Criminal Procedure Commons^™

A Criminal Law We Can Call Our Own?, R A Duff

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay sketches an ideal of criminal law—of the kind of criminal law that we can call our own as citizens of a democratic republic. The elements of that ideal include a republican theory of liberal democracy, as the kind of polity in which we can aspire to live; an account of the role of criminal law in such a polity, as defining a set of public wrongs and providing an appropriate formal, public response to the commission of such wrongs through the criminal process of trial and punishment; and a discussion of how the citizens of such a polity …

Three Principles Of Democratic Criminal Justice, Joshua Kleinfeld

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay links criminal theory to democratic political theory, arguing that the view of criminal law and procedure known as “reconstructivism” shares a common root with certain culturally oriented forms of democratic theory. The common root is the valorization of a community’s ethical life and the belief that law and government should reflect the ethical life of the community living under that law and government. This Essay then specifies three principles that are entailed by the union of democracy and reconstructivism and that should therefore characterize a democracy’s approach to criminal justice: the “moral culture principle of criminalization,” the “principle …

Manifesto Of Democratic Criminal Justice, Joshua Kleinfeld

Northwestern University Law Review

It is widely recognized that the American criminal system is in a state of crisis, but views about what has gone wrong and how it could be set right can seem chaotically divergent. This Essay argues that, within the welter of diverse views, one foundational, enormously important, and yet largely unrecognized line of disagreement can be seen. On one side are those who think the root of the present crisis is the outsized influence of a vengeful, poorly informed, or otherwise wrongheaded American public and the primary solution is to place control over the criminal system in the hands of …

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 …

White Paper Of Democratic Criminal Justice, Joshua Kleinfeld, Laura I. Appleman, Richard A. Bierschbach, Kenworthey Bilz, Josh Bowers, John Braithwaite, Robert P. Burns, R A Duff, Albert W. Dzur, Thomas F. Geraghty, Adriaan Lanni, Marah Stith Mcleod, Janice Nadler, Anthony O'Rourke, Paul H. Robinson, Jonathan Simon, Jocelyn Simonson, Tom R. Tyler, Ekow N. Yankah

Northwestern University Law Review

This white paper is the joint product of nineteen professors of criminal law and procedure who share a common conviction: that the path toward a more just, effective, and reasonable criminal system in the United States is to democratize American criminal justice. In the name of the movement to democratize criminal justice, we herein set forth thirty proposals for democratic criminal justice reform.

Policing And Procedural Justice: Shaping Citizens' Identities To Increase Democratic Participation, Tracey Meares

Northwestern University Law Review

Like the education system, the criminal justice system offers both formal, overt curricula—found in the Bill of Rights, and informal or “hidden” curricula—embodied in how people are treated in interactions with legal authorities in courtrooms and on the streets. The overt policing curriculum identifies police officers as “peace officers” tasked with public safety and concern for individual rights, but the hidden curriculum, fraught with racially targeted stop and frisks and unconstitutional exercises of force, teaches many that they are members of a special, dangerous, and undesirable class. The social psychology of how people understand the fairness of legal authorities—procedural justice—is …

Democratizing Criminal Law: Feasibility, Utility, And The Challenge Of Social Change, Paul H. Robinson

Northwestern University Law Review

There are good reasons to be initially hesitant about shaping criminal law rules to track the justice judgments of ordinary people. People seem to disagree about many criminal law issues. Their judgments, at least as reflected in many aspects of current law such as three strikes and high penalties for drug offenses, seem harsh to many. Effective crime control would seem to require the expertise of trained experts and scholars who understand the complexities of general deterrence and the identification and incapacitation of the dangerous.

But this brief Essay, which reviews some previous studies and analyses, argues that distributing criminal …

Introduction To Criminal Justice, Jason Davis, Andrea Allen, Scott Jacques

Criminal Justice and Law Grants Collections

This Grants Collection for Introduction to Criminal Justice was created under a Round Five ALG Textbook Transformation Grant.

Affordable Learning Georgia Grants Collections are intended to provide faculty with the frameworks to quickly implement or revise the same materials as a Textbook Transformation Grants team, along with the aims and lessons learned from project teams during the implementation process.

