Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons^™

Private Affairs: Public Employees And The Right To Sexual Privacy, Susan A. Jacobsen

Cleveland State Law Review

Currently, the federal circuit courts split on whether public employers can discipline their employees for legal, off-duty sexual activity. The Fifth and Tenth Circuits permit discipline in these scenarios; the Ninth Circuit does not. At issue is whether certain public employees, like police officers, should be held to a higher standard because of their duty to the public or whether the Constitution entitles them to privacy rights that shield them from discipline. This Note concludes the latter and argues against punishing the legal, off-duty sexual conduct of all public employees. Because the right to sexual privacy already exists within the …

Emergency Parole Release For Older Parole-Eligible Doc Inmates, David I. Bruck

Scholarly Articles

Professor Bruck writes to Secretary Moran and Chairwoman Bennett to urge them to protect elderly Virginia prison inmates from the risk of death from COVID-19 by granting immediate parole release to as many over-60 parole-eligible prisoners as possible, upon a showing that they are at low risk to re-offend, and have a supportive home to go to once released.

Atoning For Dred Scott And Plessy While Substantially Abolishing The Death Penalty, Scott W. Howe

Washington Law Review

Has the Supreme Court adequately atoned for Dred Scott and Plessy? A Court majority has never confessed and apologized for the horrors associated with those decisions. And the horrors are so great that Dred Scott and Plessy have become the anti-canon of constitutional law. Given the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the Court’s historical complicity in the brutal campaign against African Americans, this Article contends that the Court could appropriately do more to atone.

The Article asserts that the Court could profitably pursue atonement while abolishing capital punishment for aggravated murder. The Article shows why substantial abolition of the capital sanction would …

Psychopathy And Police Officers: A Cross-Sectional Analysis Of The Relationship Between Psychopathic Traits And Police Work Across Temporal Factors, Hunter N. Moore

Student Theses

It’s estimated that psychopathic personalities constitute about 1% of the general population but is seen at elevated rates in particularly stressful and harsh environments (Babiak & Hare, 2006; Hare, 1996). A career in law enforcement is one known to be uniquely stressful (Lucas et al., 2012), and the trauma from their career seems to be having an impact on their personality (Wills & Schuldberg, 2016). While psychopathy traits have been reported in police officers (Próchniak, 2012), these traits have yet to be assessed as a function of time. The current study explores these relationships by assessing psychopathy traits, as measured …

Pre-Report Review Of Body-Worn Camera Footage: An Examination Of Stakeholder Beliefs, Laypeople’S Judgments Of Officer Credibility, And The Consequences For Memory, Kristyn A. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Aim: This dissertation examines people’s beliefs about police officer access to body-worn camera footage, people’s judgments of officer credibility as it relates to video footage, and the consequences that review of footage has on reporting accuracy.

Rationale: With escalating police-civilian tensions in 2014, American police departments adopted body-worn camera programs. A majority of departments have policies allowing officers unrestricted access to camera footage. Because officers fear that inconsistencies between reports and videos could result in suspicion of officer deceit, they argue that officers should have access to footage before writing their reports to ensure reports match the footage. Yet, because …

Civil Rights Ecosystems, Joanna C. Schwartz

Michigan Law Review

The Philadelphia and Houston Police Departments are similarly sized, but over a recent two-year period, ten times more civil rights suits were filed against Philadelphia and its officers than were filed against Houston and its officers. Plaintiffs in cases brought against Philadelphia and its officers were awarded one hundred times more in settlements and judgments. What accounts for these differences? Although the frequency and severity of misconduct and injury may play some role, I contend that the volume and outcome of civil rights litigation against any given jurisdiction should be understood as a product of what I call its civil …

Decriminalizing Non-Appearance In Washington State: The Problem And Solutions For Washington’S Bail Jumping Statute And Court Nonappearance, Aleksandrea Johnson

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

May The State Punish What It May Not Prevent?, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

In Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought? I defended an overlooked principle of criminalization that I called the Enforceability Constraint. The Enforceability Constraint holds that the state may punish transgressions of a given type only if the state in principle may forcibly disrupt such transgressions on the ground that they are criminal wrongs. As I argued in the essay, the reason why the state is forbidden from punishing thought is that the state is forbidden from forcibly disrupting a person’s mental states on the ground that they are criminally wrongful (as opposed to, say, on the ground that they …

Beat The Heat: Texas’S Need To Reduce Summer Temperatures In Offender Housing, Mary E. Adair

St. Mary's Law Journal

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s lack of air conditioning in offender housing areas is a violation of the Eighth Amendment and deprives offenders of humane living conditions. Unlike most Texans, offenders housed in the TDCJ are unable to adequately protect themselves from the higher, prolonged summer temperatures. Most Texas prisons do not provide air conditioning or other types of cooling systems in offender housing areas, so offenders are at the mercy of the elements with little protection against heat-related illnesses. Several jurisdictions, other than Texas, have recognized extreme temperatures in housing areas can lead to constitutional violations because the …

Federal Sentencing: A Judge’S Personal Sentencing Journey Told Through The Voices Of Offenders He Sentenced, Mark W. Bennett

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Federal sentencing is a tragic mess. Thirty years of conflicting legislative experiments began with high hopes but resulted in mass incarceration. Federal sentences, especially in drug cases, are all too often bone-crushingly severe.

In this Article, the Honorable Mark Bennett, a retired federal judge, shares about his journey with federal sentencing and his strong disagreement with the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines by telling the stories of some of the 400 men and women he sentenced during his twenty-five years as a federal judge.

