Criminal Law Commons^™

“Criminal Records” - A Comparative Approach, Sigmund A. Cohn

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Territorial Principle In Penal Law: An Attempted Justification, Patrick J. Fitzgerald

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Punishing Property Offenders: Does Moral Correction Work?, Sharona Aharony-Goldenberg, Yael Wilchek-Aviad

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Voices On Innocence, Lucian E. Dervan, Richard A. Leo, Meghan J. Ryan, Valena Elizabeth Beety, Gregory M. Gilchrist, William W. Berry

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In the summer of 2015, experts gathered from around the country to sit together and discuss one of the most pressing and important issues facing the American criminal justice system – innocence. Innocence is an issue that pervades various areas of research and influences numerous topics of discussion. What does innocence mean, particularly in a system that differentiates between innocence and acquittal at sentencing? What is the impact of innocence during plea bargaining? How should we respond to growing numbers of exonerations? What forces lead to the incarceration of innocents? Has an innocent person been put to death and, if …

The Complicated Economics Of Prison Reform, John F. Pfaff

Michigan Law Review

Two recent books on prison growth directly address the relationship between penal change and economic conditions: Hadar Aviram’s Cheap on Crime and Marie Gottschalk’s Caught. Aviram’s is the more optimistic of the two accounts, arguing that there is at least some potential in an economic-based reform effort. Gottschalk, on the other hand, fears not only that economic-based efforts could fail to lead to significant reforms, but that they could actually make prison life worse for inmates if states cut funding and support without cutting populations. Both books make many provocative points, but both also suffer from some surprising omissions. …

The Pendulum Swings: Reconsidering Corporate Criminal Prosecution, David M. Uhlmann

Articles

Corporate crime continues to occur at an alarming rate, yet disagreement persists among scholars and practitioners about the role of corporate criminal prosecution. Some argue that corporations should face criminal prosecution for their misconduct, while others would reserve criminal prosecution for individual corporate officials. Perhaps as a result of this conflict, there has been a dramatic increase over the last decade in the use of deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements for some corporate crimes, even as the government continues to bring criminal charges for other corporate crimes. To move beyond our erratic approach to corporate crime, we need a better …

Evading Miller, Robert S. Chang, David A. Perez, Luke M. Rona, Christopher M. Schafbuch

Seattle University Law Review

Miller v. Alabama appeared to strengthen constitutional protections for juvenile sentencing that the United States Supreme Court recognized in Roper v. Simmons and Graham v. Florida. In Roper, the Court held that executing a person for a crime committed as a juvenile is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. In Graham, the Court held that sentencing a person to life without parole for a nonhomicide offense committed as a juvenile is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. In Miller, the Court held that a mandatory sentence of life without parole for a homicide offense committed by a juvenile is also unconstitutional under …

Punishment By Family And Community In Katherine Anne Porter's Noon Wine, Robert Batey

Akron Law Review

So crime and death permeate Noon Wine, but the novel is also a story of family and community. With evocative detail, Porter portrays the lives and relationships of the defendant Royal Earle Thompson, his wife Ellie, and their sons Arthur and Herbert, who mature from childhood to adolescence during the story. As the novel focuses on the young boys' propensity to play with the prized possessions of the farmhand Olaf Helton, his harmonicas, the reader learns how father, mother, and farmhand (for Helton grows to be "'one of the family"') participate in the trying task of childrearing.

Punitive Compensation, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Criminal restitution is a core component of punishment. In its current form, this remedy rarely serves restitution's traditional aim of disgorging a defendant's ill-gotten gains. Instead, courts use this monetary award not only to compensate crime victims for intangible losses, but also to punish the defendant for the moral blameworthiness of her criminal action. Because the remedy does not fit into the definition of what most consider "restitution," this Article advocates for the adoption of a new, additional designation for this prototypically punitive remedy: punitive compensation. Unlike with restitution, courts measure punitive compensation by a victim's losses, not a defendant's …

Proportional Response: The Need For More—And More Standardized—Veterans’ Courts, Claudia Arno

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Over the past two decades, judges and legislators in a number of states have recognized significant shortcomings in the ways traditional systems of criminal corrections address cases involving criminal offenders who are veterans of the U.S. armed services. This recognition has come at a time when policy-makers have similarly recognized that, for certain subsets of criminal offenders, “diversionary” programs may achieve better policy results than will traditional criminal punishment. In accordance with these dual recognitions, some states have implemented systems of veterans’ courts, in which certain offenders, who are also U.S. veterans, are diverted into programs that provide monitoring, training, …

Dividing Crime, Multiplying Punishments, John F. Stinneford

UF Law Faculty Publications

When the government wants to impose exceptionally harsh punishment on a criminal defendant, one of the ways it accomplishes this goal is to divide the defendant’s single course of conduct into multiple offenses that give rise to multiple punishments. The Supreme Court has rendered the Double Jeopardy Clause, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, and the rule of lenity incapable of handling this problem by emptying them of substantive content and transforming them into mere instruments for effectuation of legislative will.

This Article demonstrates that all three doctrines originally reflected a substantive legal preference for life and liberty, and a …

The "Once An Adult, Always An Adult" Doctrine: More Harm Than Good, Kaitlin Pegg

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

This Note focuses on the negative effects of the “once an adult, always an adult” doctrine, one mechanism through which juveniles convicted of a crime can be transferred to adult court. The doctrine, enacted in a majority of states, provides that children who have been previously transferred to adult court by a judge or prosecutor, or because of statutory exclusion of certain crimes from juvenile jurisdiction, will be transferred for all subsequent crimes, regardless of severity.

