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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Law
Rethinking Culpability And Wrongdoing (In The Criminal Law—And Everyday Life), T. Markus Funk
Rethinking Culpability And Wrongdoing (In The Criminal Law—And Everyday Life), T. Markus Funk
University of Cincinnati Law Review
Determining an offender’s “culpability” is fundamental to justice systems worldwide. However, this crucial concept, built on a blending of moral responsibility with legal guilt, remains significantly diluted, including in the U.S. Model Penal Code, for instance, uses an offender’s moral culpability merely to “grade” offenses and determine sentences. This approach, which is mirrored in U.S. state and federal laws and academic discourse, not only affects individual cases but also has far-reaching societal implications.
Under this prevailing perpetrator-centric approach, “harm” narrowly refers to the concrete damage (or the “injury”), such as physical pain and damage or loss of property, the perpetrator …
Considering Caretakers: An Explicit Argument For Downward Departures During Federal Sentencing Mitigation For Caretakers Of Children, Danielle Sparber Bukacheski
Considering Caretakers: An Explicit Argument For Downward Departures During Federal Sentencing Mitigation For Caretakers Of Children, Danielle Sparber Bukacheski
University of Miami Law Review
The sentencing stage of the federal legal system provides defendants with an opportunity to articulate why the sentencing judge is justified in imposing less severe sentences. Yet, under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, sentencing judges have been restricted in the characteristics and background information that can be utilized when imposing a downward departure from the recommended Guidelines sentence. More specifically, there is great variability regarding the extent to which family-related circumstances can be utilized as justification for a downward departure due to the Sentencing Commission’s ambiguous language. Considering the damaging effects of incarceration on children when a caretaker is physically removed …
The Unconstitutionality Of Underfunded Public Defender Systems, Braden Daniels
The Unconstitutionality Of Underfunded Public Defender Systems, Braden Daniels
Senior Honors Theses
When a defendant is ineffectively represented by a public defender due to an underfunded public defender system, a defendant whose public defender provides him only cursory representation is entitled to a new trial only if blatantly innocent. The U.S. Supreme Court should follow its precedent and declare systemically underfunded public defender systems unconstitutional, with cases meriting reversal when the underfunding is to blame for unreasonable attorney errors, regardless of prejudice. This stems logically from the Court’s holdings in Gideon v. Wainwright, Strickland v. Washington, and United States v. Cronic. Many have argued for the reversal or modification …
Police Officers’ Perceptions Regarding Their Interactions With The Disabled In Kankakee County, Jilliann M. English
Police Officers’ Perceptions Regarding Their Interactions With The Disabled In Kankakee County, Jilliann M. English
ELAIA
Background Previous research shows the rate of crime against people with disabilities is significantly higher than the general population. Despite this, gaps in the training and resources for officers to assist those with disabilities may exist. Eadens et al. (2008) explored this issue by evaluating officer attitudes towards intellectual disabilities. Kankakee County has a significant disabled population, and Illinois is ranked very low in the improvement of related policies, making this a valuable area of interest. Methods This study utilized the modified version of the Social Distance Questionnaire (SDQ) used by Eadens et al. (2008), which is both qualitative and …
Social Ecology, Preventive Intervention, And The Administrative Transformation Of The Criminal Legal System, Mark R. Fondacaro
Social Ecology, Preventive Intervention, And The Administrative Transformation Of The Criminal Legal System, Mark R. Fondacaro
Georgia State University Law Review
This Article outlines an administrative model of criminal justice that provides a conceptual framework and empirical justification for transforming our criminal legal system from a backward-looking, adjudicative model grounded in principles of retribution toward a forward-looking model grounded in consequentialist principles of justice aimed at crime prevention and recidivism reduction. The Article reviews the historical roots and justifications for our current system, along with recent advances in the behavioral, social, and biological sciences that inform why and how the system fuels injustice. The concept of social ecology is introduced as an organizing framework for: (1) understanding why individuals do or …
The Procedural Justice Industrial Complex, Shawn E. Fields
The Procedural Justice Industrial Complex, Shawn E. Fields
Faculty Scholarship
The singular focus on procedural justice police reform is dangerous. Procedurally just law enforcement encounters provide an empirically proven subjective sense of fairness and legitimacy, while obscuring substantively unjust outcomes emanating from a fundamentally unjust system. The deceptive simplicity of procedural justice – that a polite cop is a lawful cop – promotes a false consciousness among would-be reformers that progress has been made, evokes a false sense of legitimacy divorced from objective indicia of lawfulness or morality, and claims the mantle of “reform” in the process. It is not just that procedural justice is a suboptimal type of reform; …
Chaotic Childhoods, Stephanos Bibas
Chaotic Childhoods, Stephanos Bibas
Articles
Rob Henderson’s breakout memoir, Troubled, gives us a window on troubled youth. Henderson, a brilliant young psychologist, illumines how harmful childhood instability is by reflecting on his own experience. He never knew his father, was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, and bounced around foster care. After squandering much of his early education and drowning his rage in alcohol, drugs, fights, and vandalism, he made his way through the Air Force to Yale and now Cambridge. But few of his friends escaped the wounds from their childhoods; many wound up unemployed, in prison, or dead. As an outsider to the elites …
U.S. Judiciary Syllabus: True True Crime Zines, Jason Leggett
U.S. Judiciary Syllabus: True True Crime Zines, Jason Leggett
Open Educational Resources
An experimental, open education syllabus for a pilot zero textbook cost course, U.S. Judiciary using zines and true crime.