Criminal Law Commons^™

Reassessing Prosecutorial Power Through The Lens Of Mass Incarceration, Jeffrey Bellin

Michigan Law Review

A review of John F. Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration - And How to Achieve Real Reform.

All Bathwater, No Baby: Expressive Theories Of Punishment And The Death Penalty, Susan A. Bandes

Michigan Law Review

A review of Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.

Criminal Justice And The Mattering Of Lives, Deborah Tuerkheimer

Michigan Law Review

A review of James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.

How Defendant Characteristics Affect Sentencing And Conviction In The Us, Payton Kuenzli

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This research study analyzes whether or not there is any relationship between sentencing and conviction and certain defendant characteristics in the US legal system. In the midst of a time where the nation is strongly divided politically, the topic is often the center of research projects and discussions in academic journals. Specifically, this research explores the 3 characteristics- race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Within this article, multiple case studies from other journals are cited in which research and experiments have suggested that these factors do have influence on both whether or not a defendant gets convicted or for how long …

The Innocence Movement And Misdemeanors, Jenny M. Roberts

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In recent years, the Innocent Movement has begun to focus its attention on wrongful misdemeanor convictions as a systemic problem. This Article analyzes eighty-five documented misdemeanor exonerations and concludes that innocence has been demonstrated primarily in two ways: laboratory tests of alleged unlawful drugs that reveal “no controlled substance” despite the individual having pled guilty to misdemeanor drug possession; and police body camera or citizen videos that surface after a misdemeanor conviction to contradict the factual basis for that conviction. Strategic use of these relatively definitive methods of revealing wrongful misdemeanor convictions can call attention to the flaws in misdemeanor …

Punishing Risk, Erin Collins

Law Faculty Publications

Actuarial recidivism risk assessments-statistical predictions of the likelihood of future criminal behavior-drive a number of core criminal justice decisions, including where to police, whom to release on bail, and how to manage correctional institutions. Recently, this predictive approach to criminal justice entered a new arena: sentencing. Actuarial sentencing has quickly gained a number of prominent supporters and is being implemented across the country. This enthusiasm is understandable. Its proponents promise that actuarial data will refine sentencing decisions, increase rehabilitation, and reduce reliance on incarceration.

Yet, in the rush to embrace actuarial sentencing, scholars and policy makers have overlooked a crucial …

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 …

Corporate Culture And Competition Compliance In East Asia, Jingyuan Ma, Mel Marquis

South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business

No abstract provided.

Criminal Employment Law, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article diagnoses a phenomenon, “criminal employment law,” which exists at the nexus of employment law and the criminal justice system. Courts and legislatures discourage employers from hiring workers with criminal records and encourage employers to discipline workers for non-work-related criminal misconduct. In analyzing this phenomenon, my goals are threefold: (1) to examine how criminal employment law works; (2) to hypothesize why criminal employment law has proliferated; and (3) to assess what is wrong with criminal employment law. This Article examines the ways in which the laws that govern the workplace create incentives for employers not to hire individuals with …

Punishing Criminals For Their Conduct: A Return To Reason For The Armed Career Criminal Act, Sheldon Evans

Scholarship@WashULaw

For over twenty-five years, the Armed Career Criminal Act has produced inconsistent results and has taxed judicial economy perhaps more than any other federal sentencing mechanism. This recidivist sentencing enhancement is meant to punish habitual criminals based on their numerous past crimes, but the Supreme Court’s application of the Act too often allows habitual criminals to escape the intended enhancement on a legal technicality. This comes as a result of the Court’s categorical approach, which punishes habitual criminal offenders based on the statutory elements of their past crimes rather than the conduct of their past crimes. In an effort to …

Sentencing Reform: Fixing Root Problems, Peter A. Joy, Rodney J. Uphoff

Scholarship@WashULaw

In theory, at least, many subscribe to the belief that it is better to let 10 or 100 guilty persons go free rather than convict an innocent person. Indeed, the American criminal justice system provides criminal defendants a panoply of important rights, including the right to effective assistance of counsel, in large part to ensure that the innocent are not convicted of crimes that they did not commit. But defense counsel is there not only to protect the innocent, but also to ensure that, if the defendant is found guilty after trial or if the defendant pleads guilty before trial, …

Deterrence, David Crump

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming

Criminal Employment Law, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article diagnoses a phenomenon, “criminal employment law,” which exists at the nexus of employment law and the criminal justice system. Courts and legislatures discourage employers from hiring workers with criminal records and encourage employers to discipline workers for non-work-related criminal misconduct. In analyzing this phenomenon, my goals are threefold: (1) to examine how criminal employment law works; (2) to hypothesize why criminal employment law has proliferated; and (3) to assess what is wrong with criminal employment law. This Article examines the ways in which the laws that govern the workplace create incentives for employers not to hire individuals with …

Mullner V. State, 133 Nev. Adv. Op. 98 (Dec. 7, 2017), Joseph K. Fabbi

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

A court can use offenses committed as a juvenile, but charged and convicted as an adult, when it considers habitual criminal sentencing, especially if the offender’s past convictions are similar to the crime currently being considered for sentencing.