When juveniles convicted of crimes are transferred to the adult court system, they are subject to a wide array of harsh punishments unavailable in …

Book Review: Political Crime In Europe: A Comparative Study Of France, Germany And England. Barton L. Ingraham. University Of California-Berkeley Press, 1979., Albert M. Pearson Iii

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

From Prosecutorial To Reparatory: A Valuable Post-Conflict Change Of Focus, Nancy A. Combs

Michigan Journal of International Law

The ICC is well known in international legal circles. Indeed, everyone who knows anything about international law knows that the ICC is the acronym for the International Criminal Court, the body charged with prosecuting international crimes around the globe. Created in 2002, the ICC was intended to “put an end to impunity” for the perpetrators of international crimes” and to affirm “that the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole must not go unpunished.”1 Imagine, however, a world where the “ICC” instead was an acronym for the International Compensation Court. That is, what if the …

The Role Of Race, Poverty, Intellectual Disability, And Mental Illness In The Decline Of The Death Penalty, Stephen B. Bright

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Death As A Bargaining Chip: Plea Bargaining And The Future Of Virginia's Death Penalty, John G. Douglass

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Making Sure We Are Getting It Right: Repairing "The Machinery Of Death" By Narrowing Capital Eligibility, Ann E. Reid

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Executioner's Dilemmas, Eric Berger

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Free Will Is No Bargain: How Misunderstanding Human Behavior Negatively Influences Our Criminal Justice System, Sean Daly

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Witnessing Executions, Frank Green

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Botched Executions, Corinna Barrett Lain

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lethal Injections: States Medicalize Execution, Joel B. Zivot

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Has The "Machinery Of Death" Become A Clunker?, Stephen F. Smith

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Infliction Of Emotional Distress, Avlana K. Eisenberg

Michigan Law Review

This Article identifies and critiques a trend to criminalize the infliction of emotional harm independent of any physical injury or threat. The Article defines a new category of criminal infliction of emotional distress (“CIED”) statutes, which include laws designed to combat behaviors such as harassing, stalking, and bullying. In contrast to tort liability for emotional harm, which is cabined by statutes and the common law, CIED statutes allow states to regulate and punish the infliction of emotional harm in an increasingly expansive way. In assessing harm and devising punishment, the law has always taken nonphysical harm seriously, but traditionally it …

Sentencing And The Salience Of Pain And Hope, Benjamin Berger

Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper Series

What would a jurisprudence of sentencing that was induced from the experience of punishment, rather than deduced from the technocracy of criminal justice, look like? Rather than focusing narrowly on the question of quantum, such a jurisprudence would be concerned with the character and quality of punishment. A fit sentence would account for pain, loss, estrangement, alienation, and other features of the offender’s aggregate experience of suffering at the hands of the state in response to his or her wrongdoing. This would be a broader, more resolutely political conception of criminal punishment. This article shows that the jurisprudence of the …

The ’73 Graft: Punishment, Political Economy, And The Genealogy Of Morals, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I explore the place of a genealogy of morals within the context of a history of political economy. More specifically, I investigate the types of moralization – of criminals and delinquents, of the disorderly, but also of political economic systems, of workers and managers, of rules and rule-breaking – that are necessary and integral to making a population accept new styles of political and economic governance, especially the punitive institutions that accompany modern political economies in the contemporary period.

The marriage of political economy and a genealogy of morals: this essay explores how the moralization of certain …

Calling A Spade A Spade: Understanding Sex Offender Registration As Punishment And Implications Post-Starkey, Alex Duncan

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Moral Argument: Reason And Conviction In Tadros' Philosophy Of Punishment (With Response By Victor Tadros), Eric Blumenson, Victor Tadros

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

For generations, philosophers of punishment have sought to revise or combine established theories of punishment in a way that could reconcile the utilitarian aims of punishment with the demands of deontological justice. Victor Tadros’ recent work addresses the same problem, but answers it with an entirely original theory of punishment based on the duties criminals acquire by committing their crimes. The unexpected appearance of a new rationale for punishment has already inspired a robust dialogue between Tadros and his critics on many of the individual claims that, linked together, comprise his argument. This critique focuses instead on Tadros’ theory as …

Rituals Upon Celluloid: The Need For Crime And Punishment In Contemporary Film, J C. Oleson

Cleveland State Law Review

Most members of the public lack first-hand experience with the criminal justice system; nevertheless, they believe that they possess phenomenological knowledge about it. In large part, the public’s understandings of crime and punishment are derived from television and film, which provide modern audiences with a vision of institutions that are normally occluded from view. While public rituals of punishment used to take place on the scaffold, equivalent moral narratives about crime and punishment now occur on film because modern punishment is imposed outside of the public gaze. Yet because crime films distort what they depict, the public’s view of crime …

A Philosophical Analysis Of California Determinate Sentencing, Three Strikes, And Realignment, Madeline Stein

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between philosophy and policy in the context of three California policies, Determinate Sentencing, Three Strikes, and Realignment. The philosophy portion includes theories of retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation, focusing on the tensions and conflicts within them.