Documents are in .pdf format, with a separate .docx (Word) version available for download. Each collection contains the following materials:

• Linked Syllabus
• Initial Proposal
• Final Report

Criminal Justice Research Methods, Andrea Allen, Scott Jacques

Criminal Justice and Law Grants Collections

This Grants Collection for Criminal Justice Research Methods was created under a Round Four ALG Textbook Transformation Grant.

Affordable Learning Georgia Grants Collections are intended to provide faculty with the frameworks to quickly implement or revise the same materials as a Textbook Transformation Grants team, along with the aims and lessons learned from project teams during the implementation process.

Documents are in .pdf format, with a separate .docx (Word) version available for download. Each collection contains the following materials:

• Linked Syllabus
• Initial Proposal
• Final Report

Resurrecting Miranda's Right To Counsel, David Rossman

Faculty Scholarship

The regime created by Miranda v. Arizona is at this point in its history bankrupt both intellectually and in terms of practical effect. Justices who have joined the Court after Miranda have cut back its scope by stingy interpretations of the doctrine’s reach and effect. In practice, few suspects actually benefit from the way Miranda is now implemented in police stations and courtrooms. Given the failure of Miranda’s promise, can we envision an alternative? Here is one that may be politically palatable and doctrinally feasible, largely adopted from English practice:

1. Police would give the same Miranda warnings that they …

Quantifying The Contours Of Power: Chief Justice Roberts & Justice Kennedy In Criminal Justice Cases, Michael A. Mccall, Madhavi M. Mccall

Pace Law Review

This Article seeks to contribute to the debate with an empirical analysis of voting behavior in criminal justice cases decided during the first ten Terms of the Roberts Court era. The following section presents the study’s case selection and introduces the types of measures used to illuminate influence on the High Court (Part II). Court- and individual-level tendencies (Part III) identify potential spheres of influence occupied by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy. These bases of judicial power are examined separately in Part IV (Chief Justice Roberts) and Part V (Justice Kennedy). Some possible implications of Justice Scalia’s death on …

Bail Nullification, Jocelyn Simonson

Michigan Law Review

This Article explores the possibility of community nullification beyond the jury by analyzing the growing and unstudied phenomenon of community bail funds, which post bail for strangers based on broader beliefs regarding the overuse of pretrial detention. When a community bail fund posts bail, it can serve the function of nullifying a judge’s determination that a certain amount of the defendant’s personal or family money was necessary to ensure public safety and prevent flight. This growing practice—what this Article calls “bail nullification”—is powerful because it exposes publicly what many within the system already know to be true: that although bail …

Ministers Of Justice And Mass Incarceration, Lissa Griffin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Over the past few years, scholars, legislators, and politicians have come to recognize that our current state of “mass incarceration” is the result of serious dysfunction in our criminal justice system. As a consequence, there has been significant attention to the causes of mass incarceration. These include the war on drugs and political decisions based on a “law and order” perspective. Congressional and state legislative enactments increased the financing of the expansion of police powers and provided for severely punitive sentencing statutes, thereby giving prosecutors uniquely powerful weapons in securing guilty pleas. All of this occurred as crime rates dropped. …

Representing The United States Government: Reconceiving The Federal Prosecutor's Role Through A Historical Lens, Scott Ingram

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

For nearly 100 years courts and legal scholars have held prosecutors to the “justice” standard, meaning that the prosecutor’s first duty is to ensure that justice is done. With this command, prosecutors have increased their discretion. The modern prosecutor’s power is unrivaled in the criminal justice system. Judges and defense attorneys have ceded some of their power to prosecutors. The prosecutor’s power has led a host of commentators to critique prosecutorial use of power for a variety of reasons. Rather than add to this voluminous literature by defending or critiquing prosecutorial power, this Article challenges the underlying assumption of prosecutorial …

Federal Review Of State Criminal Convictions: A Structural Approach To Adequacy Doctrine, Eve Brensike Primus

Michigan Law Review

Modern state postconviction review systems feature procedural labyrinths so complicated and confusing that indigent defendants have no realistic prospect of complying with the rules. When defendants predictably fail to navigate these mazes, state and federal courts deem their claims procedurally defaulted and refuse to consider those claims on their merits. As a result, systemic violations of criminal procedure rights—like the right to effective counsel—persist without judicial correction.

