Legal Studies Commons^™

High Expectations And Some Wounded Hopes: The Policy And Politics Of A Uniform Statute On Videotaping Custodial Interrogations, Andrew E. Taslitz

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Much has been written about the need to videotape the entire process of police interrogation of suspects. Videotaping discourages abusive interrogation techniques, improves police training in proper techniques, reduces frivolous suppression motions, and improves jury decision making about the voluntariness and accuracy of a confession. Despite these benefits, only a small number of states have adopted legislation mandating electronic recording of the entire interrogation process. In the hope of accelerating legislative adoption of this procedure and of improving the quality of such legislation, the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) ratified a uniform recording statute for consideration by the states. I was …

Veterans Court: Towards The Implementation Of A Collaborative Justice Model In San Luis Obispo County, Daniel Smee

Continuing Education (CAPSTONE)

Veterans’ treatment courts represent an emerging trend across the country of collaborative justice designed to deal with criminal justice issues stemming from problems linked to military service. This approach places the veteran in VA (Veterans Affairs) treatment programs as a diversion from incarceration. There are few such courts in California (nine) largely in non-rural counties. This study investigated two rural counties, Tulare and Santa Barbara with Veterans courts to develop a model for such a court in San Luis Obispo County. Early recidivism data at the one-year point for Tulare County showed a zero percent rate of criminal behavior (12 …

Justice And Efficiency: An Empirical Study On Simplified Procedure For Guilty Plea Cases, Bensen Li

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the simplified procedure for guilty plea cases emerged in the context of the rise of crime in China. It examines the effect of the simplified procedure and the relevance of the concept of guilty plea in practice, seeking to answer the questions such as: how efficient was it in process durations in the simplified procedure? Is there any difference for guilty plea cases in sentencing between simplified procedure and regular procedure cases? What is the core problem in considerations and relationship between justice and efficiency in the simplified procedure?

To answer these questions, the empirical study is …

Book Review, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Does The Lawyer Make A Difference? Public Defender V. Appointed Counsel, Peter A. Joy, Kevin C. Mcmunigal

Scholarship@WashULaw

A recent study found that poor criminal defendants in Philadelphia who were represented by court-appointed private lawyers were more often found guilty and sentenced to more time in prison than similarly situated defendants represented by public defenders. In this column, we review the details of the study, its findings, and its ethical and constitutional implications.

The North Carolina Racial Justice Act: An Essay On Substantive And Procedural Fairness In Death Penalty Litigation, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Overcriminalization For Lack Of Better Options: A Celebration Of Bill Stuntz, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

The unity of Bill Stuntz's character – his profound integrity – makes it easy to move from a celebration of his friendship (which I’ve treasured since we first met back in 1985) to one of his scholarship, for creativity, wisdom, and humility are strengths not just of Bill himself but of his work. Even as his broad brush strokes have fundamentally advanced our understanding of the interplay between substantive criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice institutions over time, Bill's work – like Bill himself – welcomes and endures sustained engagement. Humility is appropriate for me, too, as I offer …

Executions In America: How Constitutional Interpretation Has Restricted Capital Punishment, Andrea Paone

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

In upholding the constitutionality of capital punishment, the United States Supreme Court has utilized a strict construction interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, which has led the opponents of capital punishment to abandon the Due Process approach and look to the Eighth Amendment, for which the justices utilize a loose construction interpretation.

Construing The Outer Limits Of Sentencing Authority: A Proposed Bright-Line Rule For Noncapital Proportionality Review, Kevin White

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Proper Crime Recording As An Effective Feedback Tool In Articulating A Crime Policy, Kevin A. Unter

Georgia Journal of Public Policy

Crime policy is subject to the policy process just like other governmental policies.  An effective crime policy is one that reduces the amount of crime in a police department’s jurisdiction, e.g., the city.  Accordingly, crime policy consists of the same policy components – agenda setting, formulation, implementation, and feedback.  The implementation of any crime policy depends on the information collected by police departments, often through crimes reported to the department via 9-1-1 calls or brought to a police officer’s attention through proactive police work.  The success of that police work relative to the reported crime first depends on whether the …

Modifying The Restrictions On Sentence Modification: United States V. Cobb, Jackie Bosshardt

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sidestepping Deference: How United States V. Ressam Encourages Overly Stringent Review Of Sentencing Decisions, Joseph Leavitt

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Facing The Unfaceable: Dealing With Prosecutorial Denial In Postconviction Cases Of Actual Innocence, Aviva Orenstein

San Diego Law Review

This Article develops a question that intrigued Fred: prosecutors’ duties postconviction to prisoners who might be innocent. Although Fred wrote about a panoply of questions that arise regarding the prosecutor’s duty to “do justice” after conviction, this Article will address one specific area of concern: how and why prosecutors resist allowing DNA testing and, more startlingly, deny the obvious implications of DNA evidence when that evidence exonerates the convicted.

