Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Visible Policing: Technology, Transparency, And Democratic Control, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Law enforcement has an opacity problem. Police use sophisticated technologies to monitor individuals, surveil communities, and predict behaviors in increasingly intrusive ways. But legal institutions have struggled to understand—let alone set limits on—new investigative methods and techniques for two major reasons. First, new surveillance technology tends to operate in opaque and unaccountable ways, augmenting police power while remaining free of meaningful oversight. Second, shifts in Fourth Amendment doctrine have expanded law enforcement’s ability to engage in surveillance relatively free of scrutiny by courts or by the public. The result is that modern policing is not highly visible to oversight institutions …

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: Analyzing Inhumane Practices In Mississippi’S Correctional Institutions Due To Overcrowding, Understaffing, And Diminished Funding, Ariel A. Williams

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to examine the political, social, and economic factors which have led to inhumane conditions in Mississippi’s correctional facilities. Several methods were employed, including a comparison of the historical and current methods of funding, staffing, and rehabilitating prisoners based on literature reviews. State-sponsored reports from various departments and the legislature were analyzed to provide insight into budgetary restrictions and political will to allocate funds. Statistical surveys and data were reviewed to determine how overcrowding and understaffing negatively affect administrative capacity and prisoners’ mental and physical well-being. Ultimately, it may be concluded that Mississippi has high …

Technological Tethereds: Potential Impact Of Untrustworthy Artificial Intelligence In Criminal Justice Risk Assessment Instruments, Sonia M. Gipson Rankin

Faculty Scholarship

Issues of racial inequality and violence are front and center in today’s society, as are issues surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). This Article, written by a law professor who is also a computer scientist, takes a deep dive into understanding how and why hacked and rogue AI creates unlawful and unfair outcomes, particularly for persons of color.

Black Americans are disproportionally featured in criminal justice, and their stories are obfuscated. The seemingly endless back-to-back murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and heartbreakingly countless others have finally shaken the United States from its slumbering journey towards intentional criminal justice …

Giving Due Process Its Due: Why Deliberate Indifference Should Be Confined To Claims Arising Under The Cruel And Unusual Punishment Clause, Shad M. Brown

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

This Note discusses culpability requirements for claims brought by pretrial detainees and convicted prisoners. The initial focus is on deliberate indifference, a culpability requirement formulated under the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause but symmetrically applied to claims arising under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Note then shifts to Kingsley v. Hendrickson, a landmark Supreme Court decision that casts doubt on the application of Eighth-Amendment standards to Fourteenth-Amendment claims. Finally, this Note advocates for the application of objective unreasonableness, a different culpability requirement, to claims arising under the Due Process Clause. It does so on the …

"Pistol Shots Ring Out In The Barroom Night": Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" As An Exam (Or Course) In Criminal Procedure, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

Bob Dylan wrote the song Hurricane to draw the public’s attention to the conviction of the boxer, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, for a crime (multiple murders) which Carter did not commit. Dylan’s song – and its performance as a part of Dylan’s fabled Rolling Thunder Tour – brought significant public attention to this case (and the miscarriage of justice it reflected), and eventually led to the granting of federal habeas corpus (a decision affirmed by the Third Circuit) and the freeing of Carter from state prison in New Jersey. The song takes the listener from the facts of the crime, through …

Discrimination Against People Of Color In America’S Cash Bail System, Dolores Yanez

University Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to describe how the current bail system in America is discriminatory and unjust for people of color (POC). The American criminal justice system is represented as a system run by procedural justice, which entails government officials being genuinely concerned about the fairness and transparency of the process by which decisions are made. This presumes that every American will be treated with the same respect and dignity, and that they will be given the same opportunities regardless of their socioeconomic status, racial or ethnic backgrounds. America’s cash bail system and its impact on people of …

Police Reform Through A Power Lens, Jocelyn Simonson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Discovering Racial Discrimination By The Police, Alison Siegler, William Admussen

Northwestern University Law Review

For decades, it was virtually impossible for a criminal defendant to challenge racial discrimination by the police or prosecutors. This was because in United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996), the Supreme Court set an insurmountable standard for obtaining discovery in support of a selective prosecution claim. Equating the roles of prosecutors and law enforcement officers, lower courts applied this same standard to claims alleging racial discrimination by the police. This high standard led courts to deny discovery and stifle potentially meritorious claims. Recently, criminal defendants have initiated a wave of challenges to “fake stash house” operations, in which …

The Unconstitutional Police, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

Most Fourth Amendment cases arise under a basic fact pattern. Police decide to do something--say, stop and frisk a suspect. They find some crime--say, a gun or drugs--they arrest the suspect, and the suspect is subsequently charged with a crime. The suspect--who is all too often Black--becomes a defendant and challenges the police officers' initial decision as unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. The defendant seeks to suppress the evidence against them or perhaps to recover damages for serious injuries under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The courts subsequently constitutionalize the police officers' initial decision with little or no scrutiny. Effectively, the …

The Just Prosecutor, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

As the most powerful actors in our criminal legal system, prosecutors have been and remain one of the principal drivers of mass incarceration. This was and is by design. Prosecutorial power derives from our constitutional structure--prosecutors are given almost unfettered discretion to determine who to charge, what to charge, and, often, what the sentence will be. Within that structure, the prosecutor's duty is to ensure that justice is done. Yet, in exercising their outsized power, some prosecutors have fully embraced a secondary, adversarial role as a partisan advocate at the significant cost of seeking justice.

