Source: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/crimprof_blog/page/2/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 20:14:48+00:00

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Even after the Supreme Court declared the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines unconstitutional and advisory only, federal judges continue to impose advisory Guidelines sentences in a large number of sentencing proceedings. Judges continue to employ the Guidelines, even though the Guidelines are overly punitive and even though the U.S. Sentencing Commission does not take into consideration the thousands of collateral consequences that those convicted of federal felonies face after serving a period of incarceration. Why? This essay explains why federal sentencing judges should discontinue such heavy reliance on the advisory Sentencing Guidelines ranges.
Bruce Jacob, former Dean of the Stetson University College of Law and long-time faculty member of various institutions, is famous for having argued Gideon v. Wainwright before the Supreme Court. What many do not know, however, is that Bruce argued a perhaps equally important case to the Warren Court five years later. And this time he won. The case, Kaufman v. United States, established that inmates, whether federal or state, may use federal habeas corpus to challenge Fourth Amendment violations. Unfortunately, this result was short-lived. Within ten years it had been replaced by another Supreme Court decision, Stone v. Powell, put in place by a new and more conservative Burger Court. This short piece describes Bruce's efforts in the Kaufman case, the Court's holding, its legacy, and the career of the story's deuteragonist (before and after prison), Harold Kaufman.
Criminals engender no community sympathy and have no political capital. This is part of the reason that the United States has the highest prison population on earth, and by a considerable margin. Incarceration levels grew four-fold over the past forty years. Despite this, America is now experiencing an unprecedented phenomenon whereby many states are now simultaneously implementing measures to reduce prison numbers. The unusual aspect of this is that the response is not coordinated; nor is it consistent in its approach, but the movement is unmistakable. This ground up approach to reducing prison numbers suffers from the misgiving that it is an ineffective solution to a complex issue. While prison numbers are reducing, it is at a glacial rate. Pursuant to current trends, it would take five decades to reach incarceration levels that are in keeping with historical levels in the United States, and which are in line with prison numbers in most other countries.
Everyone knows that fingerprint evidence can be extremely incriminating. What is less clear is whether the way that a fingerprint examiner describes that evidence influences the weight lay jurors assign to it. This essay describes an experiment testing how lay people respond to different presentations of fingerprint evidence in a hypothetical criminal case. We find that people attach more weight to the evidence when the fingerprint examiner indicates that he believes or knows that the defendant is the source of the print. When the examiner offers a weaker, but more scientifically justifiable, conclusion, the evidence is given less weight. However, people do not value the evidence any more or less when the examiner uses very strong language to indicate that the defendant is the source of the print versus weaker source identification language. We also find that cross-examination designed to highlight weaknesses in the fingerprint evidence has no impact regardless of which type of conclusion the examiner offers. We conclude by considering implications for ongoing reform efforts.
Common private-ordering theories predict that merchants have an incentive to act honestly because if they do not, they will get a bad reputation and their future businesses will suffer. In these theories, cheating is cheating whether the cheat is big or small. But while reputa­tion-based private ordering may constrain the big cheat, it does not necessarily constrain the small cheat because of the difficulty in discover­ing certain types of low-level cheating and the consequent failure of the disciplining power of reputation. Yet the small cheat presents a signifi­cant challenge to modern contracting, both between businesses and in the contracts of adhesion imposed on consumers. To encourage private law scholars to address the unique governance challenges posed by low-level cheating, this Essay describes the conditions under which low-level cheating can flourish and become widespread. It demonstrates this so-called “Cheating Pays” scenario using a historical case study in which a seventeenth-century London grocer, trading under precisely those condi­tions that private-ordering theories predict will incentivize honesty, not only cheated extensively but also successfully remained in business after having been caught and publicly punished. Identifying the scenarios in which cheating pays has implications for how firms use contracts and how consumers might use the courts to try to reduce opportunistic behavior.
"Michigan attorney general launches wrongful conviction unit"
"ACLU files class action lawsuit in Michigan over broken bail system"
The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed a class action suit against magistrates, a chief judge and the county sheriff who preside over arraignments in Detroit, alleging that their broken bail system discriminates against the poor who cannot afford to pay the amounts.
With the high rates of poverty impacting Detroit, the ACLU alleges more and more citizens are being unfairly impacted by the bail system who are picked up on minor offenses. The lawsuit claims that there are right to counsel violations because most clients do not have an attorney when bail is set. The class action attempts to narrow who can be jailed while awaiting conviction and speeds up detention hearings, so citizens are not being detained for long periods of time for failing to post bail.
It is generally agreed that to be morally, and in the US, constitutionally, permissible, the death penalty must accord with human dignity. I argue that it does not. To this end, I sketch a conception of dignity, embedded in Kantian moral theory, which helps assess when violations of dignity take place, as well as appreciate the high moral stakes such violations involve.
This symposium presents case studies of the often difficult ethical and tactical issues confronted by lawyers for social justice movements. These case studies were developed by the pairing of movement lawyers with legal ethicists and enriched by the discussions at the Movement Lawyering Ethics Roundtable. They seek to provide guidance to lawyers facing these recurrent issues. This issue also includes an essay entitled "rebuilding the Ethical Compass of the Law" and reading guides with selected bibliographies.
U.S. v. Davis: Whether the subsection-specific definition of “crime of violence” in 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(3)(B), which applies only in the limited context of a federal criminal prosecution for possessing, using or carrying a firearm in connection with acts comprising such a crime, is unconstitutionally vague.
McDonough v. Smith: Whether the statute of limitations for a Section 1983 claim based on fabrication of evidence in criminal proceedings begins to run when those proceedings terminate in the defendant’s favor, as the majority of circuits have held, or whether it begins to run when the defendant becomes aware of the tainted evidence and its improper use, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit held below.
For many years, American legislatures have been steadily attaching a wide range of legal consequences to convictions — and sometimes even just charges — for crimes that are classified as “violent.” These consequences affect many key aspects of the criminal process, including pretrial detention, eligibility for pretrial diversion, sentencing, eligibility for parole and other opportunities for release from incarceration, and the length and intensity of supervision in the community. The consequences can also affect a person’s legal status and rights long after the sentence for the underlying offense has been served. A conviction for a violent crime can result in registration requirements, lifetime disqualification from employment in certain fields, and a loss of parental rights, among many other “collateral consequences.” While a criminal conviction of any sort relegates a person to a kind of second-class citizenship in the United States, a conviction for a violent crime increasingly seems even more momentous — pushing the person into a veritable third-class citizenship.
Foregrounding Paul Butler's book Chokehold, James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own, and Angela J. Davis' Policing the Black Man, this symposium offers a wide ranging, comprehensive, and critical discussion of structural inequality and its devastating manifestations in the criminal justice system. Exploring three interlocking oppressive features of the criminal justice system, this symposium unpacks structural inequality by analyzing: (i) the societal presumption of Black criminality and violence, and how this rationalizes and reinforces a structural chokehold on African-Americans; (ii) the complex systemic relationships between Black leadership, crime policy, and decision-making leading to disproportionate incarceration rates for African-American males; and (iii) systemic practices from racial profiling to a flawed grand jury system that insulates unjustified violence and police misconduct from scrutiny at trial. The symposium integrates several distinct conceptual approaches to theorizing the disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system.

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