Reforming Federal Sentencing: A Call For Equality-Infused Menschlichkeit, Nora V. Demleitner

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

This piece, which serves as an Introduction to the Symposium Issue of the Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice, addresses both questions of pedagogy and federal sentencing. It starts by highlighting the value of a symposium on federal sentencing as a teaching, research, and advocacy tool before it turns to sentencing reform specifically.

Federal sentencing remains a highly contested area because it raises stark questions of equality and equitable treatment. Sentencing has long been unfair to minority defendants, African-Americans in particular, though the guidelines have in part mitigated racial disparities. Still the injustices perpetuated through …

Sentencing Disparities And The Dangerous Perpetuation Of Racial Bias, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

This Article addresses the role that racial disparities—specifically sentencing disparities—play in perpetuating the racial bias that increases the daily danger of living as a Black American in the United States. As documented in the news and by sometimes humorous internet memes, White people have called the police many times to report Black people who were simply living as any other American. This trend highlights the manner in which the U.S. criminal justice system’s racial inequities feed into biased beliefs about Black criminality. This Article argues that instead of tackling implicit bias as a means to fight sentencing and other criminal …

Technology’S Influence On Federal Sentencing: Past, Present, And Future, Matthew G. Rowland

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The comprehensive reforms that govern today’s federal sentencing processes were fashioned nearly forty years ago. Those reforms were designed to address concerns regarding the effectiveness, transparency, and fairness of the preexisting indeterminant sentencing system. Today, criticisms are mounting against the very reforms that were once held out to save the sentencing process. The more determinant system is being accused of being biased against minorities, overly harsh, and costly.

This Article explores how the criminal justice system might look to technology and build on the practical experience from the indeterminant and determinant systems. Tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help …

Crime And Punishment: Considering Prison Disciplinary Sanctions As Grounds For Departure Under The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, Madison Peace

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

There are currently over 175,000 federal inmates in the United States, 146,000 of whom are held in custody by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. When an inmate in federal prison commits a federal crime, he can be both sanctioned by the Federal Bureau of Prisons and referred to a United States Attorney for prosecution of the crime in federal district court. In the federal district court, a judge will look to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines as a starting point to determine an appropriate sentence.

One question that the U.S. Sentencing Commission has not addressed, and on which federal appellate courts …

Article Iii Adultification Of Kids: History, Mystery, And Troubling Implications Of Federal Youth Transfers, Mae C. Quinn, Grace R. Mclaughlin

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

There is no federal juvenile court system in the United States. Rather, teens can face charges in Article III courts and can be transferred to be tried and sentenced as adults in these venues. This Article is the first of two articles in the Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice seeking to shed light on the largely invisible processes and populations involved in federal youth prosecution. This Article focuses on the federal transfer and prosecution of American youth as adults. It considers constitutional and statutory law relating to these federal transfers and then considers why current …

Law School News: Rwu Law Professors, Aclu Seek Release For All Ice Detainees At Wyatt 05-18-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Multi-Jurisdictional Anti-Corruption Enforcement: Time For A Global Approach, Sharon Oded

Journal of Law and Policy

With the rise of globalization, foreign corruption has become a prominent enemy of the world’s economy. Over time, numerous international initiatives―such as the OECD and United Nations conventions against foreign corruption―have enlisted a growing number of sovereign states to join in the global war against that enemy. As a consequence, global enhancement of anti-foreign corruption enforcement often results in duplicative, multi-jurisdictional enforcement, such that multiple enforcement actions are initiated against the same corporation by several authorities, in one or more jurisdictions, in relation to the same misconduct. This phenomenon, which was recently addressed by the US Department of Justice in …

The Unqualified Mess Of Qualified Immunity; A Doctrine Worth Overruling, Allison Weiss

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

This comment is a response to Ryan E. Johnson, Note, Supervisors Without Supervision: Colon, McKenna, and the Confusing State of Supervisory Liability in the Second Circuit, 77 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 457 (2020), which received the 2019 Washington and Lee Law Council Law Review Award.

In his note, Ryan Johnson drills down on the various ways that courts within the Second Circuit are approaching the viability of § 1983 lawsuits by incarcerated individuals against supervisors within correctional facilities. But how important is supervisory liability in the first place? Qualified immunity allows courts, as Mr. Johnson puts …

From First Steps To Second Chances: Addressing Mass Incarceration In State Prisons, Molly Connor

Notre Dame Law Review

In order to address mass incarceration meaningfully, Congress must pass legislation aimed at reducing state prison populations. The legislation’s name (the First Step Act) suggests there will be follow-up legislation—that Congress’s end goal has yet to be fully realized. This Note explores the details of the First Step Act with an eye toward drafting the “Second Step Act” in a way that adequately addresses the root causes of mass incarceration. In Part I, this Note discusses the events leading up to the passage of the First Step Act and its key provisions addressing sentencing reform and rehabilitative programming. Part II …

The Violence Of Nosy Questions, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Essay examines a little-studied aspect of police procedure: police officers’ unfettered power to ask questions of motorists. The questions officers ask after they have stopped a car can run the gamut from questions about the nature of the motorist’s travel plans to nosy personal questions. Such questions are often intrusive, and drivers report feeling degraded by having to answer them. This Essay argues that these questions should be regulated because giving officers complete control over what they ask motorists provides a significant space for racial discrimination in policing, creates resentment, and encourages minorities to distrust the police.