Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
Reframing Hate, Lu-In Wang
Reframing Hate, Lu-In Wang
Articles
The concept and naming of “hate crime,” and the adoption of special laws to address it, provoked controversy and raised fundamental questions when they were introduced in the 1980s. In the decades since, neither hate crime itself nor those hotly debated questions have abated. To the contrary, hate crime has increased in recent years—although the prominent target groups have shifted over time—and the debate over hate crime laws has reignited as well. The still-open questions range from the philosophical to the doctrinal to the pragmatic: What justifies the enhanced punishment that hate crime laws impose based on the perpetrator’s motivation? …
White Vigilantism And The Racism Of Race-Neutrality, Christian Sundquist
White Vigilantism And The Racism Of Race-Neutrality, Christian Sundquist
Articles
Race-neutrality has long been touted in American law as central to promoting racial equality while guarding against race-based discrimination. And yet the legal doctrine of race-neutrality has perversely operated to shield claims of racial discrimination from judicial review while protecting discriminators from liability and punishment. This Article critiques the doctrine of race-neutrality by examining the law’s response to white vigilantism in the much-publicized criminal trials of Kyle Rittenhouse and that of Ahmaud Arbery’s assailants.
What We Think, What We Know And What We Think We Know About False Convictions, Samuel Gross
What We Think, What We Know And What We Think We Know About False Convictions, Samuel Gross
Articles
False convictions are notoriously difficult to study because they can neither be observed when they occur nor identified after the fact by any plausible research strategy. Our best shot is to collect data on those that come to light in legal proceedings that result in the exoneration of the convicted defendants. In May 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations released its first report, covering 873 exonerations from January 1989 through February 2012. By October 15, 2016, we had added 1,027 cases: 599 exonerations since March 1, 2012, and 428 that had already happened when we issued our initial report but …
Racial Disparity In Federal Criminal Sentences, M. Marit Rehavi, Sonja B. Starr
Racial Disparity In Federal Criminal Sentences, M. Marit Rehavi, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
Using rich data linking federal cases from arrest through to sentencing, we find that initial case and defendant characteristics, including arrest offense and criminal history, can explain most of the large raw racial disparity in federal sentences, but significant gaps remain. Across the distribution, blacks receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than those of comparable whites arrested for the same crimes. Most of this disparity can be explained by prosecutors’ initial charging decisions, particularly the filing of charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Ceteris paribus, the odds of black arrestees facing such a charge are 1.75 times higher than …
Did Booker Increase Sentencing Disparity? Why The Evidence Is Unpersuasive, Sonja B. Starr
Did Booker Increase Sentencing Disparity? Why The Evidence Is Unpersuasive, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
The Sentencing Commission’s recent report on the effects of United States v.Booker makes a number of very worri- some claims.The most alarming is that the gap in sen- tences between otherwise similar Black and White men has nearly quadrupled: from 4.5 percent before Booker, to 15 percent after it, to 19.5 percent after United States v. Kimbrough and United States v.Gall. 1 The Commission further claims that interjudge disparity has increased in two-thirds of the federal districts, and that interdistrict variation has also increased.2 If its findings were accurate, and if these changes could be causally attributed to Booker and …
On Estimating Disparity And Inferring Causation: Sur-Reply To The U.S. Sentencing Commission Staff, Sonja B. Starr, M. Marit Rehavi
On Estimating Disparity And Inferring Causation: Sur-Reply To The U.S. Sentencing Commission Staff, Sonja B. Starr, M. Marit Rehavi
Articles
In this Essay, Professors Starr and Rehavi respond to the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s empirical staff’s criticisms of their recent article, which found, contrary to the Commission’s prior work, no evidence that racial disparity in sentences increased in response to United States v. Booker. As Starr and Rehavi suggest, their differences with the Commission perhaps relate to differing objectives. The Commission staff’s reply expresses a lack of interest in identifying Booker’s causal effects; in contrast, that is Starr and Rehavi’s central objective. In addition, Starr and Rehavi’s approach also accounts for disparities arising throughout the post-arrest justice process, extending beyond the …
Mandatory Sentencing And Racial Disparity, Assessing The Role Of Prosecutors And The Effects Of Booker, Sonja B. Starr, M. Marit Rehavi
Mandatory Sentencing And Racial Disparity, Assessing The Role Of Prosecutors And The Effects Of Booker, Sonja B. Starr, M. Marit Rehavi
Articles
This Article presents new empirical evidence concerning the effects of United States v. Booker, which loosened the formerly mandatory U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, on racial disparities in federal criminal cases. Two serious limitations pervade existing empirical literature on sentencing disparities. First, studies focus on sentencing in isolation, controlling for the “presumptive sentence” or similar measures that themselves result from discretionary charging, plea-bargaining, and fact-finding processes. Any disparities in these earlier processes are excluded from the resulting sentence-disparity estimates. Our research has shown that this exclusion matters: pre-sentencing decision-making can have substantial sentence-disparity consequences. Second, existing studies have used loose causal inference …
Negotiating The Situation: The Reasonable Person In Context, Lu-In Wang
Negotiating The Situation: The Reasonable Person In Context, Lu-In Wang
Articles
This Essay argues that our understanding of the reasonable person in economic transactions should take into account an individual’s race, gender, or other group-based identity characteristics - not necessarily because persons differ on account of those characteristics, but because of how those characteristics influence the situations a person must negotiate. That is, individuals’ social identities constitute features not just of themselves, but also of the situations they inhabit. In economic transactions that involve social interaction, such as face-to-face negotiations, the actor’s race, gender, or other social identity can affect both an individual actor and those who interact with him or …
Road Work: Racial Profiling And Drug Interdiction On The Highway, Samuel R. Gross, Katherine Y. Bames
Road Work: Racial Profiling And Drug Interdiction On The Highway, Samuel R. Gross, Katherine Y. Bames
Articles
Hypocrisy about race is hardly new in America, but the content changes. Recently the spotlight has been on racial profiling. The story of Colonel Carl Williams of the New Jersey State Police is a wellknown example. On Sunday, February 28, 1999, the Newark Star Ledger published a lengthy interview with Williams in which he talked about race and drugs: "Today... the drug problem is cocaine or marijuana. It is most likely a minority group that's involved with that."4 Williams condemned racial profiling - "As far as racial profiling is concerned, that is absolutely not right. It never has been con-doned …
'Suitable Targets'? Parallels And Connections Between 'Hate Crimes' And 'Driving While Black', Lu-In Wang
'Suitable Targets'? Parallels And Connections Between 'Hate Crimes' And 'Driving While Black', Lu-In Wang
Articles
While hate crimes may tend to be less routine and more violent than discriminatory traffic stops, closer examination of each shows the need to complicate our understanding of both. The work of social scientists who have studied racial profiling reveals striking similarities and connections between these two practices. In particular, both hate crimes and racial profiling tend to be condemned only at extremes, in situations where they appear to be irrational and excessive, but overlooked in cases where they seem logical or are expected. The tendency to see only the most extreme cases as problematic, however, fails to recognize that …
Recognizing Opportunistic Bias Crimes, Lu-In Wang
Recognizing Opportunistic Bias Crimes, Lu-In Wang
Articles
The federal approach to punishing bias-motivated crimes is more limited than the state approach. Though the federal and state methods overlap in some respects, two features of the federal approach restrict its range of application. First, federal law prohibits a narrower range of conduct than do most state bias crimes laws. In order to be punishable under federal law, bias-motivated conduct must either constitute a federal crime or interfere with a federally protected right or activity-requirements that exclude racially motivated assault, property damage and many other common violent or destructive bias offenses. In most states, however, hate crimes encompass a …