Part II of this Article briefly summarizes two of Fred’s major articles on the subject of prosecutorial ethics. Part III documents the problem of postconviction DNA exonerations and prosecutors’ varied reactions. …

The Political Economy Of Criminal Procedure Litigation, Anthony O'Rourke

Journal Articles

Criminal procedure has undergone several well-documented shifts in its doctrinal foundations since the Supreme Court first began to apply the Constitution’s criminal procedure protections to the States. This Article examines the ways in which the political economy of criminal litigation – specifically, the material conditions that determine which litigants are able to raise criminal procedure claims, and which of those litigants’ cases are appealed to the United States Supreme Court – has influenced these shifts. It offers a theoretical framework for understanding how the political economy of criminal litigation shapes constitutional doctrine, according to which an increase in the number …

Taking Money: The Politics Of Asset Forfeiture In The State Of Minnesota, Chad Hedman

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Is there a reason why a particular county might use asset forfeiture more than others? Asset forfeiture, in short, is law enforcement confiscating any items used in the act of committing a crime. As many governments face more budget crunches and deficits all means of revenue will become more vital to everyday operations. Everything gets reported back to the Minnesota State Auditor, where I was able to get complete data on every county. For variables such as education, race and others I drew from numerous government websites. I wanted to see if certain variables correlated with higher incidence of forfeiture. …

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 …

Do Ugly Criminals Receive Harsher Sentences? An Analysis Of Lookism In The Criminal Justice System, Kelly Beck

Business and Economics Honors Papers

For many years, researchers have attempted to find a link between beauty and labor market outcomes. Although many important findings have been noted in these studies, the beauty analysis utilized was a subjective measurement. This subjective method, while important, may have external factors creating bias in the rating itself. In this study, the impact of beauty is applied to criminals and their sentences. Using a computer based symmetry measurement tool, an objective beauty measurement will be utilized. This study will seek to uncover whether or not criminals who are less attractive, measured through facial symmetry, receive harsher prison sentences than …

Exporting U.S. Criminal Justice, Allegra M. Mcleod

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article explores how and why, in the Cold War’s wake, the U.S. government began to export U.S.-style criminal law and procedure models to developing and politically transitioning states. U.S. criminal law and development consultants now work in countries across the globe. This article reveals how U.S. initiatives have shaped state and non-state actors’ responses to a range of global challenges, even as this approach suffers from a deep democratic deficit. Further, this article argues that U.S. programs perpetuate U.S.-style legal institutional idolatry (which is often tied to systemic dysfunction both in the United States and abroad), and in so …

Constructing Systemic Safeguards Against Informant Perjury, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

Reliance on an informant's testimony as the primary basis for charging and convicting the accused is fraught with problems. While the hypothetical explicitly addresses the ethical dilemmas defense counsel faces when her client is trading false testimony in exchange for a reduced charge and shorter sentence, the hypothetical also implicitly illustrates the inadequacies of our criminal justice system's current handling of testimony from cooperating witnesses.

The focus on the ethical, and perhaps moral, obligations of Lawyer representing a potentially perjurious Client begs larger questions. Are there safeguards the prosecutor's office could employ to ensure that the trial prosecutor, who is …

Ensuring The Ethical Representation Of Clients In The Face Of Excessive Caseloads, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

The right of one charged with [a] crime to counsel may not be deemed fundamental and essential to fair trials in some countries, but it is in ours. From the very beginning, our state and national constitutions and laws have laid great emphasis on procedural and substantive safeguards designed to assure fair trials before impar-tial tribunals in which every defendant stands equal before the law. This noble ideal cannot be realized if the poor man charged with [a] crime has to face his accusers without a lawyer to assist him.

