Program In New York City Public Housing, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Garth Davies, Jan Holland

Faculty Scholarship

In this study, we examine the effects of the DEP intervention at three levels of complementary theoretical and practical relevance: the public housing development itself, the neighborhood in which public housing is situated, and the police precinct where the tract is located. From surveys of residents, observations of program activities, and analyses of NYCHA's program records, we compiled detailed information on the components of DEP and the reactions of public housing residents to each type of intervention. We then analyzed panel data from 1985-1996 to estimate the effects of DEP on crime rates in and around the city's public housing …

Transnational Criminal Law And Procedure: An Introduction, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

What is “transnational” criminal law? One possibility is foreign criminal law, meaning the scope and substance of what is deemed criminal behavior in other lands and the theories that ostensibly justify punishing for such behavior, indeed deeming it criminal in the first place. Another is foreign criminal procedure, the “how” of foreign criminal law’s “what” and “why”: the rules and practices of investigating crime, prosecuting suspected criminals, and adjudicating criminal cases in other lands or systems. More common meanings, judging from articles in U.S. law reviews, are comparative criminal law and comparative criminal procedure, though these might differ from their …