But the law contains a tool that, if properly adapted, could bring these systemic problems to the attention of federal courts: procedural adequacy. Procedural adequacy doctrine gives federal courts the power to ignore …

Decriminalizing Childhood, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

Even though the number of juveniles arrested, tried and detained has recently declined, there are still a large number of delinquency cases, children under supervision by state officials, and children living in state facilities for youth and adults. Additionally, any positive developments in juvenile justice have not been evenly experienced by all youth. Juveniles living in urban areas are more likely to have their cases formally processed in the juvenile justice system rather than informally resolved. Further, the reach of the justice system has a particularly disparate effect on minority youth who tend to live in heavily-policed urban areas.

The …

Punishment, Liberalism, And Public Reason, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

The article argues for a conception of the justification of punishment that is compatible with a modern, politically liberal regime. Section I deals with what some have thought are the obvious social interests society has in punishing criminals, and tries to develop those possible interests somewhat sympathetically. Section II suggests that many of those reasons are not good ones if punishment is regarded (as it should be) from the perspective of political philosophy. Social responses to bad things happening to people cannot be grounded in controversial metaphysical views about what is good for people or what people deserve, but many …

Thinking Outside The Jury Box: Deploying The Grand Jury In The Guilty Plea Process, Roger Fairfax

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

There is near-universal agreement that the engine of the modern American criminal justice system is plea bargaining.'Given the ubiquity of plea bargaining, the Supreme Court and the rest of the legal community have begun setting their sights on how the practice might be better regulated. At the same time, many hold the view that the grand jury has outlived its usefulness in the administration of criminal justice and is a relic of a time gone by. Even before recent calls for the abolition of the grand jury in the wake of high-profile cases that seemed to cast the institution in …

A Federal Certificate Of Rehabilitation Program: Providing Federal Ex-Offenders More Opportunity For Successful Reentry, Lisa A. Rich

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Article is to propose a new federal certificate of rehabilitation program. The creation of such a program not only would help the thousands of federal offenders released back into their communities every year overcome employment barriers but would also serve as a model for states to use in addressing the need of their own burgeoning population of former offenders. In order to understand the magnitude of the problem, it is essential to understand the pool of offenders affected by their criminal history, the intent of the federal agencies to assist this disadvantaged group, and the barriers …

He Jiahong, Back From The Dead: Wrongful Convictions And Criminal Justice In China, Stanley B. Lubman

Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies

1In 1987, Teng Xingshan was sentenced to death for raping a woman and dismembering her body; wrongfully convicted, he was executed in 1989 – but in 1992 the “victim” returned home, and Teng was exonerated in 2005. His case is only one among numerous other tragic wrongful convictions discussed in Back From the Dead: Wrongful Convictions and Criminal Justice in China, by Professor He Jiahong (Renmin University Law School, Beijing). This book, the product of ten years of research, is a scholarly analysis of wrongful convictions that demonstrates deep system-wide flaws in China’s criminal justice system.

Culture As A Structural Problem In Indigent Defense, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

In Part I, I will describe the ways in which today's right-to-counsel challenges are similar to and different from those that faced the writers of the 1961 symposium. I will also explain in more detail why the structural conditions of criminal defense work to create (and, to some extent, always have created) a cultural problem in indigent defense delivery systems across the country. In Part II, I will discuss why I believe that we are, once again, facing a moment for potential reform, albeit reform that is different in scope and kind from that which was possible in the 1960s. …

How Much Punishment Is Enough?: Embracing Uncertainty In Modern Sentencing Reform, Jalila Jefferson-Bullock

Journal of Law and Policy

This article examines federal sentencing reform and embraces the principle of uncertainty in this process. In order to properly reapportion federal criminal sentencing laws, reformers must account for the impracticality of determining appropriate incarceration lengths at sentencing. Thus, this article proposes an alternative federal sentencing model that includes a sentencing effectiveness assessment tool to help lawmakers implement rational sentences that appropriately punish offenders, prepare them to successfully reenter society, and reduce recidivism rates. Modern sentencing reform should adopt constant review and evaluation of sentencing to measure effectiveness and ensure that appropriate sentences are implemented to avoid the pitfalls of an …

