Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Extralegal Punishment Factors: A Study Of Forgiveness, Hardship, Good-Deeds, Apology, Remorse, And Other Such Discretionary Factors In Assessing Criminal Punishment, Paul H. Robinson, Sean Jackowitz, Daniel M. Bartels

All Faculty Scholarship

The criminal law's formal criteria for assessing punishment are typically contained in criminal codes, the rules of which fix an offender's liability and the grade of the offense. A look at how the punishment decision-making process actually works, however, suggests that courts and other decisionmakers frequently go beyond the formal legal factors and take account of what might be called "extralegal punishment factors" (XPFs).

XPFs, the subject of this Article, include matters as diverse as an offender's apology, remorse, history of good or bad deeds, public acknowledgment of guilt, special talents, old age, extralegal suffering from the offense, as well …

The Machinery Of Criminal Justice, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Two centuries ago, the American criminal justice was run primarily by laymen. Jury trials passed moral judgment on crimes, vindicated victims and innocent defendants, and denounced the guilty. But over the last two centuries, lawyers have taken over the process, silencing victims and defendants and, in many cases, substituting a plea-bargaining system for the voice of the jury. The public sees little of how this assembly-line justice works, and victims and defendants have largely lost their day in court. As a result, victims rarely hear defendants express remorse and apologize, and defendants rarely receive forgiveness. This lawyerized machinery has purchased …

Regulating The Plea-Bargaining Market: From Caveat Emptor To Consumer Protection, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Padilla v. Kentucky was a watershed in the Court’s turn to regulating plea bargaining. For decades, the Supreme Court has focused on jury trials as the central subject of criminal procedure, with only modest and ineffective procedural regulation of guilty pleas. This older view treated trials as the norm, was indifferent to sentencing, trusted judges and juries to protect innocence, and drew clean lines excluding civil proceedings and collateral consequences from its purview. In United States v. Ruiz in 2002, the Court began to focus on the realities of the plea process itself, but did so only half-way. Not until …

Final Report Of The Maldivian Penal Law & Sentencing Codification Project: Text Of Draft Code (Volume 1) And Official Commentary (Volume 2), Paul H. Robinson, Criminal Law Research Group -- University Of Pennsylvania

All Faculty Scholarship

The United Nations Development Programme and the Government of the Maldives commissioned the drafting of a penal code based upon existing Maldivian law, which meant primarily a codification of Shari'a. This is the Final Report of that codification project. A description of the process that produced this Report and the drafting principles behind it, as well as a discussion of the special challenges of codifying Islamic criminal law, are contained in an article at http://ssrn.com/abstract=941443.