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Full-Text Articles in Criminal Law
Sexually Violent Predator Laws: Psychiatry In Service To A Morally Dubious Enterprise, Eric S. Janus
Sexually Violent Predator Laws: Psychiatry In Service To A Morally Dubious Enterprise, Eric S. Janus
Faculty Scholarship
This article discusses the role of psychiatrists in determining the treatment of sexually violent predators (SVP). Instead of being released at the end of their prison sentences, sex offenders in the USA who are judged mentally disordered and dangerous are being confined in secure "treatment facilities" for indeterminate terms. This novel and aggressive legislative tactic—embodied in US sexually violent predator laws—commandeers the traditional power of state mental health systems and puts it in service to a core function of the criminal justice system: the control of sexual violence. This transposition of "civil commitment" has forced psychiatry to legitimate and arbitrate …
[N]Ot A Story To Pass On: Constructing Mothers Who Kill, Susan Ayres
[N]Ot A Story To Pass On: Constructing Mothers Who Kill, Susan Ayres
Faculty Scholarship
Toni Morrison has said in her Nobel acceptance speech, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” How we “do language” in judicial decisions about infanticide can perhaps be compared to and informed by fiction such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Beloved provides a fictional account of the life of a historical woman, a slave who escaped to freedom and then attempted to kill all four of her children, successfully killing one when her master came to claim her under the Fugitive Slave Act. In addition to …