Distinguished Jurist-In-Residence Lecture: Sentencing Reform: When Everyone Behaves Badly, Nancy Gertner

Maine Law Review

Sentencing is different from almost all functions of the government and surely different from the other functions of the judiciary. It is the moment when state power meets an individual directly. It necessarily involves issues that are distinct from those in other areas of the law. It requires a court to focus on the defendant, to craft a punishment proportionate to the offense and to the offender. It should come as no surprise that in countries across the world, common law and civil code, totalitarian and free, judges have been given great discretion in sentencing. To be sure, that power …

United States V. Pho: Defining The Limits Of Discretionary Sentencing, John G. Wheatley

Maine Law Review

In the consolidated case of United States v. Pho, the government appealed two district court rulings that imposed criminal sentences outside of the range provided in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines Manual (Guidelines). At separate trials, both defendants pied guilty to the crime of possession with intent to distribute five grams or more of cocaine base (commonly known as crack). Rejecting the Guidelines' disparate treatment of crack and powder cocaine, the district court imposed sentences that were below the Guidelines' range, but above the statutory mandatory minimum. The Court of Appeals for the First Circuit vacated both sentences and remanded the …

Constructing Recidivism Risk, Jessica Eaglin

AI-DR Collection

Courts increasingly use actuarial—meaning statistically derived—information about a defendant’s likelihood of engaging in criminal behavior in the future at sentencing. This Article examines how developers construct the tools that predict recidivism risk. It exposes the numerous choices that developers make during tool construction with serious consequences to sentencing law and policy. These design decisions require normative judgments concerning accuracy, equality, and the purpose of punishment. Whether and how to address these concerns reflects societal values about the administration of criminal justice more broadly. Currently, developers make these choices in the absence of law, even as they face distinct interests that …

State Criminal Appeals Revealed, Michael Heise, Nancy J. King, Nicole A. Heise

Vanderbilt Law Review

Every state provides appellate review of criminal judgments, yet little research examines which factors correlate with favorable outcomes for defendants who seek appellate relief. To address this scholarly gap, this Article exploits the Survey of Criminal Appeals in State Courts (2010) dataset, recently released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for State Courts (hereinafter, "NCSC Study"). The NCSC Study is the first and only publicly available national dataset on state criminal appeals and includes unprecedented information from every state court in the nation with jurisdiction to review criminal judgments.

Criminal Certification: Restoring Comity In The Categorical Approach, Joshua Rothenberg

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Federal sentencing enhancements force federal courts to delve into the world of substantive state criminal law. Does a state assault statute require violent force or just offensive touching? Does a state burglary statute that criminalizes breaking into a car or a house require prosecutors to charge the location entered as an element? Whether a person with prior convictions convicted of violating 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) faces a minimum sentence of fifteen years and a maximum of life imprisonment rather than a maximum sentence of ten years turns upon the answers to these questions. Yet, state law often does not resolve …

Thinking Inside The Box: Placing Form Over Function In The Application Of The Statutory Sentencing Procedure In State Of Maine V. Eugene Downs, Matthew E. Lane

Maine Law Review

In State v. Hewey, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court found that the sentencing court erred in imposing a sentence that exceeded the maximum applicable period of incarceration for a Class A crime and accordingly vacated the sentence. Perhaps more importantly, the Law Court used the case as an “opportunity for clarification of [its] review of an appeal from a sentence imposed by the trial court.” A unanimous court sought to clear up some inconsistencies in previous decisions regarding “the terminology used to define each of the three steps” of the sentencing process by better describing the procedure “by which the …

The Death Penalty's Darkside: A Response To Phyllis Goldfarb's Matters Of Strata: Race, Gender, And Class Structures In Capital Cases, Kevin Barry, Bharat Malkani

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

In Matters of Strata: Race, Gender, and Class Structures in Capital Cases, Professor Phyllis Goldfarb examines the ways in which race, class, and gender affect the American criminal justice system generally, and its death penalty system in particular. This Response focuses on one of Goldfarb’s observations: The relationship between slavery and the death penalty. This relationship helps to explain why, over the past four decades, the thirteen states that comprised the former Confederacy have been responsible for nearly all of this nation’s executions. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly failed to address the death penalty’s roots in slavery, …

