Sentencing Law and Policy

"Plea Bargaining Abolitionism: A History"

The title of this post is the title of this new piece authored by William Ortman now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

How does a tragedy on the scale of mass incarceration happen?  Scholarship has focused on the carceral appetite of politicians, criminal justice practitioners, and the public. R ightly so, but mass incarceration took more.  On paper, American law has a built-in check on carceral appetites: a labor-intensive system of criminal adjudication via trials. Yet as mass incarceration wreaked havoc in the 1980s and beyond, that system barely registered.  It had been supplanted, over the previous century, by a form of adjudication far better suited to punitive fervor.  Plea bargaining enabled mass incarceration.  If only Americans had been warned about plea bargaining before it was too late, maybe the catastrophe could have been avoided.

Except that they — we — were warned.  In the 1970s, an unlikely assortment of academics, prosecutors, judges, and even a Nixon-administration crime commission sought to rally the country to abolish plea bargaining.  While they did not speak in unison, they were united by a conviction that the system of plea bargaining that had matured in mid-century American courts was fundamentally unjust.

Plea bargaining abolitionists in the 1970s tried to tell us that something basic had gone wrong with the criminal process.  Perhaps predictably, the broader legal profession didn’t heed the warning.  When prosecutors and judges attempted to formally ban plea bargaining — as they did in Alaska, El Paso, and elsewhere — other prosecutors and judges, joined by defense lawyers, found ways to circumvent them.  And when scholars and politicians decried the injustice of plea bargaining, they were told to be more realistic.

"Fighting Crime Requires More Police and Less Prosecution"

The title of this post is the headline of this notable new Bloomberg opinion piece by Justin Fox than is built around an interview with Jennifer Doleac (WaPo reprint here).  Here is the set up to the Q&A in the article:

The nationwide jump in shootings and homicides early in the pandemic and the rise in other crimes that followed in some places have made crime a hot topic again in the US.  It has been a prominent one for academic research for a while, with economists in particular flocking to the field as a testing ground for research strategies that aim to sift causes from data. To get a sense of how recent findings fit with the national discussion on crime, I talked to Jennifer Doleac, an economist at Texas A&M University who not only studies crime but hosts a podcast on new research, Probable Causation, and has organized the Criminal Justice Expert Panel, which sums up expert opinion on crime questions.  This summer, Doleac, who has also written a few columns for Bloomberg Opinion, will become executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, a leading funder of crime research.  Following is a much-abridged transcript of our conversation and a list of research papers referred to in it.

I highly recommend the full piece, but here are snippets of likely interest to sentencing fans:

JD: [Research shows] first-time offenders are sort of at a fork in the road.  We can either hope it’s enough of a wake-up call that they’ve been arrested and had to come into court, and they’ll change course on their own, or we can pull them into the system.  I’ve become a big proponent of erring toward leniency in those sorts of situations.

There’s been other work to suggest similar things with nonviolent felony defendants. There’s a whole bunch of work on pretrial detention and the fact that locking people up pretrial has a really detrimental, causal effect on their future trajectories.  They’re more likely to plead guilty in that initial case but also more likely to re-offend in the future....

The main thing I try to point out to policymakers is we don’t have to fully understand why we are here to come up with ideas of what to do about it.  We can have ideas about what to do about violent crime that don’t require us solving this problem that we might never solve.

JF:  What are some top candidates?

JD: Putting more police on the streets reduces homicide, reduces violent crime.  There’s plenty of research on that. There are also plenty of discussions now about the potential social costs of over-policing, so it’s reasonable to have conversations about whether that is the route you want to go.  Also, it’s really hard to recruit police right now.

We know that increasing the probability of getting caught for crimes has a big deterrent effect in a way that potentially locking people up for 20 years on the back end does not.  No one is looking that far ahead.  Putting cameras everywhere, adding more people to DNA databases will increase the probability that you get caught if you offend.  We have lots of good evidence that would deter crime....

Leniency toward first-time offenders in the long run is probably a good investment.  Another thing is increasing access to mental health care.  There’s this amazing paper using data from South Carolina showing that when we kick kids off Medicaid at age 19, when it becomes much harder to stay on Medicaid, you just see all the kids get kicked off and then in the other graph you see everyone immediately locked up.  It’s these kids who were using Medicaid to get mental health treatment, they’re the ones that are now at very high risk of being locked up.

New comments from Justice Breyer on punishment, sentencing, prisons, the death penalty and more

The Marshall Project has just released this notable and lengthy Q&A with retired SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer, which covers a number of topic that should be of interest to sentencing fans.  For full context and coverage, everyone should check out the full piece.  Here are just a few snippets that especially caught my eye:

Once, years ago, I asked Norm Carlson, who was a very distinguished and really well-respected head of the Bureau of Prisons.  We worked on the original [Sentencing Commission] guidelines.  We were talking about recidivism.  And I said, “Well, Norman, you’ve had years of experience.  You're very, very respected. If it were up to you, what would you do to reduce recidivism rates?”  And he said, as I recall, “To be honest, I don't know.”

And so people have all kinds of ideas, and it's worth trying different ones.  But it's hard to do.  It's hard — very, very hard — to do. The [federal sentencing] guidelines were an effort — and still are an effort — to have fairer sentences, to allow the judges to understand the sentence they give will be the sentence that’s served, and moreover, [to] try to prevent wide discrepancies for the same crime, same kind of criminal across the country in different places.  So how well has that succeeded?  Like most things in the criminal law, up to a point. And I think with experience over time, perhaps it will be better....

[The death penalty] is so unfairly administered.  There's neither rhyme nor reason.  The whole point of this criminal justice system is fairness. Is justice.  That's why it's called “criminal justice.”  And that is not an oxymoron, at least in theory.  So when I see that time after time, after time — I'm not saying “You're all innocent.”  But there are a couple of cases where I really wonder.

I thought, “What can I do?” It's not a big deal for the world that I would go out and announce I'm against the death penalty.  I want to do something, if I'm going to do this, that really explains what I've seen.  And that's what I tried to do in Glossip.  And it tries to explain to other people, who can explain it to state legislatures.  And all it is, is what I've seen over a couple of decades.  And by the way, it's going to get awful expensive.  Why reconsider it?  Because you can't have both: a system that is basically fair, a system that works honestly, a system that tries to treat people equally, and also have a death penalty, as I've seen it over 20 years.

"Restorative Justice as a Democratic Practice"

The title of this post is the title of this new article recently posted to SSRN authored by Daniel McConkie.  Here is its abstract:

Our criminal justice system, to be truly democratic, should be more responsive to those most affected by it, and this calls for significant participation from citizens.  Unfortunately, the state-centered, professionalized system sidelines citizens at every stage, failing to give them voice and power.  Instead, the system should be consistent with criminal justice citizenship, which refers to the rights and privileges of ordinary people to participate directly in certain aspects of the criminal justice system and to deliberate in some of its workings.  That form of citizenship is essential to democracy, or rule by the people.

Restorative justice, especially where it is centered in community courts, is an ideal reform to strengthen criminal justice citizenship, and therefore democracy itself.  Restorative justice seeks to address and repair crime’s harms through a deliberative process that fosters mutual understanding and acceptance of responsibility; involves the stakeholders of crime directly in the process; posits a smaller role for the state; and promotes the rehabilitation and reintegration of wrongdoers into civil society.  Restorative justice strengthens democracy by fostering each of the three key aspects of criminal justice citizenship.  First, restorative justice can provide many opportunities for lay participation and collective civic action to address not only individual crimes but also broader issues in a community. Second, restorative justice processes foster deliberation.  They give voice to the key stakeholders and encourage dialogue, understanding, collaboration and creativity in repairing harms.  Third, restorative justice strengthens membership, which refers to citizens’ belonging to a community as civic equals.  It does so by inviting key stakeholders, broadly defined, to play a role in seeking to repair the harms of crime.  This promotes a shared commitment to the social order and accountability to others.

In order to realize the benefits of restorative justice as a democratic practice, reformers should continue to promote grassroots community court experiments that involve as many stakeholders as possible.  These experiments can help to reduce the size of the carceral state.

Justice Gorsuch (joined by Justice Jackson) talks up Excessive Fines Clause after SCOTUS majority finds tax forfeiture is a taking

A civil case on the Supreme Court's docket that I have been watching as the Term winds down is Tyler v. Hennepin County, Minnesota, which presented these issues: (1) Whether taking and selling a home to satisfy a debt to the government, and keeping the surplus value as a windfall, violates the Fifth Amendment's takings clause; and (2) whether the forfeiture of property worth far more than needed to satisfy a debt, plus interest, penalties, and costs, is a fine within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment.  The Supreme Court this morning handed down a unanimous opinion in Tyler, and the opinion for the Court, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, concludes this way:

The Takings Clause “was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.” Armstrong, 364 U.S., at 49.  A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed.  The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.

Because we find that Tyler has plausibly alleged a taking under the Fifth Amendment, and she agrees that relief under “the Takings Clause would fully remedy [her] harm,” we need not decide whether she has also alleged an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment. Tr. of Oral Arg. 27. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit is reversed.

But while the Court as a whole dodged the Eighth Amendment's Excessive Fines Clause, a concurring opinion by Justice Gorsuch (joined by Justice Jackson) had lots to say on the topic.  Here are a few passages from a short concurrence:

Given its Takings Clause holding, the Court understandably declines to pass on the question whether the Eighth Circuit committed a further error when it dismissed Ms. Tyler’s claim under the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause. Ante, at 14.  But even a cursory review of the District Court’s excessive-fines analysis — which the Eighth Circuit adopted as “well-reasoned,” 26 F. 4th 789, 794 (2022) — reveals that it too contains mistakes future lower courts should not be quick to emulate.