Trying To Fit A Square Peg Into A Round Hole: Why Title Ii Of The Americans With Disabilities Act Must Apply To All Law Enforcement Services, Michael Pecorini

Journal of Law and Policy

Police use of force has been subject to greater scrutiny in recent years in the wake of several high-profile killings of African Americans. Less attention, however, has been paid to the increasingly routine violent encounters between police and individuals with mental illness or intellectual and development disabilities (“I/DD”). This is particularly problematic, as police have become the de-facto first responders to these individuals and far too often police responses to these individuals result in tragedy.

This Note argues that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires law enforcement to provide reasonable accommodations during their interactions with and seizures of individuals with …

More Than Just A Potted Plant: A Court's Authority To Review Deferred Prosecution Agreements Under The Speedy Trial Act And Under Its Inherent Supervisory Power, Mary Miller

Michigan Law Review

In the last decade, the Department of Justice has increasingly relied on pretrial diversion agreements as a means of resolving corporate criminal cases short of prosecution. These pretrial diversion agreements—non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements—include substantive terms that a company must abide by for the duration of the agreement in order to avoid prosecution. When entering a deferred prosecution agreement, the Department of Justice files charges against the defendant corporation as well as an agreement outlining the variety of terms with which the company must comply. This delay in prosecution is permitted under the Speedy Trial Act, which provides an exception …

Plea Bargaining As Dialogue, Rinat Kitai-Sangero

Akron Law Review

This Article proposes turning plea bargaining into a dialogical process, which would result in lessening a defendant’s sense of alienation during the progress of the criminal justice procedure. This Article argues that plea bargaining constitutes an opportunity to circumvent restrictions existing during a trial or outside a trial, such as the inadmissibility of character evidence and the need for the victim's consent in restorative justice proceedings. This Article proposes to navigate the plea bargaining process in a way that creates a real dialogue with defendants. Such a dialogue can reduce the sense of alienation that defendants feel from their position …

Federalism, Federal Courts, And Victims' Rights, Michael E. Solimine, Kathryn Elvey

Catholic University Law Review

One of the most striking developments in American criminal law and procedure in the past four decades has been the widespread establishment of victims’ rights at both the federal and state levels. A conspicuous exception to the success of the victims’ rights movement has been the failure of Congress to pass a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would uniformly establish such rights in all federal and state courts. Advanced by both private organizations and state officials, and with bipartisan support in Congress, bills establishing a Victims’ Rights Amendment (VRA) have been introduced several times in the past three …

Mental Health Courts: Bridging Two Worlds, Honorable Matthew J. D’Emic

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

#Snitches Get Stitches: Witness Intimidation In The Age Of Facebook And Twitter, John Browning

Pace Law Review

In order to better understand witness intimidation in the age of social media, one must examine both the forms it has taken as well as the response by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. As this article points out, the digital age has brought with it a host of new ways in which witnesses may be subjected to online harassment and intimidation across multiple platforms, and those means have been used to target not only victims and fact witnesses but even prosecutors and expert witnesses as well. The article will also examine potential responses to the problem of witness …

Poor, Black And "Wanted": Criminal Justice In Ferguson And Baltimore, Michael Pinard

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Make Them Hear You: Participatory Defense And The Struggle For Criminal Justice Reform, Janet Moore, Marla Sandys, Raj Jayadev

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article introduces participatory defense as a powerful new model for improving public defense and challenging mass incarceration. This grassroots movement empowers the key stakeholders — people who face criminal charges, their families, and their communities — to become change agents who force greater transparency, accountability, and fairness from criminal justice systems. After introducing the model’s core principles and goals, the Article offers innovative analyses from doctrinal, theoretical and empirical perspectives. First, the Article connects participatory defense with the crisis-ridden history of the constitutional right to counsel, including that doctrine’s roots in the Due Process right to be heard. Second, …