Why Prosecutors Rule The Criminal Justice System—And What Can Be Done About It, Jed S. Rakoff

Northwestern University Law Review

Most recognize that federal and state laws imposing high sentences and reducing judicial sentencing discretion have created America’s current plague of mass incarceration. Fewer realize that these draconian laws shift sentencing power to prosecutors: defendants fear the immense sentences they face if convicted at trial, and therefore actively engage in the plea-bargaining process. This allows prosecutors, rather than judges, to effectively determine the sentences imposed in most cases, which creates significant sentencing discrepancies that most often are unrecorded and cannot be measured. This Essay proposes a solution that would not require legislative change to be put into effect: to have …

Victimhood & Agency: How Taking Charge Takes Its Toll, Pam A. Mueller

Pepperdine Law Review

This Article addresses an unexplored tension in the civil justice system regarding victims. The goal of the civil system is to make victims whole. We can, as is most common, attempt to do this financially, or we can consider psychological research that suggests there may be other ways of restoring victims’ statuses. One of the most common nonfinancial solutions is to increase victim participation in the justice process. This is a solution that appeals to many victims and may benefit them psychologically. However, by increasing their participation, they may unknowingly trade off some of the benefits of victimhood. For instance, …

With Chelsea Manning's Release, Lead Trial Attorney Coombs Recalls Case: Rwu Law Professor David E. Coombs Revisits Issues In The Case, Looks Forward To Teaching Again Next Year 05-17-2017, Edward Fitzpatrick

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

From Grace To Grids: Rethinking Due Process Protections For Parole., Kimberly A. Thomas, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

Current due process law gives little protection to prisoners at the point of parole, even though the parole decision, like sentencing, determines whether or not a person will serve more time or will go free. The doctrine regarding parole, which developed mostly in the late 1970s, was based on a judicial understanding of parole as an experimental, subjective, and largely standardless art—rooted in assessing the individual “character” of the potential parolee. In this Article we examine the foundations of the doctrine, and conclude that the due process inquiry at the point of parole should take into account the stark changes …

Supervised Release Sentences Of Child Pornography Offenders In U.S. District Courts: An Examination Of Disparity, Niquita Marie Loftis

Dissertations

The statutory supervised release sentencing range for child pornography offenders convicted in U.S. District Courts is five years to life. However, the guideline policy statement contained in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines recommends lifetime supervision for all child pornography offenders. U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) data for fiscal year 2012 indicate that only approximately 33% of child pornography offenders were sentenced to lifetime supervision. This variation suggests the possibility of unwarranted supervised release sentencing disparities. The dissertation explores this possibility by examining the effects of individual-level legal and extralegal factors and district-level contextual factors on supervised release sentences for child pornography offenders. …

Random If Not "Rare"? The Eighth Amendment Weaknesses Of Post-Miller Legislation, Kimberly Thomas

Articles

First, this Article surveys the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to analogize life without parole for juveniles to the death penalty for adults, and discusses the Eighth Amendment law regarding the parameters around death penalty statutory schemes. Second, this Article examines the state legislative response to Miller, and scrutinizes it with the Court's Eighth Amendment death penalty law-and the states' responses to this case law-in mind. This Article highlights the failure of juvenile homicide sentencing provisions to: 1) narrow offenses that are eligible for life without parole sentences; 2) further limit, once a guilty finding is made, the categories of …

Post-Trial Plea Bargaining And Predictive Analytics In Public Law, Harold J. Krent

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Adam Gershowitz’s article calling for post-trial plea bargaining in capital cases reasons that governors should commute sentences to life in prison, in exceptional cases, to limit the costs of protracted post-trial litigation over imposition of the death penalty. The commutation power, in his view, resembles pre-trial plea bargaining in that both the state and the criminal defendant can benefit—the state saves resources while the defendant gets off death row.

Gershowitz’s article, therefore, affords a window into the increasing use of predictive analytics in deciding whether to bring or resolve litigation. Sifting through data on all prior capital cases can yield …

#Protestersrightsmatter: The Case Against Increased Criminal Penalties For Protesters Blocking Roadways, Caroline M. Moos

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Mental Health Courts And Sentencing Disparities, E. Lea Johnston, Conor P. Flynn

UF Law Faculty Publications

Despite the proliferation of mental health courts across the United States, virtually no attention has been paid to the criminal justice effects these courts carry for participants. This article provides the first empirical analysis of differential sentencing practices in mental health and traditional criminal courts. Using a case study approach, the article compares how Pennsylvania’s Erie County Mental Health Court and county criminal courts sentenced individuals who committed the same offenses and held the same average criminal history score. Information on the mental health court—including eligibility criteria, plea bargaining and sentencing procedure, sentencing policies, program length, graduation rates, likelihood of …