First, the District Court concluded that the Minnesota tax-forfeiture scheme is not punitive because “its primary purpose” is “remedial” — aimed, in other words, at “compensat[ing] the government for lost revenues due to the nonpayment of taxes.” 505 F. Supp. 3d 879, 896 (Minn. 2020).  That primary-purpose test finds no support in our law. Because “sanctions frequently serve more than one purpose,” this Court has said that the Excessive Fines Clause applies to any statutory scheme that “serv[es] in part to punish.” Austin v. United States, 509 U.S. 602, 610 (1993) (emphasis added).  It matters not whether the scheme has a remedial purpose, even a predominantly remedial purpose.  So long as the law “cannot fairly be said solely to serve a remedial purpose,” the Excessive Fines Clause applies.  Ibid. (emphasis added; internal quotation marks omitted)....

Second, the District Court asserted that the Minnesota tax-forfeiture scheme cannot “be punitive because it actually confers a windfall on the delinquent taxpayer when the value of the property that is forfeited is less than the amount of taxes owed.” 505 F. Supp. 3d, at 896.  That observation may be factually true, but it is legally irrelevant.  Some prisoners better themselves behind bars; some addicts credit court-ordered rehabilitation with saving their lives.  But punishment remains punishment all the same....

Third, the District Court appears to have inferred that the Minnesota scheme is not “punitive” because it does not turn on the “culpability” of the individual property owner.  505 F. Supp. 3d, at 897.  But while a focus on “culpability” can sometimes make a provision “look more like punishment,” this Court has never endorsed the converse view.  Austin, 509 U.S., at 619.  Even without emphasizing culpability, this Court has said a statutory scheme may still be punitive where it serves another “goal of punishment,” such as “[d]eterrence.”  United States v. Bajakajian, 524 U.S. 321, 329 (1998).  And the District Court expressly approved the Minnesota tax-forfeiture scheme in this case in large part because “‘the ultimate possibility of loss of property serves as a deterrent to those taxpayers considering tax delinquency.’” 505 F. Supp. 3d, at 899 (emphasis added).  Economic penalties imposed to deter willful noncompliance with the law are fines by any other name.  And the Constitution has something to say about them: They cannot be excessive.

Should every state have a dedicated commission to receive complaints about prosecutors?

The question in the title of this post was my first reaction to the news of a commission just created in Georgia.  This AP piece, headlined "Georgia enacts law letting panel punish, oust prosecutors," provides these details:

Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill into law Friday creating a new commission empowered to discipline and remove wayward prosecutors, saying it will curb “far-left prosecutors” who are “making our communities less safe.”

Kemp made the remarks at the Chatham County Sheriff's Office in Savannah, where he signed the measure establishing the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission, which will launch July 1 and start accepting complaints Oct. 1....

The efforts continue anti-crime campaigns that Republicans ran nationwide last year, accusing Democrats of coddling criminals and improperly refusing to prosecute whole categories of crimes, including marijuana possession.

Georgia Democrats strenuously opposed the measure, saying the Republican legislative majority was seeking another way to impose its will on Democratic voters at the local level....

Crucially, the Georgia law mandates that a prosecutor must consider every case for which probable cause exists and can’t exclude categories of cases from prosecution. Experts have said that considering every case individually is unrealistic, because prosecutors turn down many more cases than they charge. However, it’s unclear if the new law will change prosecutors’ behavior or just lead them to avoid talking publicly about charging decisions.

The eight-member commission will include six current or former prosecutors and two other lawyers. It will oversee DAs and solicitors general — elected prosecutors who handle lower-level crimes in some counties....

The law was born from frustrations involving a white Republican prosecutor in suburban Atlanta who was indicted for bribery related to sexual harassment claims. He lingered in office until he pleaded guilty to unprofessional conduct and resigned in 2022.

Some Democrats were interested in similar measures for a time because of Jackie Johnson, a coastal Georgia DA who was charged with hindering the police investigation into the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Democratic interest cooled after voters ousted Johnson.

The rules could also target prosecutors who declared before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 that they wouldn't prosecute abortion-related offenses. Seven current Georgia DAs fit that description.

Though the AP piece leans into the political dynamics driving some debates over prosecutorial behaviors, this official press release from Gov Kemp notes that the new Georgia Commission can and will be policing local prosecutors on various fronts:

Governor Brian P. Kemp, accompanied by First Lady Marty Kemp, members of the General Assembly, district attorneys and solicitors-general, and other local and state leaders, signed Senate Bill 92 today, establishing the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission (PAQC). The PAQC will serve as a valuable oversight mechanism for district attorneys and solicitors-general across Georgia, ensuring these officials fulfill their constitutional and statutory duties....

The bill establishes the following grounds for the removal or involuntary retirement of a district attorney or solicitor-general from office:

• Mental or physical incapacity that interferes with the performance of duties that is likely permanent;
• Willful misconduct in office;
• Willful and persistent failure to carry out statutory duties;
• Conviction of a crime involving moral turpitude;
• Conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice which brings the office into disrepute; or
• Knowingly authorizing or permitting an assistant district attorney or assistant solicitor-general to commit any of the aforementioned acts.

To parrot this press release, I sincerely think it would be a great idea to have a "valuable oversight mechanism for district attorneys" in every state (and for federal prosecutors, too).  I have often heard from persons who sincerely believe they have witnessed a prosecutor engage in "willful misconduct" or "conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice which brings the office into disrepute"; so creating a central commission (comprised mostly of former and current prosecutors) to hear complaints about, and conduct any needed investigations of, the work of prosecutors makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, like many government entitles, if unduly politicized or problematically ideological, this commission could possibly do more harm than good.  But, given the general lack of transparency and accountability for prosecutorial actions and practices, I am inclined to be hopeful about this new PAQC.

"Evidence Rules for Decarceration"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Erin Collins and available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

Two observations about the operation of the criminal legal system are so widely accepted that they are seem undeniable: First, it is a system of pleas, not trials.  Second, the system is too punitive and must be reformed.  One could easily think, therefore, that the Rules of Evidence, which apply intentionally and explicitly only to the adjudicatory phase of criminal procedure, have nothing to do with the solution.  And legal scholarship focusing on decarceration largely reflects this assumption: while many have explored reforms that target front end system actors and processes that lead people into the system (e.g. police, prosecutors, broad criminal statutes), and back end reforms that that seek to lessen the toll of punitive policies (sentencing reform, alternatives to incarceration), markedly fewer have explored how what happens in the middle — adjudication — contributes to mass incarceration.

While this oversight makes sense, it is not justified because it is also equally undeniable that plea bargaining happens in the shadow of trial.  This Essay examines how the shadow of trial — specifically, the shadow cast by evidentiary rulings about the accused person’s past — contributes to the perpetuation of an expansive carceral state.  It identifies how evidence rules have been relaxed, tweaked, specialized, or unmoored from their foundational principles in ways that facilitate prosecution and conviction or essentially force plea deals — without regard for the truth, fairness, or justice of the outcome.  In other words, it identifies ways that evidence law undermines the Rules’ primary purpose, which is to advance fair proceedings “to the end of ascertaining the truth and securing a just determination.”

"Against the Recidivist Premium"

The title of this post is the title of this paper authored by Guha Krishnamurthi recently posted to SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

The American penal system is broken.  The state of mass incarceration is wreaking havoc on individuals, families, and communities. And these effects are unequally levied upon and borne by communities of color and the poor.  This state of affairs is morally odious and intolerable.  One main component of mass incarceration is the deployment of the “recidivist premium” — that is, the imposition of additional punishment on repeat offenders compared to first time offenders who commit the same offense.  This Article contends that, in light of our reasons for punishment, the recidivist premium is unjustified and indeed harmful.  As a result, I argue that, on our current state of information, we should abolish our penal system’s deployment of the recidivist premium.

This Article sets forth the comprehensive case against the use of the recidivist premium.  First, I show that the recidivist premium does not accord with our retributive theories of desert.  Then, I explain that, on our best empirical evidence, the recidivist premium does not further the principal consequentialist benefits of punishment, namely deterrence and incapacitation.  Finally, I show that the recidivist premium does not advance the desiderata of sentencing design, including consistency, calculability, predictability, and efficiency.

To live up to our ideals of equality and human dignity, we must restore the rights of those convicted of crimes when they reenter society and treat them as full members of their polity.  Any differential treatment must be specially and rigorously justified.  The recidivist premium does not satisfy that demanding standard, and thus it should not stand.

Highlighting US Sentencing Commission's significant amendments to federal guidelines' criminal history rules

The highest profile amendment to the federal sentencing guidelines promulgated by the US Sentencing Commission last week (basics here) concerns a major revision of § 1B1.13 setting terms for a "Reduction in Term of Imprionment under 18 U.S.C § 3582(c)(1)(A)" (discussed here).  But the most consequential amendment might prove to be new provisions altering how criminal history will impact guideline calculations.  USSC Chair Reeves discussed in his statement at last week's hearing (just some of) the particulars:

[W]e have proposed addressing two discrete ways in which the sentencing guidelines punish people for having a “criminal history.”  The first proposal aimed to reduce or eliminate the use of “status points,” which are sentencing enhancements given to people who committed a crime while on parole or probation.  As we heard from many commenters, status points often amount to a form of “double penalty.”...  Moreover, Commission research strongly suggests that status points’ ability to predict recidivism -- a core justification for their use -- may be extremely weak.

In light of all this, the Commission’s final policy eliminates status points in the vast majority of criminal cases. For a limited category of defendants with extensive criminal histories, we are cutting the effect of status points in half, reflecting the idea that this tool may sometimes achieve other goals beyond predicting recidivism.