You can't give me too many cases, too many clients, …

Intimate Partner Violence: Criminal Justice Responses To High Lethality Cases, Victoria E. Collins

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the relationship between the level of violence suffered by the victim in a domestic violence relationship and the criminal justice responses to that violence, namely arrest, prosecution and the issuance of protective orders. Data was obtained from a nonprofit domestic violence agency in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The data was collected by agency staff from victims seeking assistance. This study found that female victims of domestic violence that suffered higher levels of violence at the hands of their abuser were more likely to be issued a protective order. Female victims who suffered higher levels of violence were not …

Detection Of Deception In Criminal Defendents: Treatment Or Trial?, Loran Noelle Bounds

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study is to determine how to detect whether a person is faking a mental illness. An area that is often malingered is insanity, where criminal defendents will fake that they are mentally ill as to avoid imprisonment or the death penalty. The death penalty is one of the most difficult defenses to raise and is rarely successful.

The C.A.P. Effect: Racial Profiling In The Ice Criminal Alien Program, Trevor George Gardner, Aarti Kohli

Scholarship@WashULaw

The goal of the Criminal Alien Program (CAP) is to improve safety by promoting federal-local partnerships to target serious criminal offenders for deportation. Indeed, the U.S. Congress has made clear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “should have no greater immigration enforcement priority than to remove deportable aliens with serious criminal histories from the United States…” The Warren Institute’s analysis of arrest data pursuant to an ICE-local partnership in Irving, Texas demonstrates that ICE is not following Congress’ mandate to focus resources on the deportation of immigrants with serious criminal histories.

This study also shows that immediately after Irving, Texas …

Table Of Contents, Volume 6, Number 3, 2008, The Death Penalty, Editorial Board

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Table of contents for a special issue on the topic of capital punishment.

Completely Unguided Discretion: Admitting Non-Statutory Aggravating And Non-Statutory Mitigating Evidence In Capital Sentencing Trials, Sharon Turlington

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “As an attorney practicing exclusively in the area of death penalty defense at the trial level for the last ten years, my perspective on the problems inherent in the system seems vastly different from that presented in academic research and even in case law. While most of the recent changes in death penalty law have focused on the right of the defendant to have sentencing enhancing elements of an offense proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, much of the evidence presented in an actual death penalty jury trial is non-statutory aggravation and non-statutory mitigation. Generally, non-statutory aggravating …

The Abolitionist’S Dilemma: Establishing The Standards For The Evolving Standards Of Decency, Dwight Aarons

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “For those who believe that the death penalty should be declared unconstitutional and that the U.S. Supreme Court is the institution that should make that declaration, these are interesting times. On one hand, the Rehnquist Court, which had previously not been a reliable friend of criminal defendants, in 2002, ruled that it was unconstitutional to execute mentally retarded defendants, and in 2005 it came to the same conclusion as to defendants who committed a capital crime before his or her eighteenth birthday. On the other hand, close scrutiny of these opinions evidences that the Court all but casts aside …

The Emerging Death Penalty Jurisprudence Of The Roberts Court, Kenneth C. Haas

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “In 1976, four years after finding the nation’s death penalty laws to be constitutionally flawed, the U.S. Supreme Court established the parameters of modern American death penalty jurisprudence. Since then the Court has gone through several phases. The Court proceeded cautiously from 1977 to 1982, limiting the death penalty to those who committed murder in a manner deemed especially heinous and despicable by judges and juries, requiring even-handedness and consistency in capital sentencing, and insisting that sentencing authorities examine the individual characteristics of each offender and the particular circumstances of his crime. From 1983 to 2001, however, the Court …

The Death Penalty And Reversible Error In Massachusetts, Alan Rogers

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “This article will survey Massachusetts homicide cases from 1805 to 1996 in which the SJC found reversible error. For comparative purposes, the data will be grouped into three periods: from 1805, the year the SJC began to publish its decisions, to 1891, the year original jurisdiction for homicide cases was transferred from the SJC to the Superior Court; 1892 to 1939, the year Massachusetts law allowed the SJC to review the facts as well as the law of capital cases; and from 1940 to 1996, the year Chief Justice Paul Liacos resigned from the court and the importance of …

Death Is Unconstitutional: How Capital Punishment Became Illegal In America—A Future History, Jur. Eric Engle Ph.D.

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “A constitution is an organic fact of every state: it is a part of the being of the state. People, like the state, also have a constitution—a character. Just as people change over time, so do states. But just as there are natural limits on what people can or cannot become, so there are natural limits on what the state can and cannot fairly do. No man, nor any group of men, ex ante may justly take the life of another person, though perhaps their killing may be excused (or forgiven) ex post.”

"The death of Death would surely …