Criminal Procedure Commons^™

From Arbitrariness To Coherency In Sentencing: Reducing The Rate Of Imprisonment And Crime While Saving Billions Of Taxpayer Dollars, Mirko Bagaric

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Dealing with criminals and preventing crime is a paramount public policy issue. Sentencing law and practice is the means through which we ultimately deal with criminal offenders. Despite its importance and wide-ranging reforms in recent decades, sentencing remains an intellectual and normative wasteland. This has resulted in serious human rights violations of both criminals and victims, incalculable public revenue wastage, and a failure to implement effective measures to reduce crime. This Article attempts to bridge the gulf that exists between knowledge and practice in sentencing and lays the groundwork for a fair and efficient sentencing system. The Article focuses on …

Transforming Juvenile Justice: Making Doctrine Out Of Dicta In Graham V. Florida, Jason Zolle

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

In the late 1980s and 1990s, many state legislatures radically altered the way that their laws treated children accused of crimes. Responding to what was perceived of as an epidemic of juvenile violence, academics and policymakers began to think of child criminals as a "new breed" of incorrigible "superpredators." States responded by making it easier for prosecutors to try and sentence juveniles as adults, even making it mandatory in some circumstances. Yet in the past decade, the Supreme Court handed down four opinions that limit the states' ability to treat children as adults in the justice system. Roper v. Simmons …

Consecutive Misdemeanor Sentencing: Curing The Inequity , Gary R. Nicols, Harry M. Caldwell

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mandatory Chemical Castration For Perpetrators Of Sex Offenses Against Children: Following California's Lead, Peter J. Gimino Iii

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law Enforcement And Criminal Law Decisions, Erwin Chemerinsky

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reverberations Of The Victim's "Voice": Victim Impact Statements And The Cultural Project Of Punishment, Erin L. Sheley

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Pain, Love, And Voice: The Role Of Domestic Violence Victims In Sentencing, Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg, Dana Pugach

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Criminal law systems throughout the world have evolved to a stage where they no longer ask, "What is the appropriate role of the victim in a criminal trial?" The questions now relate to the scope of the victim's rights, in which procedures she has independent standing, and at what stage she should be heard. The process of the "prosecution stepping into the victim's shoes," whereby the state controls the entire criminal process, seemingly on behalf of the victim, has been replaced by the recognition that the interests of the prosecution (the State) are not always consistent with those of the …

Book Review, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond Experience: Getting Retributive Justice Right, Dan Markel, Chad Flanders, David C. Gray

All Faculty Scholarship

How central should hedonic adaptation be to the establishment of sentencing policy?

In earlier work, Professors Bronsteen, Buccafusco, and Masur (BBM) drew some normative significance from the psychological studies of adaptability for punishment policy. In particular, they argued that retributivists and utilitarians alike are obliged on pain of inconsistency to take account of the fact that most prisoners, most of the time, adapt to imprisonment in fairly short order, and therefore suffer much less than most of us would expect. They also argued that ex-prisoners don't adapt well upon re-entry to society and that social planners should consider their post-release …

From Harmelin To Graham - Justice Kennedy Stakes Out A Path To Proportional Punishment, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

Graham v. Florida³ is a groundbreaking decision because it revives punishment doctrine on two issues that have lain dormant since Harmelin v. Michigan⁴: proportionality and individualized sentencing. Although it doesn't overrule Harmelin, by recognizing the continued vitality of Weems⁵ and Solem ⁶ the Graham decision appears to acknowledge that the Court's approach to proportionality since Harmelin may be too restrictive for the U.S. justice system today. In Solem, the Court affirmed its Constitutional role in ensuring just punishment; in Graham, the Court reaffirms that role.

Harmelin has had an enormous and regrettable impact …

Statewide Capital Punishment: The Case For Eliminating Counties’ Role In The Death Penalty, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Retribution And The Experience Of Punishment, John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Drug Law Reform—Retreating From An Incarceration Addiction, Robert G. Lawson

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Now, thirty years into the "war on drugs," views about the law's reliance on punishment to fix the drug problem are less conciliatory and more absolute: "[t]he notion that 'the drug war is a failure' has become the common wisdom in academic ... circles." Those who have most closely studied the results of the "war" believe that it has "accomplished little more than incarcerating hundreds of thousands of individuals whose only crime was the possession of drugs." More importantly, they believe that it has had little if any effect on the drug problem: "Despite the fact that the number of …

Desert, Deontology, And Vengeance First Annual Edward J. Shoen Leading Scholars Symposium: Paul H. Robinson, Youngjae Lee