The second “criminal history” proposal we issued sought to fulfill a core directive Congress gave the Commission at its inception.  That directive says that, in general, “a first offender who has not been convicted of a crime of violence or an otherwise serious offense” should not be incarcerated.  The Commission’s proposal sought to define who met this standard and what the consequences for meeting this standard should be.

Ultimately, we decided to answer both questions broadly.  Our final policy provides a larger reduction in sentence for a larger category of people than the status quo.  While we agreed to limit this reduction in a limited set of circumstances, we also agreed to give judges discretion to expand non-carceral options to more people.

These two items concerning "status points" and "zero-point-offenders" are the big ticket criminal history matters, though the Commission also adds to its examples of overrepresented criminal history cases involving criminal history points resulting from marijuana possession convictions. 

As detailed here, the Commission has officially sought comment on whether it should make the key parts of its new criminal history amendment "available for retroactive application."  The Commission states that a "retroactivity impact analysis will be made available to the public as soon as practicable."  I suspect that analysis will show these criminal histpry changes could impact many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of federal prisoners.  This June 2022 report from the Commission detailed that "over one-third of federal offenders (37.5%) received two 'status points' under §4A1.1(d) as part of their criminal history scores."  And this 2022 USSC Quick Facts accounting of federal prisoners noted that almost 30% "have little or no prior criminal history."  Though not all these populations would clearly benefit from retroactive application of the new criminal history rules, a sizeable number likely would.   

Retroactivity dynamics aside, it appears from Table 23 in the USSC's latest annual data on criminal history scores that over 60% of federal defendants sentences in fiscal year 2022 had either had zero criminal history points (33.9%) or received status points (26.7%).  In other words, the data suggest that more future federal defendants will be impacted by these criminal history amendments than won't be.  In short, these are relatively small criminal history changes sure to have a relatively big impact.

Tenth Circuit deepens split over considering retribution in revocation of federal supervised release

In this post a few weeks ago, I flagged a recent Congressional Research Service document which fully detailed a jurisprudential divide among the circuits over justifications for supervised release revocation.  As that document detailed: 

The federal appeals courts disagree as to whether, and to what extent, retribution may justify the revocation of supervised release in light of this statutory omission. On one side of the divide, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the First, Second, Third, Sixth, and Seventh Circuits have held that federal courts may consider retribution in making revocation decisions. On the other side, the Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Circuits have concluded that courts either may not consider retribution in these decisions at all or may consider it only to a limited degree.

Notably, yesterday a Tenth Circuit panel jumped into the action and agreed with the minority of other circuit via US v. Booker, No. 22-7000 (10th Cir. March 28, 2023) (available here). Here is how the 17-page opinion in Booker gets started:

After Donald Joe Booker, Jr. repeatedly violated the terms of his supervised release, the district court revoked his supervision and sentenced him to twenty-four months in prison, the statutory maximum.  For the first time on appeal, Mr. Booker argues that the district court erroneously based his sentence for violating supervised release on retribution whereas the statute governing the revocation of supervised release implicitly prohibits considering retribution.  See 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e).

We review Mr. Booker’s sentence for plain error.  Clarifying the scope of 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e), we hold that district courts may not modify or revoke a term of supervised release based on the need for retribution.  Because the district court quoted from a § 3553(a) sentencing factor representing retribution, we conclude that the district court erred. But even assuming this error was plain, Mr. Booker has not shown that it affected his substantial rights because we conclude there is no reasonable probability that his sentence would have been shorter had the court not erred. Exercising jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 and 18 U.S.C. § 3742(a), we AFFIRM Mr. Booker’s twenty-four-month sentence.

Because of the plain error issue, this new Booker case would likely not make a good vehicle for SCOTUS to resolve this deep circuit divide over supervised release decision-making. (And, as a silly aside, I certainly would not be keen to have another major "Booker" sentencing ruling.)  But, given US Sentencing Commission data showing over 20,000 supervised release violation hearings taking place every year, there are on average nearly 100 federal defendants at least potentially impacted by this jurisprudential divide every single day in federal courts.  SCOTUS really should resolve this matter sooner rather than later if we think some semblance of equal justice is of importance in our federal criminal sentencing systems.

"In Their Names: The Untold Story of Victims’ Rights, Mass Incarceration, and the Future of Public Safety"

The title of this post is the title of this recently published book authored by Lenore Anderson.  I am pleased that I will have an opportunity to speak with the author and one of her colleagues during this event this coming Wednesday at 12noon.  Here is the event description:

Lenore Anderson has built her career on reforming criminal justice, both in her previous position as chief of policy in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and in her current role as co-founder and president of Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ).  In her debut book, "In Their Names: The Untold Story of Victims’ Rights, Mass Incarceration, and the Future of Public Safety," Anderson examines how the United States’ focus on victims’ rights often perpetuates mass incarceration.  She argues that bureaucrats justify increased incarceration under the guise of public safety, rather than creating solutions to better serve crime victims.

Join the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center (DEPC) for a discussion with Lenore Anderson and Shakyra Diaz, the Chief of Federal Advocacy at ASJ, and moderated by DEPC Executive Director Douglas Berman.  Panelists will discuss how state leaders and advocates can create effective public safety solutions that replace over-incarceration.

The registration link for this online event can be found here.

Is support for criminal justice reform in red states really still "strong"?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this lengthy new Arnold Ventures piece titled "Red State Support for Criminal Justice Reform Remains Strong."  I recommend the piece in full, in part because it has plenty of notable content even though its contents do not fully support the title of the piece.  Here are some extended excerpts:

Partisans and pundits like to present criminal justice reform as an issue that pits red states against blue states.  But beyond the headlines, policymakers from both sides of the aisle are working to build a criminal justice system that is more effective, efficient, accountable, and just.  Even following the spike in crime during the Covid-19 pandemic, bipartisan commitment to criminal justice reform has remained remarkably robust — including leadership from conservative coalitions....

In North Carolina, Conservatives for Criminal Justice Reform (CCJR) has gained traction since its founding in 2016 and has advanced several pieces of reform legislation. Their first goal was raising the juvenile age so that a 16- or 17-year-old charged with a low-level felony or misdemeanor would not enter the adult court system.... Other wins included the General Assembly and Senate’s unanimous passage of the Second Chance Act in 2019, which allowed the expungement of nonviolent charges, and Senate Bill 300 in 2021, which was sponsored by three Republican state senators. That bill standardized police officer training and created a database to track uses of force resulting in death or serious injury....

Another organization aiming to reach both sides of the aisle is R Street Institute, a D.C.-based think tank.  Recently, the organization has worked on initiatives concerning the cost-saving success of police-led juvenile diversion programs and cite-and-release programs as an alternative to arrest....

Over the last decade, policy change around marijuana has progressed rapidly.  In November 2022, Maryland and Missouri voters approved ballot measures to legalize recreational marijuana, meaning that it is now legal in just under half of all states (and decriminalized in a majority of states).  Additionally, some of the remaining states are poised to reexamine their cannabis laws this year, including Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Texas, and Oklahoma.

Last October, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt — a Republican who has become a national leader in red state criminal justice reform — ordered a special election for State Question 820, which would have legalized recreational marijuana use. While the referendum ultimately failed, it garnered significant Republican support in the relatively conservative state. It also included some of the most comprehensive marijuana criminal justice reforms seen in any legalization effort to date and will serve as a benchmark for future efforts around the country....

Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group, has set their sights on another drug policy long overdue for reform: sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. For over 35 years, the sentencing imbalance between these two types of cocaine has disproportionately and undeniably impacted Black communities. In 2022, the bipartisan Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of the Law (EQUAL) Act narrowly failed in the Senate after passing the House, and in February 2023 it was reintroduced by a bipartisan group including U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul....

In the last five years, 10 states have passed clean slate legislation — policies that expand eligibility for the clearance or sealing of arrest and conviction records, as well as automate that process — for people who have remained crime-free.  Another half dozen states are expected to consider bills around the topic in the coming year or so.  Advocates say the popularity of these efforts is due to a principle all sides can agree on: Bureaucratic barriers should be removed so that more people can get back to work and support themselves....

“Clean Slate efforts have gained strong bipartisan support because they are deeply rooted in the American Dream — the belief that if you work hard, you should be able to get ahead and provide for your family,” says Sheena Meade, CEO of Clean Slate Initiative. ​“Also, people are starting to understand that those who benefit from a second chance are normal folks. One in three Americans have an arrest or conviction record, and most records are not for serious offenses.”

These clean slate policies can have massive impact. For instance, since the implementation of Pennsylvania’s clean slate law in 2019, over 40 million cases have been sealed, benefiting 1.2 million Pennsylvanians.... The Nolan Center for Justice, established by the American Conservative Union Foundation, is also a prominent voice for clean-slate policies. ​“We tailor our approach depending on who we speak to,” explains Kaitlin Owens, Nolan’s deputy director of advocacy. ​“For instance, reaching out to business leaders who can testify on the positives of hiring formerly incarcerated folks can go a long way.”

In addition to its support for people who have recently been released from incarceration, the Nolan Center also works to effectuate change within prisons. For instance, model policy written by Nolan in 2017 around improving the treatment of incarcerated women was distributed to state legislatures via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative nonprofit organization, resulting in 32 states — many of them southern Republican strongholds — passing such legislation.  One example is North Carolina, which in 2021 passed the Dignity Act limiting the use of restraints and cavity searches on pregnant women, providing access to menstrual products, and ensuring mothers are placed in facilities within a reasonable distance to their children. 

