Law Commons^™

How Criminal Code Drafting Form Can Restrain Prosecutorial And Legislative Excesses: Consolidated Offense Drafting, Paul H. Robinson, Matthew Kussmaul, Muhammad Sarahne

All Faculty Scholarship

Solving criminal justice problems typically requires the enactment of new rules or the modification of existing ones. But there are some serious problems that can best be solved simply by altering the way in which the existing rules are drafted rather than by altering their content. This is the case with two of the most serious problems in criminal justice today: the problem of overlapping criminal offenses that create excessive prosecutorial charging discretion and the problem of legislative inconsistency and irrationality in grading offenses.

After examining these two problems and demonstrating their serious effects in perverting criminal justice, the essay …

Handling Aggravating Facts After Blakely: Findings From Five Presumptive Guidelines States, Nancy J. King

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article reveals how five states with presumptive (binding) sentencing guidelines have implemented the right announced in Blakely v. Washington to a jury finding of aggravating facts allowing upward departures from the presumptive range. Using data provided by the sentencing commissions and courts in Kansas, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington, as well as information from more than 2,200 docket sheets, the study discloses how upward departures are used in plea bargaining, sometimes undercutting policy goals; how often aggravating facts are tried and by whom; common types of aggravating facts; and the remarkably different, sometimes controversial interpretations of Blakely and …

Population-Based Sentencing, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The institutionalization of actuarial risk assessments at sentencing reflects the extension of the academic and policy-driven push to move judges away from sentencing individual defendants and toward basing sentencing on population level representations of crimes and offenses. How have courts responded to this trend? Drawing on the federal sentencing guidelines jurisprudence and the emerging procedural jurisprudence around actuarial risk assessments at sentencing, this Article identifies two techniques. First, the courts have expanded individual procedural rights into sentencing where they once did not apply. Second, the courts have created procedural rules that preserve the space for judges to pass moral judgment …

Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime Redux: Charging Trends, Aggravating Factors, And Individual Outcome Data For 2005-2014, David M. Uhlmann

Law & Economics Working Papers

In a 2014 article entitled “Prosecutorial Discretion and Environmental Crime,” I presented empirical data developed by student researchers participating in the Environmental Crimes Project at the University of Michigan Law School. My 2014 article reported that 96 percent of defendants investigated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and charged with federal environmental crimes from 2005 through 2010 engaged in conduct that involved at least one of the aggravating factors identified in my previous scholarship, namely significant harm, deceptive or misleading conduct, operating outside the regulatory system, and repetitive violations. On that basis, I concluded that prosecutors charged violations that …

Mandatory Minimum Penalties: An Analysis Of Four State’S Penal Codes And Federal Court Policies, Cassie Geiken

Honors Theses

In Nebraska, variations of bills attempting to amend mandatory minimum laws in the state have been introduced. The harshness of the mandatory sentences, as well as the looming state of emergency caused by prison overcrowding, have sustained the debate over sentencing laws. This essay identifies the core issues of mandatory minimum sentencing laws and analyzes the states of Nebraska, Texas, Alabama, California, and the federal system’s use of mandatory minimums for felony charges to identify potential solutions. Statute review found that Nebraska’s current sentencing codes are misaligned with the rest of the nation; not even Alabama with one of the …

The Effects Of Voluntary And Presumptive Sentencing Guidelines, Stephen Rushin, Josph Colquitt, Griffin Sims Edwards

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article empirically illustrates that the introduction of voluntary and presumptive sentencing guidelines at the state-level can contribute to statistically significant reductions in sentence length, inter-judge disparities, and racial disparities.

For much of American history, judges had largely unguided discretion to select criminal sentences within statutorily authorized ranges. But in the mid-to-late twentieth century, states and the federal government began experimenting with sentencing guidelines designed to reign in judicial discretion to ensure that similarly situated offenders received comparable sentences. Some states have made their guidelines voluntary, while others have made their guidelines presumptive or mandatory, meaning that judges must generally …

The Effects Of Voluntary And Presumptive Sentencing Guidelines, Stephen Rushin, Griffin Sims Edwards, Josph Colquitt

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article empirically illustrates that the introduction of voluntary and presumptive sentencing guidelines at the state-level can contribute to statistically significant reductions in sentence length, inter-judge disparities, and racial disparities.