Faculty Scholarship

In a series of recent writings, Paul Robinson has defended “empirical desert” as the way of deriving distributive principles for determining who should be punished and by how much. Desert is, of course, an idea with a long history, and its precise role in criminal law has been much debated. In addressing various criticisms of desert in criminal law, Robinson distinguishes empirical desert from what he calls “deontological desert” and “vengeful desert.” Robinson’s strategy, which I call “divide and deflect,” fights off various objections traditionally leveled against the use of desert in criminal law by arguing that most of those …

Meditaciones Postmodernas Sobre El Castigo: Acerca De Los Límites De La Razón Y De Las Virtudes De La Aleatoriedad (Una Polémica Y Un Manifiesto Para El Siglo Xxi), Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Abstract in Spanish
Durante la Modernidad, el discurso sobre la pena ha girado circularmente en torno a tres grupos de interrogantes. El primero, surgido de la propia Ilustración, preguntaba: ¿En qué basa el soberano su derecho de penar? Nietzsche con mayor determinación, pero también otros, argumentaron que la propia pregunta implicaba ya su respuesta. Con el nacimiento de las ciencias sociales, este escepticismo hizo surgir un segundo conjunto de interrogantes: ¿Cuál es, entonces, la verdadera función de la pena? ¿Qué es lo que hacemos cuando penamos? Una serie de críticas ulteriores – de metanarrativas, funcionalistas o de objetividad científica – …

Liberty Lost: The Moral Case For Marijuana Law Reform, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

Marijuana policy analyses typically focus on the relative costs and benefits of present policy and its feasible alternatives. This Essay addresses a prior, threshold issue: whether marijuana criminal laws abridge fundamental individual rights, and if so, whether there are grounds that justify doing so. Over 700, 000 people are arrested annually for simple marijuana possession, a small but significant proportion of the 100 million Americans who have committed the same crime. In this Essay, we present a civil libertarian case for repealing marijuana possession laws. We put forward two arguments corresponding to the two distinct liberty concerns implicated by laws …

Rethinking The Constitutional Criminal Procedure Of Juvenile Transfer Hearings: Apprendi, Adult Punishment And Adult Process, Jenny E. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

This article makes valuable new contributions to the burgeoning scholarly discourse on Apprendi v. New Jersey-a landmark decision that celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. It builds on the author's experience as a public defender, during which she pioneered the surprising but straightforward argument that under Apprendi, findings that justify transferring a juvenile to adult court must be proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Apprendi requires that any fact authorizing a sentence higher than the otherwise applicable statutory maximum must be found by a jury using a beyond a reasonable doubt standard. This tenet applies directly to juvenile …

Prosecuting Torturers, Protecting "Child Molesters": Toward A Power Balance Model Of Criminal Process For International Human Rights Law, Mykola Sorochinsky

Michigan Journal of International Law

In the age of terrorism, human rights law globally suffers substantial setbacks. However, at the regional level, human rights law is now more relevant than ever. More cases are decided each year by regional human rights tribunals, particularly in Europe. More importantly, human rights law affects more areas of domestic legal systems than ever before-from trademark law to limits on corporal punishment of children. This growing complexity presents two challenges: first, the challenge of comprehension (or the increasing need to make sense of the ever-expanding case law in many substantive areas) and second, the challenge of responsibility (or the fact …

Drug Law Reform--Retreating From An Incarceration Addiction, Robert G. Lawson

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Neoliberal Penality: A Brief Genealogy, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The turn of the twenty first century witnessed important shifts in punishment practices. The most shocking is mass incarceration – the exponential rise in prisoners in state and federal penitentiaries and in county jails beginning in 1973. It is tempting to view these developments as evidence of something new that emerged in the 1970s – of a new culture of control, a new penology, or a new turn to biopower. But it would be a mistake to place too much emphasis on the 1970s since most of the recent trends have antecedents and parallels in the early twentieth century. It …

Post-Modern Meditations On Punishment: On The Limits Of Reason And The Virtues Of Randomization, Bernard E. Harcourt, Alon Harel, Ken Levy, Michael M. O'Hear, Alice Ristroph

Faculty Scholarship

In this Criminal Law Conversation (Robinson, Ferzan & Garvey, eds., Oxford 2009), the authors debate whether there is a role for randomization in the penal sphere - in the criminal law, in policing, and in punishment theory. In his Tanner lectures back in 1987, Jon Elster had argued that there was no role for chance in the criminal law: “I do not think there are any arguments for incorporating lotteries in present-day criminal law,” Elster declared. Bernard Harcourt takes a very different position and embraces chance in the penal sphere, arguing that randomization is often the only way to avoid …