I find it both notable and interesting to see how Arnold Ventures is trying to make the case that "bipartisan commitment to criminal justice reform has remained remarkably robust."  I would not quibble with this claim if the title of this article focused on conservative advocacy groups because all the groups mentioned in the article (and others like Right on Crime) continue to press forward with thoughtful arguments that all sorts of criminal justice reforms are justified by conservative principles.  Put slightly differently, there is certainly a strong case to be made that conservative principles and conservative advocacy groups still strongly support criminal justice reforms.

But the article title claims that "Red State" support for reform "Remains Strong."  This claim could be supported, yet North Carolina is the only state extensively discussed in the article has actually enacted reforms (whereas failed and stalled reform efforts in Oklahoma and elsewhere are also discussed).  Putting aside that many consider North Carolina a purple state (in part because it has a Democratic governor), it is disappointing that the article does not mention an array of notable recent reforms in red states like Florida and Indiana and Ohio.  (And, though the article discusses some federal reform proposals, it does not discuss the recent "bipartisan" work of Congress to reject Washington DC's local effort to reform its criminal code.)

In sum, though I sincerely want to believe that the "bipartisan commitment to criminal justice reform has remained remarkably robust," I see the politics of crime and punishment circa Spring 2023 to be much more nuanced, dynamic and multi-dimensional with a lot of distinct political and practical factors pushing and pulling distinct reform efforts.  And while it is useful to see Arnold Ventures painting a rosy picture concerning modern reform politics, this picture does not seem entirely complete.

"Branding Corporate Criminals"

The title of this post is the title of this new article authored by W. Robert (Will) Thomas and Mihailis Diamantis available via SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

Corporate punishment has a branding problem. Criminal sanctions should call out wrongdoing and condemn wrongdoers.  In a world where generic corporate misconduct is a daily affair, conviction singles out truly contemptible practices from merely sharp, unproductive, or undesirable ones.  In this way, criminal law gives victims the recognition they deserve, deters future wrongdoers who want to preserve their good name, and publicly reinforces society’s most treasured values.

Unfortunately, corporate punishment falls far short of all these communicative ambitions.  For punishment to convey its intended message, society must be able to hear it. When courts convict individuals, everyone understands that the conviction places a mark of enduring stigma: “felon,” “thief,” “murderer,” and “fraudster.”  The state reinforces this impression by reserving its harshest and most degrading treatment for individual criminals, caging them and possibly killing them.  Corporate punishment, by contrast, is a fleeting affair diluted by civil and administrative alternatives, PR spin, and a frenetic media environment.  In today’s criminal justice system, it can be hard even to identify after the fact who the corporate criminals are.  Unsurprisingly, corporations view criminal charges as inconvenient economic uncertainties and criminal fines as mere costs of doing business.  Public perceptions have largely followed suit.

Corporate criminal law could disrupt this perverse dynamic by adopting a new sanction that would “brand” corporate criminals.  While the brand sanction could take many forms — different visual marks of varying size — this Article calls for, at a minimum, appending a criminal designation, ⓕ, to corporate felons’ legal name and mandating its appearance on products and communications.  This “corporate criminal brand” would stand as a 21st century corporate reimagining of its medieval corporal punishment namesake. Lawmakers rightly rejected physical brands on individual criminals long ago.  The criminal justice landscape is different for corporations, who feel no pain and have no dignity. Unlike monetary fines, corporate criminal branding would unambiguously signal a corporation’s criminal status to outside observers.  By forcibly integrating corporations’ criminal identity into their public image, criminal law might finally have a way to recognize victims and to strike at what corporations value most.

"After the Criminal Justice System"

The title of this post is the title of this new article authored by Benjamin Levin now available via SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

Since the 1960s, the “criminal justice system” has operated as the common label for a vast web of actors and institutions.  But, as critiques of mass incarceration have entered the mainstream, academics, activists, and advocates increasingly have stopped referring to the “criminal justice system.”  Instead, they have opted for critical labels — the criminal legal system, the criminal punishment system, the prison industrial complex, etc.  What does this re-labeling accomplish?  Does this change in language matter to broader efforts at criminal justice reform or abolition?  Or, does an emphasis on labels and language distract from substantive engagement with the injustices of contemporary criminal law?

In this Article, I examine that move to abandon the “criminal justice system” as a means of describing U.S. institutions of criminal law and its enforcement.  I identify three alternative labels that are gaining traction in academic and activist circles: the criminal legal system, the criminal punishment system, and the prison industrial complex.  I argue that each reflects not only a different vision of U.S. criminal law but also a different vision of what is wrong with it.  My goal in this Article is not to advocate for a correct new label.  Rather, it is to explain how the different names provide a window into different ways of understanding how the United States punishes and controls individuals and communities.  Identifying an alternate label (or opting to retain the criminal justice system) should force much-needed reflection about what makes criminal institutions distinct from other institutions of governance.  And, such clarity should be essential to any project of reform or abolition.

This Article contributes to three literatures.  First, it is a part of a larger project of unpacking how we as a society (and particularly as legal elites) talk about and understand criminal law. Second, this Article contributes to a literature that examines the boundaries of criminal law and the ways in which criminal legal institutions interact with ostensibly non-criminal ones.  Third, and relatedly, this Article contributes to a critical literature on siloing in scholarship and activism.  By emphasizing the fuzzy boundaries of the “criminal justice system,”  I hope to stress that studying and mobilizing against the injustices of the U.S. criminal legal apparatus requires grappling with a host of diverse legal doctrines and sociopolitical forces.

New CRS piece reviews circuit split over justifications for revoking supervised release

A helpful reader alerted me to this notable new "Legal Sidebar" from the Congressional Research Service.  As suggested by the title, "Can Retribution Justify the Revocation of Supervised Release? Courts Disagree," the piece details a jurisprudential divide among the circuits for the justification for supervised release revocation.  Here is how the five-page report begins:

What are the legitimate reasons that a government may subject an individual to criminal punishment?  Western penological theory and American legal history generally identify four principled bases for criminal punishment: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.  The Sentencing Reform Act (SRA) requires federal courts to impose an initial sentence that reflects these purposes of punishment.

The SRA also authorizes federal courts to sentence defendants to supervised release, encompassing a set of conditions that the defendant must comply with upon release from prison for a period of time (or, for some offenses, for up to life).  A defendant’s compliance with these conditions is “supervised” or monitored by a federal probation officer.  If a defendant violates a condition, the court may revoke the supervised release and send the defendant back to prison, among other things.  The SRA lists deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation among the factors that a judge must consider in making these revocation determinations.  The SRA does not, however, expressly include retribution as one such factor.

The federal appeals courts disagree as to whether, and to what extent, retribution may justify the revocation of supervised release in light of this statutory omission.  On one side of the divide, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the First, Second, Third, Sixth, and Seventh Circuits have held that federal courts may consider retribution in making revocation decisions.  On the other side, the Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Circuits have concluded that courts either may not consider retribution in these decisions at all or may consider it only to a limited degree.

This Sidebar summarizes the four purposes of punishment, including retribution; offers an overview of supervised release; and summarizes the aforementioned split.  The Sidebar concludes with congressional considerations.

Brennan Center publishes "A Proposal to Reduce Unnecessary Incarceration: Introducing the Public Safety and Prison Reduction Act"

The folks at the Brennan Center for Justice have a new report available here authored by Hernandez D. Stroud, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and Ram Subramanian titled "A Proposal to Reduce Unnecessary Incarceration: Introducing the Public Safety and Prison Reduction Act."  Here is part of the report's introduction:

According to a 2016 Brennan Center for Justice report, nearly 40 percent of the U.S. prison population is incarcerated without any compelling public safety justification. Incarceration degrades people’s humanity, disrupts their social networks, and causes lifelong social and financial disadvantage through restricted access to education, jobs, and housing.  It also devastates families and communities, disproportionately affecting society’s most marginalized segments.

Reforms have reduced the population behind bars from its 2009 peak, yet an astonishing level of incarceration persists: today over 1.2 million people are confined to federal and state prisons, and just over 636,000 more are locked up in local jails.  Few states have achieved significant reductions in their prison populations, and in some places these populations have begun to grow again.

For a half century, the federal government has harnessed its grant-making power to spur states to incarcerate more people and to impose longer sentences, making the United States the most punitive country in the world.  It can now use that same funding power to reverse course.  The idea of using federal funding to reduce incarceration is not new, but recent programs have had mixed results.  For example, between 2010 and 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) provided state and local governments with technical assistance and direct funding to reduce their prison populations.  But this funding did not always produce the intended outcome....

Yet since assuming office in 2021, the Biden administration, while retaining JRI’s focus on recidivism reduction, now specifically allows grant money to support efforts to reduce incarceration for new crimes or technical violations of community supervision.  And more recently, in August 2022, as part of his 2023 budget proposal to Congress, President Biden unveiled a grant program called Accelerating Justice System Reform, which would dedicate $15 billion over 10 years for jurisdictions to implement crime prevention and public health approaches to public safety.

Building on this momentum, the Brennan Center for Justice calls on Congress to enact a new, $1 billion federal funding program, called the Public Safety and Prison Reduction Act, to channel money to states with the goal of reducing unnecessary incarceration while promoting humane and fair criminal-justice policies that preserve public safety.  The proposal, based on a previous Brennan Center policy solution — the Reverse Mass Incarceration Act — was crafted in consultation with a variety of stakeholders, including formerly incarcerated individuals.

