Criminal Procedure Commons^™

Prosecuting The Crisis, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Over the past decade, activists and academics have celebrated the rise of the so-called “progressive prosecutor” movement. District attorney candidates—often former public defenders or civil rights lawyers—have promised to use prosecutorial discretion to address the injustices of the criminal system. A proliferation of such campaigns, and the electoral successes of some of these candidates have raised questions about progressive prosecution: what does it actually mean to be a progressive prosecutor? Does progressive prosecution work? Do progressive candidates follow through on campaign promises? And, how enthusiastic should defense attorneys, reformers, and critics of the carceral state be about progressive prosecution? The …

Opening The Virtual Window: How On-Line Processes Could Increase Access To Justice In The Criminal Legal System, Cynthia Alkon, Amy Schmitz

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the potential of technology to improve access to justice (A2J) in criminal courts, specifically for nonviolent misdemeanor cases. Despite a push for innovation in courts, criminal courts have been slow to embrace change and technological innovation due to factors like constitutional constraints and funding limitations. This article argues that criminal courts need "virtual windows" alongside traditional "brick and mortar doors" to enhance A2J. It proposes a problem-solving approach focusing on misdemeanor cases, a high-volume category where technology can have a significant impact. The paper highlights the importance of ensuring defendants make "knowing and intelligent" pleas despite the …

Extralegal Bias In The United States Military In Sexual Assault Cases, Taylor F. Blackston

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

By evaluating the case recommendations following a preliminary hearing from military sexual assault cases from fiscal years 2016-2018, this study aims to assess whether or not extralegal factors are influencing decisions of case recommendations of assigned convening authorities. Using secondary data from the Department of Defense’s annual reports on sexual assault in the United States military (n=5,171), this study aims to answer the following questions: Do extralegal factors contribute to convening authorities’ recommendations following Article 32 hearings? If so, what extralegal factors contribute to convening authority's decision on non-judicial hearing recommendations? The results of the following analyses identified several extralegal …

Judge Frankel’S Fifty-Year-Old Invitation To Reconstruct Sentencing, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

America was a different place at the time Judge Marvin Frankel penned his now-famous text Criminal Sentences: Law without Order in 1973. Richard Nixon was the U.S. president. The Vietnam War was ending. The Watergate scandal was unfolding. There was much to grab the public’s attention, and criminal sentencing was not a national or international headline. Just two years earlier, President Nixon had declared a war on drugs and targeted drug abuse as “public enemy number one,” but it would be over a decade before punitive mandatory minimum drug sentences would become our sentencing norm. At the time of …

Reconsidering A Private Right Of Action Under Vawa: How The Media Portrays Violence Against Women And Its Effect On Commerce Clause Jurisprudence, Lauren Chamberlin

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The note argues that the Violence Against Women Act's (VAWA) private right of action was a valid exercise of Congress's Commerce Clause powers, contrary to the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Morrison. It contends that gender-based violence substantially affects interstate commerce and that the Court's decision was influenced by outdated perceptions of such violence as a private matter. The article advocates for the reenactment of the private right of action, emphasizing the need for Congress, the courts, and the states to address the economic and societal impacts of gender-based violence.

Making Justice Available For Victims Of Sexual Misconduct Within The Prison System, Emma L. Bruder

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note advocates for amending the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) to include a private cause of action, enabling survivors of sexual misconduct in confinement to seek judicial remedies. This amendment would enforce their Eighth Amendment rights and address the limitations imposed by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), which hinders access to justice for incarcerated individuals.

Sentencing In An Era Of Plea Bargains, Jeffrey Bellin, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The literature offers inconsistent answers to a question that is foundational to criminal law: Who imposes sentences? Traditional narratives place sentencing responsibility in the hands of the judge. Yet, in a country where 95 percent of criminal convictions come from guilty pleas (not trials), modern American scholars center prosecutors – who control plea terms – as the decider of punishment. This Article highlights and seeks to resolve the tension between these conflicting narratives by charting the pathways by which sentences are determined in a system dominated by plea bargains.

After reviewing the empirical literature on sentence variation, state and federal …

The Incongruence Principle Of Evidence, Hillel J. Bavli

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Evidence law assumes that the meaning and value of information at trial is equal to the meaning and value of the same information in the real world. This premise underlies evidence policy, judicial applications of evidence law, and instructions to jurors for evaluating evidence. However, it is incorrect, and the law’s failure to recognize this hinders its aims of accuracy and equality.

In this article, I draw on fields outside of law - including Bayesian inference and cognitive psychology - to develop a model of evidence that describes how jurors combine new evidence with prior beliefs (or “priors”) to make …

Understanding Criminal Justice Innovations, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Burgeoning science and technology have provided the criminal justice system with the opportunity to address some of its shortcomings. And the criminal justice system has significant shortcomings. Among other issues, we have a mass incarceration problem; clearance rates are surprisingly low; there are serious concerns about wrongful convictions; and the system is layered with racial, religious, and other biases. Innovations that are widely used across industries, as well as those directed specifically at the criminal justice system, have the potential to improve upon such problems. But it is important to recognize that these innovations also have downsides, and criminal justice …

Knowledge Generation And Uncertainty In An Unpredictable Social World, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Megan T. Stevenson’s Article, Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World, is an incredibly important, deep, and thought-provoking argument explaining what we can learn about fundamental causal relationships when we observe few interventions with long-lasting, cascading consequences.¹ It is a profound reflection on empirical work in the social sciences.