For much of American history, judges had largely unguided discretion to select criminal sentences within statutorily authorized ranges. But in the mid-to-late twentieth century, states and the federal government began experimenting with sentencing guidelines designed to reign in judicial discretion to ensure that similarly situated offenders received comparable sentences. Some states have made their guidelines voluntary, while others have made their guidelines presumptive or mandatory, meaning that judges must generally …

Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber

Publications

McCleskey v. Kemp, the case that upheld the death penalty despite undeniable evidence of its racially disparate impact, is indelibly marked by Justice William Brennan’s phrase, “a fear of too much justice.” The popular interpretation of this phrase is that the Supreme Court harbored what I call a “disparity-claim fear,” dreading a future docket of racial discrimination claims and erecting an impossibly high bar for proving an equal protection violation. A related interpretation is that the majority had a “color-consciousness fear” of remedying discrimination through race-remedial policies. In contrast to these conventional views, I argue that the primary anxiety …

Booker's Ironies, Ryan W. Scott

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

What's Wrong With Sentencing Equality?, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Equality in criminal sentencing often translates into equalizing outcomes and stamping out variations, whether race-based, geographic, or random. This approach conflates the concept of equality with one contestable conception focused on outputs and numbers, not inputs and processes. Racial equality is crucial, but a concern with eliminating racism has hypertrophied well beyond race. Equalizing outcomes seems appealing as a neutral way to dodge contentious substantive policy debates about the purposes of punishment. But it actually privileges deterrence and incapacitation over rehabilitation, subjective elements of retribution, and procedural justice, and it provides little normative guidance for punishment. It also has unintended …

Discretionary Death Penalty For Convicted Drug Couriers In Singapore: Reflections On High Jurisprudence Thus Far, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

For decades, drug trafficking was a serious offence in Singapore potentially punishable by mandatory death. In 2012, Singapore’s Misuse of Drugs Act (MDA) was amended to give the courts sentencing discretion if the accused can first prove that he was merely a courier, and to better reflect the moral culpability accorded as between mules and kingpins in the hierarchy of drug syndicates. However, there are some complications in proving this. Not only must the accused show that he was merely a courier, he must also show that he had substantively assisted the authorities in disrupting drugtrafficking activities in Singapore. This …

Flawed Coalitions And The Politics Of Crime, David Jaros

All Faculty Scholarship

Bipartisanship can be dangerous. In the late 1970s, liberal and conservative forces united to discard two centuries of federal sentencing practice and usher in an era of fixed guidelines that would reshape the criminal justice landscape. In the decades that followed, liberals would come to bitterly regret their alliance with conservative sentencing reformers. The guideline regime established by the Sentencing Reform Act ultimately advanced hardline conservative criminal justice goals that were antithetical to the objectives of many of the Act’s former liberal supporters.

Researchers have shown that a particular cognitive bias — cultural cognition — can explain why intense partisan …

Viewpoint: Sentencing Guidelines Needn't Be Scrapped, Wes R. Porter

Publications

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York has offered an important voice on a wide range of issues in federal practice, typically from the bench. In 2011, for example, he refused to rubber-stamp a $285 million proposed civil settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and banking giant Citigroup. Rakoff recently sounded off from the podium on the current state of federal sentencing. On March 7, as the keynote speaker at the 27th Annual National Institute on White Collar Crime in Las Vegas, Rakoff railed against the numerical calculations and formulaic approach that still drives …

Criminal (In)Justice And Democracy In America, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay responds to Nicola Lacey’s review of my recent book The Machinery of Criminal Justice (Oxford Univ. Press 2012). Lacey entirely overlooks the book’s fundamental distinction between making criminal justice policy wholesale and adjudicating deserved punishment at the retail level, in individual cases, which is quite consistent with keeping but tempering rules. She also undervalues America’s deep commitments to federalism, localism, and democratic self-government and overlooks the related problem of agency costs in criminal justice. Her top-down approach colors her desire to pursue equality judicially, to the exclusion of the political branches. Finally, Lacey denigrates the legitimate roles of …

Federal Judges Need Competing Information To Rival The Misleading Guidelines At Sentencing, Wes R. Porter