"The (Immediate) Future of Prosecution"

The title of this post is the title of this new essay authored by Daniel Richman now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

Even as others make cogent arguments for diminishing the work of prosecutors, work remains — cases that must be brought against a backdrop of existing economic inequality and structural racism and of an array of impoverished institutional alternatives.  The (immediate) future of prosecution requires thoughtful engagement with these tragic circumstances, but it also will inevitably involve the co-production of sentences that deter and incapacitate.  Across-the-board sentencing discounts based on such circumstances are no substitute for the thoughtful intermediation that only the courtroom working group — judges, prosecutors and defense counsel — can provide. The (immediate) future also requires prosecutors to do more to recognize the distinctive role they can play in combating illegitimate domination.

CCJ's Veterans Justice Commission releases "Honoring Service, Advancing Safety: Supporting Veterans From Arrest Through Sentencing"

As highlighted in this prior post, the Council on Criminal Justice last summer launched a new national commission "to examine why so many military veterans land in jail and prison and produce recommendations for evidence-based policy changes that enhance safety, health, and justice." This CCJ Commission has released this major policy report today titled "Honoring Service, Advancing Safety: Supporting Veterans From Arrest Through Sentencing." This press release provides some highlights from the full report. Here are excerpts from the press release:

America’s civilian justice system fails to adequately identify veterans, steer them away from prosecution and incarceration, and coordinate or research the effectiveness of programs attempting to support them, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) Veterans Justice Commission said in releasing its first set of recommendations today.

While data-based tools exist to verify a person’s veteran status, only 9 of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies and 11% of its 3,100 jails report using them, relying instead on veterans to self-identify, the Commission said. But many veterans fail to do so because of shame or fear of losing benefits. Hundreds of jurisdictions now operate specialized Veterans Treatment Courts (VTCs), but participation is often restricted to minor offenses, and just 36 of 2,300 prosecutors’ offices reported operating veteran-specific diversion programs. As a result of these and other holes in the system, veterans miss out on diversion opportunities or treatment targeting the service-related trauma and other conditions that often drive their criminal behavior.

The Commission, which is led by former Defense Secretary and U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel and includes former Defense Secretary and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, issued three recommendations to address these and other challenges confronting veterans at the “front end” of the criminal justice system, from arrest through sentencing:

• To improve identification of veterans when they come in contact with the justice system, Congress should authorize a study to evaluate the effectiveness of databases that capture veteran status, order necessary improvements, and incentivize their use by local and state agencies....
• States and the federal government should pass laws expanding or creating opportunities for veterans to avoid arrest, conviction, or incarceration if they complete programs, including VTCs, requiring them to take responsibility for their actions and address issues underlying their criminal offending. The Commission also said courts should be permitted to consider combat exposure and other military experiences a mitigating factor at sentencing, including in cases involving violence.
• Noting that reliable data on justice-involved veterans is sorely lacking, the Commission recommended that the federal government establish a National Center on Veterans Justice to fund research and identify effective program interventions....

Prior related posts:

• New CCJ commission to examine factors driving veterans' involvement in criminal justice system 
• Noting the notable challenge of defining "veteran" for various purposes connected to criminal justice systems 

ABA Criminal Justice Section releases "2023 Plea Bargain Task Force Report"

American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section Plea Bargaining Task Force today released this 40-page report. The report's introduction provides some background and details concerning its work:

The Plea Bargain Task Force formed in 2019 to address persistent criticisms of the plea bargain system in the United States. Plea bargaining has become the primary way to resolve criminal cases. Indeed, some jurisdictions have not had a criminal trial in many years, resolving all their cases through negotiated resolutions.  For this reason, a critical examination of the modern plea system is necessary and important.

This Report comes after three years of work, during which the Task Force collected and reviewed testimony from experts in the field and those impacted by the plea system, scholarly and legal reports on plea bargaining, state and federal rules of criminal procedure, and other materials. What has become clear from this process is that plea bargaining is not one monolithic practice. It looks different depending on whether one is in state or federal court, a rural jurisdiction with few lawyers or an urban center with large prosecution and public defender offices.  Even within the same courthouse, informal practices may differ between courtrooms and attorneys.  Although these variations pose a challenge for the development of any one-size-fits-all set of recommendations to reform plea bargaining practices, this Report identifies and addresses numerous concerns with plea bargaining that are common to a wide variety of jurisdictions.  The Report then provides guidance to jurisdictions on how to meet those challenges while also promoting justice, transparency, and fairness.

There are many purported benefits of plea bargaining in the current criminal justice system.  Nearly all jurisdictions have limited resources and plea bargaining provides a mechanism to efficiently resolve cases. By preserving resources this way, jurisdictions are able to direct greater resources to investigations and cases that proceed to trial. Additionally, plea bargaining provides a mechanism to incentivize defendants to cooperate with the government or to accept responsibility for their criminal conduct.  A plea also provides a clear and certain resolution to a case, which offers finality for the defendant, the victim, the courts, and the community. Furthermore, defendants use the plea process to avoid some of the most severe aspects of the criminal system.

In moderation, many of these benefits make sense. But as the Task Force discovered, too often these benefits have become the driving force of criminal adjudication at the cost of more fundamental values. For instance, according to the testimony the Task Force collected, at times, efficiency and finality trump truth-seeking. Furthermore, many benefits of plea bargaining are, when viewed in a different light, a means to mitigate the excessive harshness of the modern American criminal system. In this sense, plea bargaining is not so much providing a benefit as it is a safety valve for quotidian injustice.

Moreover, the Task Force reviewed substantial evidence that defendants—including innocent defendants — are sometimes coerced into taking pleas and surrendering their right to trial.   This happens for a number of reasons. For instance, mandatory sentencing laws often make the risks of taking a case to trial intolerable, and in some cases, prosecutors understand and exploit these fears to induce defendants to plead guilty in cases where they otherwise would prefer to exercise their constitutional right to have the case decided by a jury.  Similarly, mandatory collateral consequences, including the threat of deportation, push defendants to accept pleas in cases they might otherwise fight at trial.

The Task Force also discovered that the integrity of the criminal system is negatively affected by the sheer number of cases resolved by pleas. For example, police and government misconduct often goes unchecked because so few defendants proceed to pre-trial hearings where such misconduct is litigated.  The reality that so few pretrial matters are litigated leads prosecutors to be less critical of their witnesses and less willing to scrutinize the strength of their cases, knowing that they won’t be held accountable at trial. Defense lawyers, similarly, are less likely to properly investigate cases, knowing their clients will almost certainly  take a plea. Plea bargaining creates perverse incentives across the system for lawyers and judges who focus on disposition rates and getting through cases quickly rather than resolving cases justly. Furthermore, the loss of trials in favor of plea bargains is a profound loss for civic engagement. Jury trials provide critical oversight to the criminal system, and juries remain one of the only ways for citizens to shape how prosecutors enforce laws. The voice of the community is almost entirely lost in a system dominated by pleas.

More troubling still, the Task Force heard many ways in which plea bargaining promotes and exacerbates existing racial inequality in the criminal system. The Task Force collected testimony from experts in the field who demonstrated that throughout the plea process similarly situated defendants of color fare worse than white defendants. Black defendants in drug cases, for instance, are less likely to receive favorable plea offers that avoid mandatory minimum sentences and, as a result, receive higher sentences for the same charges as white defendants. The same is true for gun cases, in which Black defendants are more often subjected to charge stacking — a technique that allows prosecutors to pile on many charges, increasing the likely sentence after trial and the government’s leverage during plea negotiations – than white defendants.  In fact, across all charges the Task Force found evidence of significant racial disparities in prosecutorial decisions to drop or reduce charges.  For example, white defendants who face initial felony charges are less likely than Black defendants to be convicted of a felony, and white defendants facing misdemeanor charges are more likely than Black defendants to have their cases dismissed or resolved without incarceration.

After this introduction, this report sets forth fourteen principles that inform and structure the rest of the report.  Readers are encouraged to click through to see all the details, though here is the intro to the statement of principles:

While the plea bargaining process in the United States is broad and varied, the Task Force determined that it was vitally important to craft a single set of principles to guide plea practices generally. Those principles, which guide the Report’s more specific observations and recommendations, are listed below. These principles should be shared widely with members of the criminal justice community so that they might influence behavior and decision-making moving forward. These principles represent our conclusions about how plea bargaining should operate within our larger criminal justice system, a system based on the fundamental Constitutional right to trial.

"Vigilantism and 'Public Confidence': The Pertinence of Public Opinion to Sentencing"

The title of this post is the title of this new essay authored by Michael Tonry now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

Public confidence in courts, judges, and sentencing, and belief in the legitimacy of legal institutions, as exists in Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands, are self-evidently good things.  Politicians in England and Wales often avow the importance of “public confidence” in explaining why they promote or adopt especially repressive (e.g., Antisocial Behaviour Orders, Imprisonment for Public Protection) or illiberal (e.g., abolition of double jeopardy doctrine) legislation.  Three non-trivial issues lurk.  First, the rhetoric gets the causal ordering wrong.  As Justice Auld observed, public confidence is not “an aim of a good criminal justice system; but a consequence of it.”  Second, there is an underlying belief or assumption that “the public” disapproves current practices and wants changes made.  Masses of research show, however, that most depictions of the public’s views are unreliable and provide inadequate bases for policy making.  The public knows astonishingly little about criminal justice, opinions are shaped by media coverage and sensationalism, and considered views are not relentlessly punitive.  Third, there is more than a whiff of vigilante thinking in the idea that public opinion should be the basis for laws that prescribe or judicial decisions that concern punishments of particular people for particular crimes.