The Article argues that we have found few, if any, well-identified policy levers that generate outsized, long-term positive impacts for those impacted by the criminal legal system. It offers several explanations for the lack of randomized control trial (“RCT”) evaluations with large, non-mechanical effects, but the …

America Is Watching, But Are They Listening?, Nancy Kartos

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The note examines the persistent issue of violence against Black people, particularly at the hands of police, and how social media has become a significant factor in hindering accountability. It draws historical parallels between past racial violence, such as lynchings during the Jim Crow era, and contemporary police brutality, highlighting how social media amplifies yet polarizes public discourse. The analysis critiques the legal system's failure to hold police accountable, with a focus on the doctrine of qualified immunity, and explores how political polarization exacerbates the problem. The note ultimately argues that without addressing these systemic and technological challenges, meaningful reform …

Mute Eloquence: A Gallery Of Contracting Emojis, Courtney Leon

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The increasing use of emojis in electronic communications, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has introduced complexity into contract law due to the lack of standardized interpretation. Courts are encountering disputes over emoji meanings, highlighting the need for a uniform framework. The proposed Emoji Codebook aims to address this by categorizing emojis and providing consistent interpretations, aligning with existing laws like the UCC and E-SIGN Act to facilitate clearer contract formation and mitigate misunderstandings.

The Prosecution Bar, William Ortman

Scholarly Works

The American legal profession needs a prosecution bar. Before lawyers are permitted to appear for the government in a criminal case, they should be licensed not just to practice law, but to practice prosecution. The two are not the same. Regulating them as if they were fosters injustice and fortifies the carceral state.

“Doing justice” is the orienting creed of prosecutorial ethics, in theory, while on the ground, American prosecutors routinely indulge in unjust practices. This Article argues that prosecutors’ membership in an undifferentiated legal profession is the key to understanding the contradiction. Lawyers’ training, socialization, and professional regulation fixate …

State V. Regan, 273 A.3d 116 (R.I. 2022), Rebecca Costello

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taming Dangerousness, Shima Baradaran Baughman

Faculty Scholarship

In every courtroom across the country each day, judges determine whether thousands of individuals are either released or held before trial. These speedy and seemingly minor decisions have profound impacts on an accused’s fate and on national incarceration rates. Indeed, over the last fifty years, these individual decisions have led to a four-hundred percent increase in pretrial detention in the United States. This increase in pretrial detention accounts for 99% of the jail growth in the last fifteen years, despite record decreases in arrest and crime rates. At the same time, the United States has witnessed three meaningful periods of …

Easing The Burden Of Survivors Of Domestic Violence Through The "One Family, One Judge" Court Model: Why Integrated Domestic Violence ("Idv") Courts Should Be Instituted Throughout The United States, Elka B. Blonder

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note advocates for the implementation of Integrated Domestic Violence (IDV) Courts nationwide, arguing that these courts provide a more efficient and supportive system for survivors of domestic violence by consolidating criminal, civil, and family cases under a single judge. This "one family, one judge" model aims to reduce the fragmentation and trauma survivors face in traditional court systems, offering a holistic approach that enhances survivor safety and offender accountability.

Title Theft, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

Real property owners across the country have been targeted by scammers who prepare deeds purporting to convey title to property the scammers do not own. Sometimes, the true owners are entirely unaware of these bogus transfers. In other instances, the scammers use misrepresentation to induce unsophisticated owners to sign documents they do not understand. Property doctrine protects owners against forgery and fraud—the primary vehicles scammers use in their efforts to transfer title. Owners enjoy protection not only against the scammers themselves, but generally against unsuspecting purchasers to whom the scammers transfer purported title. Recovery of title, however, involves costs and …

Crimes Of Suspicion, Lauryn P. Gouldin

Emory Law Journal

Requiring that officers have suspicion of specific crimes before they seize people during stops or arrests is a fundamental rule-of-law limitation on government power. Until very recently, the Supreme Court studiously avoided saying whether reasonable suspicion for street and traffic stops must be crime specific, and lower courts are sharply divided as a result. Statements made in Kansas v. Glover that the Fourth Amendment requires reasonable suspicion of a “particular crime” or of “specific criminal activity” may reflect an effort to rehabilitate this foundational principle, but crime specificity was not the Court’s focus in Glover. Meanwhile, Fourth Amendment scholars, even …

The Conflict Among African American Penal Interests: Rethinking Racial Equity In Criminal Procedure, Trevor George Gardner

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article argues that neither the criminal justice reform platform nor the penal abolition platform shows the ambition necessary to advance each of the primary African American interests in penal administration. It contends, first, that abolitionists have rightly called for a more robust conceptualization of racial equity in criminal procedure. Racial equity in criminal procedure should be considered in terms of both process at the level of the individual, and the number of criminal procedures at the level of the racial group—in terms of both the quality and “quantity” of stops, arrests, convictions, and the criminal sentencings that result in …

Unwinding “Law And Order”: How Second Look Mechanisms Resist Mass Incarceration And Increase Justice, Destiny Fullwood, Cecilia Bruni

Human Rights Brief

For decades, the United States has used incarceration to achieve a particularized version of safety. Amidst the civil rights movement, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater wielded the phrase “law and order” against the masses of Black men, women, and children in their fight for equitable treatment. This came at a time when “[i]t was no longer socially permissible for polite White people to say they opposed equal rights for Black Americans. Instead, they began ‘talking about the urban uprisings’” and “attaching [those] to street crime, to ordinary lawlessness[.]” The result was a decades-long, persistent campaign to maintain order by arresting and …