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- Criminal law; criminal justice system; criminal legal system; Victim; Victim Rights; Victim’s Rights; prosecution (1)
- Criminal law; criminal justice system; criminal legal system; racial inequality; police violence; institutional racism; structural racism; criminal reform (1)
- Education; Integration; Equity; Adequacy Suits; Education Clause; Education Article; New York State State Constitution (1)
- Policing; White-supremacy; Far-right Extremism; Criminal Procedure (1)
- Race; Sentencing; Parole; criminal supervision; victims’ rights; victim impact statements; victim impact evidence; criminal law; criminal justice system; criminal legal system (1)
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- Reproductive Justice; Environmental Justice; Reparations; Medicaid Expansion; Environmental Racism (1)
- STEM; gender gap; diversity; patents; universities; systemic racism; intellectual property (1)
- Victim; Victim Rights; Victim’s Rights; criminal law; criminal justice system; criminal legal system; reform (1)
Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
Should Victims’ Views Influence Prosecutors’ Decisions?, Bruce A. Green, Brandon P. Ruben
Should Victims’ Views Influence Prosecutors’ Decisions?, Bruce A. Green, Brandon P. Ruben
Brooklyn Law Review
This article seeks to promote a conversation about how prosecutors, particularly in misdemeanor cases with identifiable victims, should take account of what victims want, including what they regard as the just result. The criminal law assumes that victims want retribution, which means incarcerating offenders, and prosecutors’ offices largely accept that premise. We argue that in a process that generally is weighted toward punishment and excessive use of state power, prosecutors should ascertain victims’ actual views and take them into account as a counterweight. That is, when prosecutors would otherwise pursue a misdemeanor prosecution, they should generally defer to victims’ informed …
Blame The Victim: How Mistreatment By The State Is Used To Legitimize Police Violence, Tamara Rice Lave
Blame The Victim: How Mistreatment By The State Is Used To Legitimize Police Violence, Tamara Rice Lave
Brooklyn Law Review
The surprising thing about George Floyd is not that he was killed by the police. What is remarkable is that the officer who killed him was charged, convicted, and sentenced to more than twenty-two years in prison. This article examines the institutional mechanisms that support police violence against Black people. In the process, it illuminates the insidious ways in which state actors exploit structural social, economic, and health mistreatment to legitimize police violence. After exploring these issues, this article provides suggestions to reform our institutions in a manner that will bring about meaningful and lasting change.
Parole, Victim Impact Evidence, And Race, Alexis Karteron
Parole, Victim Impact Evidence, And Race, Alexis Karteron
Brooklyn Law Review
Parole offers the possibility of release for a substantial number of incarcerated people in the United States, the world’s largest jailer, but is seriously understudied. In particular, the role of victims and race in the parole decision-making process deserves attention. Decades of research has shown that the “race-of-victim effect” leads to more punitive sentences when white victimhood is at issue. In the parole context, the ubiquity of victim impact statements and the emotional responses they trigger raise the likelihood that the “race-of-victim effect” plagues parole decision-making as well. This essay calls for greater data collection and scrutiny into the role …
The Victim/Offender Overlap And Criminal System Reform, Cynthia Godsoe
The Victim/Offender Overlap And Criminal System Reform, Cynthia Godsoe
Brooklyn Law Review
Victimization makes people more likely to harm others, and vice versa. In short, “hurt people hurt people.” This victim/offender overlap is especially pronounced in sexual and violent offenses. Unfortunately, the criminal law continues to imagine victims and offenders in two different and mutually exclusive categories, each rigidly defined and morally laden. I first encountered this phenomenon while representing teenagers termed “crossover youth” due to their being both in the foster care system and the juvenile criminal system, and was surprised to find so little on this topic in the criminal law literature. Beginning to fill this gap is an important …
Down And Dirty: Remedies And Reparations For Intersected Environmental And Reproductive Justice, Mickaela J. Fouad
Down And Dirty: Remedies And Reparations For Intersected Environmental And Reproductive Justice, Mickaela J. Fouad
Brooklyn Law Review
Pollution is a rampant issue in the United States, ranging from smog-filled air to infertile soil to contaminated water. Yet despite the pervasive nature of pollution, its harms are not equally distributed amongst society. Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities disproportionately bear the burden of pollution and consequently suffer more harms because of it. Many of the health consequences from pollution are reproductive in nature: proximity to pollution can compromise fertility, cause difficulty in carrying a pregnancy to term and result in birth defects, disabilities, and reproductive cancers. This note focuses on the reproductive consequences of pollution and relies …
New York’S School Segregation Crisis: Open The Court Doors Now, Gus Ipsen
New York’S School Segregation Crisis: Open The Court Doors Now, Gus Ipsen
Brooklyn Law Review
New York has the most segregated public school system of any state in America. Nearly seven decades removed from the US Supreme Court’s seminal ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, New York has done little beyond clearing Brown’s baseline mandate of not explicitly segregating students on the basis of race. In part, the forces that shape admissions policies—politics, bigotry, and powerful parents, to highlight a few—have been left unchecked because the transcendent power of the state’s courts has been sealed off. In 2003, the New York Court of Appeals in Paynter v. State firmly shut the door on plaintiffs …
Sy-Stem-Ic Bias: An Exploration Of Gender And Race Representation On University Patents, Jordana R. Goodman
Sy-Stem-Ic Bias: An Exploration Of Gender And Race Representation On University Patents, Jordana R. Goodman
Brooklyn Law Review
People of color and women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields in the United States. Through both intentional and unintentional structural barriers, universities continue to lose valuable intellectual resources by perpetuating a lack of gender, racial, and ethnic diversity as people climb the academic ladder. Identifying racial and gender disparities between university campus populations and their patent representation quantifies the qualitatively observed systemic racism and sexism plaguing STEM. Without data quantifying the underrepresentation of women and people of color, specifically when protecting their intellectual property rights, universities cannot show that their programs designed to close these …
White Supremacy’S Police Siege On The United States Capitol, Vida B. Johnson
White Supremacy’S Police Siege On The United States Capitol, Vida B. Johnson
Brooklyn Law Review
On January 6, 2021, law enforcement failed the people and the institutions it was supposed to protect. This article explores how white supremacy and far-right extremism in policing contributed to the insurrection at the Capitol. Police officers enabled the siege of the Capitol, participated in the attack, and failed to take seriously the threat posed by white supremacists and other far-right groups. The debacle is emblematic of the myriad problems in law enforcement that people of color, scholars, and those in the defund and abolitionist movements have been warning about for years. Police complicity in the attack on the Capitol …