New Sentencing Project report: "Counting Down: Paths to a 20-Year Maximum Prison Sentence"

The folks at the Sentencing Project have long advocated for an absolute limit on the length of prison terms, and this new 20-page report on the topic is titled "Counting Down: Paths to a 20-Year Maximum Prison Sentence."  Here is part of the report's executive summary:

In the United States, over half of people in prison are serving a decade or longer and one in seven incarcerated people are serving a life sentence.  To end mass incarceration, the United States must dramatically shorten sentences. Capping sentences for the most serious offenses at 20 years and shifting sentences for all other offenses proportionately downward, including by decriminalizing some acts, is a vital decarceration strategy to arrive at a system that values human dignity and prioritizes racial equity.

This report begins by examining the evidence in support of capping sentences at 20 years.  Countries such as Germany and Norway illustrate that sentences can be far shorter without sacrificing public safety.  A wealth of criminological evidence makes clear that unduly long sentences are unnecessary: people age out of crime, and even the general threat of long term imprisonment is an ineffective deterrent.

The Sentencing Project recommends the following seven legislative reforms to cap sentences at 20 years and right-size the sentencing structure:

1. Abolish death and life without parole (LWOP) sentences, limiting maximum sentences to 20 years.

2. Limit murder statutes to intentional killings, excluding offenses such as felony murder, and reduce homicide penalties.

3. Eliminate mandatory minimum sentences and reform sentencing guidelines to ensure that judges can use their discretion to consider mitigating circumstances.

4. Provide universal access to parole and ensure timely review.

5. Eliminate consecutive sentences and limit sentence enhancements, including repealing “truth-in-sentencing” and “habitual offender” laws.

6. Create an opportunity for judicial “second look” resentencing within a maximum of 10 years of imprisonment, regardless of an individual’s offense.

7. Shift all sentences downward, including by de-felonizing many offenses and decriminalizing many misdemeanors.

Finally, this report offers ideas for how stakeholders can take steps toward shrinking sentences today.  Prosecuting attorneys can use their discretion to limit sentences to 20 years when charging and plea bargaining, as well as engage in sentence review.  Judges can impose lower sentences where possible.  And communities can invest in interventions that prevent long sentences by keeping people from entering or reentering the criminal legal system altogether. Limiting maximum terms to 20 years need not be the end goal of criminal legal reform — 20 years is still an extraordinary length of time in prison — but it is an essential step toward a fair and proportionate justice system.

"Rape as Indignity"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Ben McJunkin now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

Rape law has a consent problem.  The topic of sexual consent predominates any discussion of rape law, both doctrinally and socially.  It is now widely taken as axiomatic that non-consensual sex is paradigmatic of rape.  But consent is in fact a deeply contested concept, as recent debates over affirmative consent have demonstrated. Grounding rape law in sexual non-consent has also proven both over- and under-inclusive, too often leaving the law inadequate to vindicate some sexual harms and distorted in attempts to reach others.  Increasingly, the very concept of consent is being questioned by scholars, who desire a rape law that more accurately reflects the lived experience of both victims and perpetrators. Consent is even potentially dangerous.  The structure of consent reinforces problematic gender roles in sexual relations and fuels troubling narratives that have led to widespread violence against women.

This Article proposes a novel grounding for rape law — not as a matter of consent, but as a matter of human dignity. Human dignity has been perhaps the premier value in both political and moral thought over the past two centuries. As the Article documents, dignity’s relatively straightforward moral imperative — respect for persons — has a long tradition of being operationalized legally, making it ripe for use as the basis of a criminal prohibition.  Building upon both federal and state efforts to combat the indignities of sex trafficking, the Article outlines a proposed framework for punishing as rape the infliction of indignity through certain means of compelling sex, namely force, fraud, and coercion. Centering human dignity, rather than consent, would more closely align rape law with the fundamental tenets of criminal law theory and has the potential to disrupt gendered social scripts that increasingly animate violence.  In a time of mass incarceration, recognizing rape as indignity would also set the stage for a much-needed shift toward restorative justice and incarceration alternatives.

Vera Institute of Justice presents "A New Paradigm for Sentencing in the United States"

I am very pleased to see the official publication of this very interesting new report authored by Marta Nelson, Samuel Feineh and Maris Mapolski of the Vera Institute of Justice. I had the good fortune to see an early draft of this provocative document, and I hope it gets widely read and generates considerable discussion and debate. Here is a small portion of the lengthy report's executive summary:

This report posits that maintaining our system of mass incarceration will not bring people in the United States the safety and justice they deserve, while dismantling it in favor of a narrowly tailored sentencing response to unlawful behavior can produce more safety, repair harm, and reduce incarceration by close to 80 percent, according to modeling on the federal system.  In this report, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) addresses a main driver of mass incarceration: our sentencing system, or what happens to people after they have gone through the criminal legal system and are convicted of a crime.  The report

› provides a review of the history of sentencing in this country;

› summarizes the research and evidence surrounding sentencing’s impact on individual and community safety;

› offers new guiding principles that legislators should consider in place of the current primary reliance on deterrence, retribution, and excessive use of incapacitation;

› outlines seven key sentencing reforms in line with these guiding principles;

› models the impact of these reforms on both public safety and mass incarceration; and

› suggests a “North Star” for sentencing policy with a legal presumption toward community-based sentences except in limited circumstances....

Our current sentencing system defaults to putting most people convicted of crimes behind bars.  In 2006 in the United States — the last year in which national sentencing data was gathered — 70 percent of people convicted of state felonies ended up in prison; in the federal system, 90 percent of people convicted in 2019 did....

This default to incarceration does not build safety.  A 2021 meta-analysis of 116 studies found that custodial sentences not only do not prevent reoffending, but they can also actually increase it.  Explanations include that stripping neighborhoods of so many vital residents, including parents and breadwinners, can destabilize neighborhoods, and that the brutality of U.S. prisons, as well as the lack of opportunities after release, can negatively affect people’s behavior toward others while incarcerated — and afterward.

So how do we significantly change course? As a starting place, we must move away from retribution, deterrence, heavy reliance on incapacitation, and rehabilitation as the cornerstones of sentencing theory, policy, and practice.  These justifications for sentencing have been in currency for more than 200 years but are seldom scrutinized.  It is time to do so.

"Against Prosecutors" and a lot of notable responses thereto

I recall reading a few years ago, but maybe not blogging about, I. Bennett Capers provocative 2020 essay titled simply "Against Prosecutors."  Here is part of the essay's introduction:

What would it mean to turn away from public prosecutors and not rely on the criminal justice system as the first responder to address social ills, such as mental illness and poverty (two of the main drivers of our prison industrial complex)?  More radically, what would it mean to turn away from state-controlled prosecution as the primary way to address crime? What would it mean to replace a system where prosecutors hold a monopoly in deciding which cases are worthy of pursuit with a system in which “we the people,” including those of us who have traditionally had little power, would be empowered to seek and achieve justice ourselves?

This Article attempts to answer these questions. It begins in Part I with the enormous, monopolistic power public prosecutors wield.  But this power is not inevitable. Indeed, public prosecutors are not even inevitable. This is the main point of Part II, which surfaces the rarely discussed history of criminal prosecutions in this country before the advent of the public prosecutor, when private prosecutions were the norm and in a very real sense criminal prosecutions belonged to “the people.”  Part II then demonstrates that our history of private prosecutions and the turn to public prosecutions is more than just a curious footnote, as this very history has, in turn, shaped criminal law and justice as we know it. Part III, in many ways the core of this Article, makes the argument for turning away from public prosecutors and restoring prosecution to the people.  It also returns to the question that motivates this Article: what benefits might accrue if victims had the option to pursue criminal charges through private prosecution or public prosecution? Part III argues there would be several benefits, including democratizing criminal justice and, quite possibly, reducing mass incarceration.

This essay is fresh in mind in part because I just saw an on-line symposium in which seven scholars have written their own essays in response (and with the author providing a final word). Here are links to these new works:

Angela J. Davis, "The Perils of Private Prosecutions"

Benjamin Levin, "Victims’ Rights Revisited"

Carolyn B. Ramsey, "Against Domestic Violence: Public and Private Prosecution of Batterers"

Corey Rayburn Yung, "Private Prosecution of Rape"

Jeffrey Bellin, "A World Without Prosecutors"

Jenia I. Turner, "Victims as a Check on Prosecutors: A Comparative Assessment"

Roger A. Fairfax Jr.. "For Grand Juries"

I. Bennett Capers, "Still Against Prosecutors"

Maine momentum for restoring parole as part of broader focus on rehabilitation

This local article, headlined "Maine legislators push to reestablish parole, citing disparities in criminal justice system," reports on some interesting criminal justice reform developments in the Pine Tree State.  Here are excerpts (with links from the original):

With the release of a comprehensive 240-page report, the return of parole to Maine’s correctional system seems more likely, though still far from a sure thing.

The Maine Legislature’s parole study commission convened last year issued its final report on Jan. 30 that includes an ambitious set of recommendations, though not all received unanimous support.

The commission was an outgrowth of a 2021 bill, LD 842, from then-Rep. Jeff Evangelos (I-Friendship), who proposed reinstating parole opportunities for all those incarcerated in state institutions. 

Maine’s Legislature first established a system of parole in 1913, allowing for an incarcerated person’s sentencing period to be reevaluated by corrections officers after serving a minimum length of time.  Parole was abolished in Maine in 1976.

A unanimous recommendation came for expansion of the existing early release program, which allows inmates with 30 months or fewer of their sentence to serve the remainder in home confinement.... 

Evangelos convinced commissioners to include reinstatement of a weekend furlough program.  “It would allow fathers to get to know their kids, and mothers to hold their children, sometimes for the first time,” he said.

Also gaining strong support was a new Criminal Law Revision Commission, which once made frequent suggestions for legal changes, but lapsed in 2005.