Torture, Necessity, And Supreme Emergency: Law And Morality At The End Of Law, Zachary R. Calo

Scholarly Works

This paper employs Michael Walzer's concept of "Supreme Emergency" to address the permissibility of torture under conditions of necessity. It proposes moving beyond both utilitarian and deontological approaches to legal authority in order to understood necessity as a moral category. A full account of right action under conditions of necessity therefore demands taking account of the distinct yet cooperative function provided by legal and moral norms. A political official might therefore possess moral but not legal warrant to act in contravention of binding legal norms. Preserving the validity of law is essential to the economy of social reconstitution in the …

The Jurisprudence Of Punishment, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

No abstract provided.

Neuroimaging And The "Complexity" Of Capital Punishment, O. Carter Snead

Journal Articles

The growing use of brain imaging technology to explore the causes of morally, socially, and legally relevant behavior is the subject of much discussion and controversy in both scholarly and popular circles. From the efforts of cognitive neuroscientists in the courtroom and the public square, the contours of a project to transform capital sentencing both in principle and in practice have emerged. In the short term, these scientists seek to play a role in the process of capital sentencing by serving as mitigation experts for defendants, invoking neuroimaging research on the roots of criminal violence to support their arguments. Over …

One Small Step: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Federal Sentencing System , Matthew Jill

ExpressO

The federal sentencing guidelines, which focus on offense based statistical consistency, had a ripple effect that molded the entire federal sentencing system in it’s wake; this article is an individual case study demonstrating the flaws of a consistency based sentencing system, the injustice such a system can create, and why United States v. Booker is only the first step in creating a fair and effective sentencing system.

The Political Market For Criminal Justice, Rachel E. Barkow

Michigan Law Review

In 2004, the number of individuals incarcerated in the United States exceeded the two million mark. The current incarceration rate in the United States is 726 per 100,000 residents, the highest incarceration rate in the Western world and a dramatic increase from just three decades ago. Not only are more people serving time, but sentences have markedly lengthened. What should we make of these trends? The answer has been easy for most legal scholars: to them, the incarceration rate in the United States is too high, and reforms are necessary to lower sentences. But many political leaders and voters reach …

Crime, Criminals, And Competitive Crime Control, Wayne A. Logan

Michigan Law Review

Given the negative consequences of crime, it should come as no surprise that states will endeavor to make their dominions less hospitable to potential criminal actors. This predisposition, when played out on a national stage, would appear ripe for a dynamic in which states will seek to "out-tough" one another, leading to a spiral of detrimental competitiveness. Doran Teichman, in an article recently appearing in these pages, advances just such a view. Teichman posits that the decentralized structure of America's federalist system provides states with "an incentive to increasingly harshen" their crime control efforts, with the net result being excessive …

Decentralizing Crime Control: The Political Economy Perspective, Doron Teichman

Michigan Law Review

In an article recently published on the pages of this Law Review, The Market for Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control, and Jurisdictional Competition ("The Market"), I put forward a theory of crime control in a decentralized government. Specifically, I made three distinct claims. First, criminal justice policies affect the geographic decision of criminals as to where to commit their crimes. Other things being equal, criminal activity will tend to shift to areas in which the expected sanction is lower. Second, local jurisdictions attempting to lower their crime rates will react to policies adopted by neighboring jurisdictions and try …

The Model Federal Sentencing Guidelines Project: Sentencing Factors Applicable To All Offense Types, Model Sentencing Guidelines §3.1 - 3.6, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This Article is the ninth of twelve parts of a set of Model Federal Sentencing Guidelines designed to illustrate the feasibility and advantages of a simplified approach to federal sentencing proposed by the Constitution Project Sentencing Initiative. The Model Sentencing Guidelines and the Constitution Project report are all to be published in Volume 18, Number 5 of the Federal Sentencing Reporter. The project is described in an essay titled 'Tis a Gift To Be Simple: A Model Reform of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

The Year Of Jubilee Or Maybe Not: Some Preliminary Observations About The Operation Of The Federal Sentencing System After Booker, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This segment of the project contains the offense seriousness portion of the simplified sentencing table employed in the Model Sentencing Guidelines. The Article also contains drafter's commentary explaining the offense seriousness scale of the table, how it interacts with other portions of the Model Guidelines, and the policy choices behind the simplified table.