Publications

Federal district judges are stuck in a bad marriage with the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines after Booker v. Unittd States. While most of the sentencing debate centers around the struggle over judicial discretion and power to control sentencing outcomes, little attention is given to how poorly we inform the sentencing court's discretion. The information provided to the court at sentencing is lacking and outdated. The Booker Court freed district judges from the "mandatory guideline era" (1988-2005), but also required that district judges continue to calculate, "consult," and explain variances from the applicable guideline range. A sentencing court needs better, competing …

Taming Negotiated Justice, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

After four decades of neglecting laissez-faire plea bargaining, the Supreme Court got it right. In Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper, the Court recognized that the Sixth Amendment regulates plea bargaining. Thus, the Court held that criminal defendants can challenge deficient advice that causes them to reject favorable plea bargains and receive heavier sentences after trial. Finally, the Court has brought law to the shadowy plea-bargaining bazaar.

Writing in dissent, Justice Scalia argued that the majority’s opinion “opens a whole new boutique of constitutional jurisprudence (‘plea-bargaining law’).” To which I say: it is about time the Court developed …

Constitutionalizing Immigration Law: The Vital Role Of Judicial Discretion In The Removal Of Lawful Permanent Residents, Maritza I. Reyes

Journal Publications

For decades, scholars and advocates criticized the harsh, mandatory nature of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. They argued that federal district court judges should have discretion to authorize a punishment that fits the facts and circumstances of the crime and the defendant. Similarly, immigration scholars and advocates criticize the harsh laws that categorically remove lawful permanent residents, even after minor crimes, from the United States. In 2005, in United States v. Booker, the Supreme Court "constitutionalized" the Sentencing Guidelines by rendering them advisory, and returning judicial discretion to federal judges. This Article argues that the similar constitutional, historical, theoretical, societal, and …

Proximate Retribution, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

An essential element of the theory of retribution has been missing from courts’ and legal scholars’ analyses. While they have outlined a number of varieties of the theory and fleshed out their nuances, courts and scholars have largely neglected to examine which harms flowing from a criminal offender's conduct should be considered in determining that offender’s desert. The more remote harms caused by an offender’s conduct, such as the effects of his offenses on the families and friends of his victims or the effects of criminal conduct on society in general, are pervasive in communities across the nation. This Article …

How (Not) To Implement Cost As A Sentencing Factor, Ryan W. Scott

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

No Change In Sight For Sentencing Guidelines, Wes R. Porter

Publications

In the post-Booker era, the commission must reinvent itself to provide a useful tool for the courts in determining punishment, explains Wes Reber Porter of Golden Gate University School of Law.

Comments On [Israeli] Proposal For Structuring Judicial Discretion In Sentencing, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, Professor Robinson supports the current Israeli proposal for structuring judicial discretion in sentencing, in particular its reliance upon desert as the guiding principle for the distribution of punishment, its reliance upon benchmarks, or “starting-points,” to be adjusted in individual cases by reference to articulated mitigating and aggravating circumstances, and the proposal’s suggestion to use of an expert committee to draft the original guidelines.

Debacle: How The Supreme Court Has Mangled American Sentencing Law And How It Might Yet Be Mended, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This Article argues that the line of Supreme Court Sixth Amendment jury right cases that began with McMillan v. Pennsylvania in 1986, crescendoed in Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker in 2004-2005, and continued in 2009 in cases such as Oregon v. Ice, has been a colossal judicial failure. First, the Court has failed to provide a logically coherent, constitutionally based answer to the fundamental question of what limits the Constitution places on the roles played by the institutional actors in the criminal justice system. It failed to recognize that defining, adjudicating and punishing crimes implicates both the …

The American Inquisition: Sentencing After The Federal Guidelines, Ricardo J. Bascuas

Articles

No abstract provided.