On the critical vote for parole, the commissioners divided 7-2 in favor, with Corrections Commissioner Randall Liberty and Sen. Scott Cyrway (R-Winslow) opposed.  The co-chairs, Sen. Craig Hickman (D-Winthrop) and Rep. Charlotte Warren (D-Hallowell) voted in the majority.  Of the four legislators on the commission, only Hickman is still serving in the same position.  The others were term-limited....

[T]he report concluded that its work “focused primarily on issues surrounding the reestablishment of parole, but parole is only one piece of a much larger conversation . . . The work of this commission is a beginning, not an end.”

The Judiciary Committee that received the report can introduce legislation to adopt its findings. Advocates have already submitted their own bill, LD 178, sponsored by Sen. Pinny Beebe-Center (D-Rockland), a concept draft.

Evangelos said the bill’s language will eventually include full implementation of the commission’s findings, including hearing eligibility for all inmates, and specific victim’s rights provisions.  He’s optimistic about passage of a strong bill, pointing to support from Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham (R-Winterport), the House minority leader.  “We heard from supporters all over the country,” Evangelos said. “Of the dozens of people who testified, only two were opposed. People want a system that recognizes rehabilitation, and provides hope.”     

"Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new article now available via SSRN authored by David Arkush and Donald Braman. Here is its abstract:

Prosecutors regularly bring homicide charges against individuals and corporations whose reckless or negligent acts or omissions cause unintentional deaths, as well as those whose misdemeanors or felonies cause unintentional deaths. Fossil fuel companies learned decades ago that what they produced, marketed, and sold would generate “globally catastrophic” climate change.  Rather than alert the public and curtail their operations, they worked to deceive the public about these harms and to prevent regulation of their lethal conduct.  They funded efforts to call sound science into doubt and to confuse their shareholders, consumers, and regulators.  And they poured money into political campaigns to elect or install judges, legislators, and executive officials hostile to any litigation, regulation, or competition that might limit their profits.  Today, the climate change that they forecast has already killed thousands of people in the United States, and it is expected to become increasingly lethal for the foreseeable future.

Given the extreme lethality of the conduct and the awareness of the catastrophic risk on the part of fossil fuel companies, should they be charged with homicide?  Could they be convicted?  In answering these questions, this Article makes several contributions to our understanding of criminal law and the role it could play in combating crimes committed at a massive scale.  It describes the doctrinal and social predicates of homicide prosecutions where corporate conduct endangers much or all of the public.  It also identifies important advantages of homicide prosecutions relative to civil and regulatory remedies, and it details how and why prosecution for homicide may be the most effective legal remedy available in cases like this.  Finally, it argues that, if our criminal legal system cannot focus more intently on climate crimes — and soon — we may leave future generations with significantly less for the law to protect.

Federal judge gives cocaine trafficker time served ... and a requirement that she complete her JD program

Here is another notable sentencing story that might keep the comments buzzing  This one comes from the ABA Journal under the headline "Federal sentence includes law school, and attorneys wonder why."  Here are the basics (with links from the original):

Based on federal sentencing guidelines, people found guilty of trafficking large amounts of cocaine usually face lengthy sentences.  However, a Texas defendant received what many say is an unusual punishment: five days in prison with credit for time served and direction from the judge to complete her JD.

Chelsea Nichole Madill was accused of trafficking 28.5 kilos of cocaine in a 2018 criminal complaint.  She was charged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, and in 2019, Madill pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute a Schedule II drug.

Federal sentencing experts say the average penalty for that crime is around five years.  In addition to the law school piece and no prison time, Madill was sentenced to three years of supervised release.  The 2023 sentencing judgment was written by Southern District of Texas Chief Judge Randy Crane.

Much of the record is sealed, and whether Madill attended or completed law school is not disclosed. There is someone with that name listed as a 2L Florida A&M University College of Law student bar association board member.  A 2019 order authorized travel expenses for Madill, directing the U.S. marshal to obtain the cheapest means of noncustodial transportation possible between her Florida residence and the McAllen, Texas, courthouse....

Madill did not respond to an ABA Journal interview request sent through LinkedIn, and her phone number listed in court records was disconnected. FAMU Law also did not respond to ABA Journal interview requests....

Jesse Salazar, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case, referred an ABA Journal interview request to a public affairs officer.  The PAO said the office did not object to the sentence. Richard Gould, a federal public defender, represented Madill.  A receptionist at the Southern District of Texas Federal Public Defender’s Office told the ABA Journal Gould does not speak to reporters....

The sentence is unique, says Michael Heiskell, a Texas attorney and president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Indeed, being a law student could have resulted in a longer sentence if the court was persuaded a defendant’s legal education helped them commit the crime, he adds.

“Kudos to her and her counsel for being able to convince the court to do this. Hopefully, this gives her the motivation to complete her JD. Maybe her story resonated with the judge since he is obviously an attorney,” says Heiskell, a former state and federal prosecutor who does criminal defense work.

According to Heiskell, credit for time served is unusual in drug cases involving delivery, and the sentencing range for Madill’s conviction is between 87 and 108 months.  He adds that a purpose of the federal sentencing guidelines is to avoid disparities, so Madill’s sentence may be useful for defendants with cases similar to hers.  “You would want to make the argument of the courts being consistent in its sentencing for cases such as this. If I had a situation where my client was learning to be a plumber, electrician, etc., I would cite this case,” Heiskell says.

The ABA Journal reporter called me about this  case; I mentioned that, given that the plea was entered in 2019 and then the sentence was not imposed until 2023, it seems quite likely the defendant provided some cooperation in exchange for a reduced sentence. The article does not quote me on that point, but does highlight some of my other speculations for the very special law-school-completion condition of supervision.

For those so interested, here is the exact language in the sentencing entry from Chief Judge Crane: "You must continue to participate and complete an educational program designed to receive a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree." I joked to the ABA Journal reporter that, in some quarters, this condition might be viewed as "cruel and unusual punishment." That quote also did not make the article,  But now that the piece is published, I am eager to hear reactions to this very lawyerly federal sentence.

"Criminal Proof: Fixed or Flexible?"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Lewis Ross and now available via SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

Should we use the same standard of proof to adjudicate guilt for murder and petty theft?  Why not tailor the standard of proof to the crime? These relatively neglected questions cut to the heart of central issues in the philosophy of law.  This paper scrutinises whether we ought to use the same standard for all criminal cases, in contrast with a flexible approach that uses different standards for different crimes.  I reject consequentialist arguments for a radically flexible standard of proof, instead defending a modestly flexible approach on non-consequentialist grounds.  The system I defend is one on which we should impose a higher standard of proof for crimes that attract more severe punishments.  This proposal, although apparently revisionary, accords with a plausible theory concerning the epistemology of legal judgments and the role they play in society.

Effective look at the many ugly realities of probation

The March 2023 issue of Reason magazine has this terrific article about probation systems authored by C.J. Ciaramella and Lauren Krisai. This lengthy piece is worth a full read, and its full title notes its basic themes: "U.S. Probation System Has Become a Quagmire: What was originally intended as an alternative to incarceration has become a system for mass state control." Here are excepts from the start and first part of the piece:

Shortly after becoming a mother in summer 2013, Jennifer Schroeder was arrested for a drug charge.  Schroeder, who lives outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve 365 days in Wright County Jail.  And 40 years on probation.

Probation terms vary by state.  They can include curfews, restrictions on travel, submitting to warrantless searches, paying court fees, holding down a job, and abstaining from alcohol and drugs, to the point of being prohibited from even entering a bar.  For Schroeder it means a near-lifetime ban on voting or owning a gun, and the looming threat of eight years behind bars if she ever violates her terms.  For the privilege of being subjected to all this, there are also fees owed to the state — all to live on the edge of a life-destroying prison sentence....

While many gauge the criminal justice system by the population of jails and prisons, probation affects more lives.  And while it is clearly less punitive than being locked in a prison cell, it is still a form of onerous correctional control.  Probation is supposed to help people get their lives back on track while staying accountable and keeping the public safe, but in many states offenders are set up to fail in systems that can't or won't give them the opportunity to succeed.

It's a scattershot array of state-run systems that, over nearly 200 years, has evolved away from its original purpose of providing public accountability and rehabilitation without punishment, quietly transforming into a secondary criminal justice system hiding in plain sight.  As it has evolved, it has lost much of its original purpose, leaving even many of the system's enforcers uncertain about a fundamental question: What is probation supposed to be for?

And here is part of a section of the article about just some of the restrictions probationers face:

When a person is sentenced to probation, there are numerous terms and conditions that he or she must adhere to or face potential consequences. Sometimes these conditions are set by statute, but more often they are assigned by the judge, a state or county probation department, or an individual probation officer.  According to a joint report issued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Human Rights Watch in 2020, people under supervision across the country "must comply with an average of 10 to 20 conditions a day."

In Wisconsin, a person on probation has to obtain written approval from their probation agent to purchase, trade, or sell a car.  New York, Kansas, Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina require that probationers avoid "injurious and vicious habits," while New York, Kansas, Georgia, and South Carolina also require they avoid "persons or places of disreputable or harmful character."  It's common to be prohibited from consuming alcohol, even if the crime was unrelated to drinking....

Beyond that, probationers sometimes have curfews imposed, are unable to cross state or county lines without first getting permission, and expect unannounced drop-ins from officers.... In addition, those on probation are stripped of otherwise constitutionally protected rights. "I live in a really bad neighborhood, and I can't carry any kind of protection," Schroeder says....  Minnesota also doesn't allow offenders to vote until they complete the terms of their criminal sentence, so Schroeder isn't supposed to cast a ballot until 2053.