The necessary reforms of our …

Racial Bias Still Exists In Criminal Justice System? A Review Of Recent Empirical Research, Yu Du

Touro Law Review

The debate on whether racial bias is still embedded in the criminal justice (CJ) system today has reached its plateau. One recent article in the Washington Post has claimed an overwhelming evidence of racial bias in the CJ system. Whereas some scholars argue that racial disparity is an epitome of real crime rates, others indicate that implicit and/or explicit racial bias against Blacks held by law enforcement agents persists in the system. This review considers both supporting arguments and relevant counterarguments. After evaluating empirical and rigorous research during the past five years, the review maintains that racial bias still exists …

A Page-Turner With A Social Conscience: Requiem For A Female Serial Killer By Phyllis Chesler, Paula J. Caplan

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Duress In Immigration Law, Elizabeth A. Keyes

Seattle University Law Review

The doctrine of duress is common to other bodies of law, but the application of the duress doctrine is both unclear and highly unstable in immigration law. Outside of immigration law, a person who commits a criminal act out of well-placed fear of terrible consequences is different than a person who willingly commits a crime, but American immigration law does not recognize this difference. The lack of clarity leads to certain absurd results and demands reimagining, redefinition, and an unequivocal statement of the significance of duress in ascertaining culpability. While there are inevitably some difficult lines to be drawn in …

Rock And Hard Place Arguments, Jareb Gleckel, Grace Brosofsky

Seattle University Law Review

This Article explores what we coin “rock and hard place” (RHP) arguments in the law, and it aims to motivate mission-driven plaintiffs to seek out such arguments in their cases. The RHP argument structure helps plaintiffs win cases even when the court views that outcome as unfavorable.

We begin by dissecting RHP dilemmas that have long existed in the American legal system. As Part I reveals, prosecutors and law enforcement officials have often taken advantage of RHP dilemmas and used them as a tool to persuade criminal defendants to forfeit their constitutional rights, confess, or give up the chance to …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents.

Nine Ways Of Looking At Oklahoma City: An Essay On Sam Anderson’S Boom Town, Rodger D. Citron

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Seeing Those We’Ve Rendered Invisible – A Clarion Call For Criminal Justice, Stephen E. Henderson, Jordan Thomas

Faculty Articles

Jonathan Rapping, Gideon’s Promise: A Public Defender Movement to Transform Criminal Justice (Beacon Press 2020) In this brief review, we situate Rapping’s work among those demanding criminal justice reform, praise an unrelated bonus, and propose a friendly amendment to nudge his vision over the finish line of justice. It will not be enough to provide newly enabled and supported public defenders to those our systems consider indigent. We ought to provide them to us all.

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …

Distributed Federalism: The Transformation Of Younger, Anne R. Traum

Scholarly Works

For decades federal courts have remained mostly off limits to civil rights cases challenging the constitutionality of state criminal proceedings. Younger abstention, which requires federal courts to abstain from suits challenging the constitutionality of pending state prosecutions, has blocked plaintiffs from bringing meritorious civil rights cases and insulated local officials and federal courts from having to defend against or decide them. Younger’s reach is broad. It has forced political protestors (from the Vietnam era to Black Lives Matter) to challenge the constitutionality of their arrests and prosecutions within their state criminal proceedings. The doctrine also has made it difficult to …

No, The Firing Squad Is Not Better Than Lethal Injection: A Response To Stephanie Moran’S A Modest Proposal, Michael Conklin

Seattle University Law Review

In the article A Modest Proposal: The Federal Government Should Use Firing Squads to Execute Federal Death Row Inmates, Stephanie Moran argues that the firing squad is the only execution method that meets the requirements of the Eighth Amendment. In order to make her case, Moran unjustifiably overstates the negative aspects of lethal injection while understating the negative aspects of firing squads. The entire piece is predicated upon assumptions that are not only unsupported by the evidence but often directly refuted by the evidence. This Essay critically analyzes Moran’s claims regarding the alleged advantages of the firing squad over …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Table Of Contents, Public Interest Law Reporter

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

The Chicago Police Department's Murder Of Adam Toledo Was Not Justifiable Self-Defense, Cruz Rodriguez

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Franco And Fraihat: The Unexpected Consequences Of Overlap, Romina Nemaci

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Voter Suppression In Georgia, Eli Woods

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Revisiting Poverty Under Equal Protection In The Wake Of Covid-19, Alexis O'Connor

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

When Justice Is Blind: Accommodations For Judges With Visual Impairments And Blindness, Annie Mann

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

On Gang Databases, Louise Carhart

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Inequity For People Of Color In Healthcare In The Wake Of A Global Pandemic, Colleen Ahern

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Public Interest Law Reporter

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.