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Full-Text Articles in Law
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 …
Juvenile Justice & Diminished Criminal Culpability, Mitchell F. Crusto
Juvenile Justice & Diminished Criminal Culpability, Mitchell F. Crusto
University of Miami Law Review
When regulating the bad, albeit illegal, choices made by minors, the law is conflicted. On the one hand, we have a clear national policy to ensure the safety of and to promote the positive development of our young people, yet we simultaneously criminalize minors who make bad choices. This conundrum raises a quintessential jurisprudential flaw in our legal system: We lack a unifying, overarching principle that guides the law’s relationship with minors. In a companion piece, I pose and explore such a unifying principle, which I coin as the “best interest of the minor” standard (“BIMS”). Consequently, this Article applies …
Energy Justice And Renewable Rikers, Rebecca Bratspies
Energy Justice And Renewable Rikers, Rebecca Bratspies
University of Miami Law Review
Unsustainable energy practices generate the lion’s share of global carbon emissions as well as staggering levels of deadly particulate pollution. Replacing the current dirty, fossil fuel-based system with affordable, clean energy is both a human rights imperative and a climate change necessity. This transition, which has already begun, creates the opportunity to do things differently. By confronting the structural racism embedded in existing energy structures, we can build a just transition rather than just a transition. This Article uses New York City’s Renewable Rikers project as a case study to explore how we might take advantage of the intersections between …
Can Covid-19 Teach Us How To End Mass Incarceration?, Amy Fettig
Can Covid-19 Teach Us How To End Mass Incarceration?, Amy Fettig
University of Miami Law Review
In this essay, the author argues that federal, state and local government response to the COVID-19 epidemic in prisons and jails was largely incompetent, inhumane, and contrary to sound public health policy, resulting in preventable death and suffering for both incarcerated people and corrections staff. However, the lessons learned from these failures provide a roadmap for policy priorities and legal reform in our ongoing need to decarcerate and end the era of mass incarceration, including: (1) rolling back extreme sentences, recalibrating sentences generally and providing for “second look” mechanisms to those currently serving sentences beyond 10 years; (2) ensuring that …
Dignifying Madness: Rethinking Commitment Law In An Age Of Mass Incarceration, Jonathan Simon, Stephen A. Rosenbaum
Dignifying Madness: Rethinking Commitment Law In An Age Of Mass Incarceration, Jonathan Simon, Stephen A. Rosenbaum
University of Miami Law Review
Modern nation-states have been trapped in recurring cycles of incarcerating and emancipating residents with psychiatric disabilities. New cycles of enthusiasm for incarceration generally commence with well-defined claims about the evils of allowing “the mad” to remain at liberty and the benefits incarceration would bring to the afflicted. A generation or two later, at most, reports of terrible conditions in institutions circulate and new laws follow, setting high burdens for those seeking to imprison and demanding exacting legal procedures with an emphasis on individual civil liberties. Today, we seem to be arriving at another turn in the familiar cycle. A growing …