Towards A Unique Theory Of International Criminal Sentencing, Jens David Ohlin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

International criminal law currently lacks a robust procedure for sentencing convicted defendants. Legal scholars have already critiqued the sentencing procedures at the ad hoc tribunals, and the Rome Statute does little more than refer to the gravity of the offense and the individual circumstances of the criminal. No procedures are in place to guide judges in exercising their discretion in a matter that is arguably the most central aspect of international criminal law - punishment. This paper argues that the deficiency of sentencing procedures stems from a more fundamental theoretical deficiency - the lack of a unique theory of punishment …

Future Of Appellate Sentencing Review: Booker In The States, The Symposium: Criminal Appeals: Sentencing Appeals, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, I look at the theoretical implications of the United States Supreme Court‘s recent contradictory sentencing cases, and I then examine how they are playing out in practice at the state level. Though Booker purports to follow, not repudiate, Blakely, its view of the role of appellate courts is wholly inconsistent with Blakely‘s view. Many states have sidestepped this contradiction by simply following Blakely and ignoring the option laid out in Booker. But at least three states have chosen to pass through the door opened by Booker. Their experiences allow us to examine the implications of Booker and …

The Effect Of Blakely V. Washington On Upward Departures In A Sentencing Guideline State, Brian Iannacchione, Jeremy Ball

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

One of the problems facing the criminal justice system is unwarranted disparity as a result of unbridled discretion. Although disparity, by itself, does not necessarily indicate a problem in the criminal justice system, disparity unwarranted does present a problem. Disparity becomes unwarranted when, controlling for legal factors, extralegal factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, and age influence court processing decisions. The greater the discretion one possesses, the higher the likelihood of unwarranted disparity in one’s decisions (Albonetti, 1991; Meeker, Jesilow, & Aranda, 1992; Bushway & Piehl, 2001). Within the criminal court system, judicial discretion in sentencing has received the most scrutiny.

Of Neocolonialism, Common Law And Uncodifiable Shari’A: A Reply To Professor An-Na’Im, Paul H. Robinson, Adnan Zulfiqar

All Faculty Scholarship

In an earlier article -- Robinson et al., Codifying Shari'a: International Norms, Legality & the Freedom to Invent New Forms, http://ssrn.com/abstract=941443 -- the authors report the challenges and opportunities that arose during their commission by the United Nations Development Programme and the Government of the Maldives to produce the first modern comprehensive criminal code based upon Shari'a. In this brief essay they respond to published criticisms of that project, which asserted, among other things, that Shari'a cannot be codified, that it should not be codified, that the project was a shameful exercise in neocolonialism, that the project was an act …

American Buffalo: Vanishing Acquittals And The Gradual Extinction Of The Federal Criminal Trial Lawyer, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This essay is an invited response to Professor Ronald Wright's impressive study of the fact that the acquittal rate in federal criminal trials is declining even faster than the rate of trials themselves, Trial Distortion and the End of Innocence in Federal Criminal Justice, 154 U. PA. L. REV. 79 (2005). The essay concurs with Professor Wright's conclusion that one significant factor driving down both federal trial and acquittal rates is the government's use of the markedly increased bargaining leverage afforded to prosecutors by the post-1987 federal sentencing system consisting of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines interacting with various statutory mandatory …

Codifying Shari'a: International Norms, Legality & The Freedom To Invent New Forms, Paul H. Robinson, Adnan Zulfiqar, Margaret Kammerud, Michael Orchowski, Elizabeth A. Gerlach, Adam L. Pollock, Thomas M. O'Brien, John C. Lin, Tom Stenson, Negar Katirai, J. John Lee, Marc Aaron Melzer

All Faculty Scholarship

The United Nations Development Program and the Republic of the Maldives, a small Muslim country with a constitutional democracy, commissioned this project to craft the country's first system of codified penal law and sentencing guidelines. This Article describes the special challenges and opportunities encountered while drafting a penal code based on Shari'a (Islamic law). On the one hand, such comprehensive codification is more important and more likely to bring dramatic improvements in the quality of justice than in many other societies, due in large part to the problems of assuring fair notice and fair adjudication in the uncodified Shari'a-based system …

'Tis A Gift To Be Simple: A Model Reform Of The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This essay introducing the June 2006 edition of the Federal Sentencing Reporter (Vol. 18, No. 5) describes two important contributions to the movement for real reform of the federal sentencing system. First, Professor Bowman summarizes the recommendations of the Constitution Project Sentencing Initiative (CPSI) report on federal sentencing. The CPSI report, reproduced in this Issue, cautions against any over-hasty legislative response to the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Booker, suggests some near-term improvements to the existing federal sentencing system, and then sets out a framework for a reformed and markedly simplified federal sentencing regime. Second, Professor Bowman describes …