And here is part of the discussion of probation's contribution to incarceration:

Over the last four years, 42–45 percent of prison admissions were for probation or parole supervision violations. Roughly a quarter of all admissions to prison are for technical violations of probation or parole, such as missing an appointment.

Some states and localities have introduced graduated sanctions for technical violations and more discretion to probation officers, so offenders don't have probation revoked for their first minor screw-up. But in some states, people on probation are often set up to fail. Instead of being an alternative to prison, it simply ends up delaying incarceration.

For example, Idaho has a staggeringly high rate of prison admissions for probation and parole violations.  According to a report this year from the Idaho Department of Correction, 80 percent of 2021's admissions had either violated probation, violated parole, or failed a rider....  The overwhelming majority of admissions to prison in Wisconsin are also for supervision violations. More than 63 percent admitted to prison in 2021 were there for such a violation, and 40 percent were admitted for a technical violation of supervision.  Kansas also has a high admission to prison rate for probation violations — 44 percent of admissions to prison in fiscal year 2021 were for a violation of probation.

Warranted or unwarranted disparity?: noting different punishments for disrupting different government branches

This lengthy new NBC News piece shines a spotlight on the notable, but arguably justified, disparity between how disruptive protesters at Congress and at the Supreme Court are punished.  The full headline for the piece highlights its essentials: "Protesting against Congress may get you a $50 fine. Disrupting the Supreme Court is a different story. Protesters disrupting oral arguments can face at least a night in jail and a criminal conviction."  Here are some excerpts:

When Emily Paterson was arrested for protesting abortion law changes during a Supreme Court hearing in November, she spent the night in jail and now has a criminal conviction on her record. Across the street, Jack Murphy met a different fate when she did something similar in the Senate chamber three years earlier: She paid a $50 fine and was released a few hours later.

Such is the differing nature of punishment for nonviolent protesters during official proceedings in Washington, with the Supreme Court, which has its own police department, viewed as being tougher than the Capitol Police, which has jurisdiction over the Capitol and its surrounding campus, which borders the Supreme Court building.

It’s a sore point for Mark Goldstone, a lawyer who regularly represents Washington protesters. Supreme Court protesters are treated “more harshly” in a couple of different ways, he said, referring only to those participating in nonviolent protests and not violent attacks like the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. On Capitol grounds, the police “process you and release you,” Goldstone said, while at the Supreme Court, “you are going to spend the night in jail" and likely face prosecution....

Those familiar with Washington protests point to some possible reasons protesters are treated differently.  One is that the Capitol Police has a lot more protesters to deal with, sometimes needing to process hundreds of people quickly.  In contrast, although protests outside the Supreme Court building are common, it is relatively unusual for people to disrupt court proceedings inside the courtroom.

There are also inherent differences between the two institutions.  Congress is where democratically elected representatives meet and a place where members of the public have a right to express their views.  The high court, meanwhile, is not directly accountable to the people and likes to see itself as nonpolitical.  As such, there may be a desire to crack down on protesters to help maintain that image.  The respective police departments have different legal powers too, which could affect how they resolve cases.

As I see it, protesters who disrupt SCOTUS oral arguments are generally likely to be a lot more disruptive to the functioning of SCOTUS, and be more harmful and disrepectful to the lawyers who have prepared for months for 30 minutes of time to represent their clients before the Justice, than protesters in Congress.  Of course, as the events of January 6, 2021 should remind us, some protesters can be very disruptive of the work on Congress.  But the practicalities of the functioning of different branches, not some notion of political "image," seems to me to make the disparity here more warranted than unwarranted.  But perhaps others have distinct views.

Quite a remarkable account of one January 6 rioter's sentencing story

The Washington Post has this very lengthy piece telling a remarkable story about the life and history of one of the January 6 rioters and where his sentencing fit in.  The piece is fully titled "Prison or mercy? A Jan. 6 rioter weighs his sins and confronts his fate. Eight years before he stormed the Capitol, Jake Peart acted with ‘unfathomable’ grace. A judge must decide if it matters." The long piece is worth the time, and here is part of its start:

Nearly 18 months had passed since he stormed the U.S. Capitol and sought to halt the inauguration of a duly elected president. Now the time had come for the federal government to pass judgment on Jake Peart.

The sentencing hearing was taking place via video, a necessity given the sheer number of defendants — more than 950 and counting — who, like Peart, had been charged with crimes related to the riot.

Alone in his living room and free from custody as he awaited sentencing, Peart listened as a federal prosecutor summarized his offense: The 47-year-old real estate agent, husband and father of five had blown past police officers being “attacked violently,” the blaring of alarms and the smell of tear gas emanating from the seat of American democracy. Once inside the Capitol, he had banged on a broken piece of furniture, yelling, “This is our house!”...

Peart was one of thousands of American citizens who on Jan. 6, 2021, sought to overturn the 2020 election on behalf of an angry and defeated President Donald Trump. Collectively, the mob’s actions were “egregious, outrageous, dangerous,” the judge told Peart, calling them “a direct attack on the rule of law and democracy as we know it.”

But each of the insurrectionists in the Capitol that day was also an individual. And so before the judge delivered his decision, he described a letter in Peart’s case file from a woman who in 2013 was driving home drunk from a bar when she struck and killed Peart’s 28-year-old sister. “A truly remarkable letter,” the judge called it.

In it, Andrea Milholm Jung described how the “mercy and love” that Peart had shown her after the accident and while she was in prison had helped her to find redemption. “Put yourself in Mr. Peart’s shoes and ask yourself if you would do the same,” she wrote to the judge. “It is a question I ask myself every single day.”

Peart sat quietly in his leather chair, his Bible at his side, awaiting his fate. From his window he could see the soaring peaks of southern Utah’s red-rock desert mountains.

The entire hearing had lasted a little more than an hour and now boiled down to just a few difficult questions: Was Peart truly repentant? Did he grasp the severity of his crime? Did he deserve prison or mercy?

"Death Penalty Abolition, the Right to Life, and Necessity"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper now available via SSRN authored by Ben Jones. Here is its abstract:

One prominent argument in international law and religious thought for abolishing capital punishment is that it violates individuals’ right to life.  Notably, this right-to-life argument emerged from normative and legal frameworks that recognize deadly force against aggressors as justified when necessary to stop their unjust threat of grave harm.  Can capital punishment be necessary in this sense — and thus justified defensive killing?  If so, the right-to-life argument would have to admit certain exceptions where executions are justified.  Drawing on work by Hugo Bedau, I identify a thought experiment where executions are justified defensive killing but explain why they cannot be in our world.  A state’s obligations to its prisoners include the obligation to use nonlethal incapacitation (ONI), which applies as long as prisoners pose no imminent threat.  ONI precludes executions for reasons of future dangerousness.  By subjecting the right-to-life argument to closer scrutiny, this article ultimately places it on firmer ground.

Federal judge sentences Michigan man who plotted to kidnap Gov to 16 years despite feds seeking LWOP ... and thereafter give other leader 235 months

As reported in this NBC News piece, headlined "Man sentenced to 16 years for plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer," a high-profile case reached a sentencing outcome this morning in Michigan federal court. Here are some of the notable details:

A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced a man to 16 years in prison for his role in a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — opting against the prosecution's bid for life behind bars.

Adam Fox, 39, was convicted in August of conspiracy to commit kidnapping and to use a weapon of mass destruction to attack Whitmer, who had drawn the ire of far-right groups for her efforts to curb the spread of Covid-19 in 2020. Jurors in April failed to come to verdicts against Fox and co-defendant Barry Croft, forcing a judge to declare a mistrial before a second trial proved decisive.

U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker questioned whether Fox was a true "natural leader" of the plot, worthy of a life sentence.  "I don't think life is needed to achieve the important public deterrent factors," Jonker said in Grand Rapids, explaining the 192-month sentence.

While a terrorism enhancement set up Fox for a possible life term, Jonker said that harshest sentence isn’t automatic and that he had to carefully consider other factors.  Jonker said he leaned heavily on a 2018-19 Northern California case where U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, brother of retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, sentenced ISIS sympathizer Amer Alhaggagi to 188 months in prison, more than 15 years short of the 33 years sought by prosecutors.

“You have to calibrate, as judges, the overall seriousness of wrongdoing and the overall seriousness of the defendant’s history," Jonker said. “I see nothing in the record ... nothing that makes me think he’s (Fox) a natural leader and nothing that makes me think he’s the kind of person that anybody involved in this group was naturally going to follow.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler had said Fox was out to spark an all-out war and needed to be put away for life. “They wanted a second Civil War or a revolution,” Kessler told the court on Tuesday.  "They wanted to ruin everything for everybody."  Kessler warned that Fox will still be a dangerous man when he someday walks free. “The problem is this defendant, he’s going to go into jail and probably emerge more radicalized than when he went in and will remain a danger to the public, your honor," the prosecutor said.

The plot was hatched in response to Whitmer's actions during the start of the pandemic in 2020 when she ordered various lockdowns aimed at curbing the spread of Covid. Far-right groups blasted Whitmer, and then-President Donald Trump appeared to back that opposition in an all-caps tweet.

Defense attorney Christopher Gibbons argued on Tuesday that a life sentence would have been too much.  "That overstates the reality of the conduct that has been alleged and that was actually accomplished by Adam Fox in summer of 2020," Gibbons said.

Based on various press reports, I surmise a terrorism enhancement under the federal sentencing guidelines led to a guildeine-recommended sentencing of life, which is turn served as a key basis for federal prosecutors to advocate for an LWOP term. But it seems Judge Jonker concluded that a 16-year prison term would be "sufficient but not greater than necessary" to serve the purposes set forth by Congress in 18 USC 3553(a)(2).

UPDATE:  On Wednesday (Dec. 28), another kidnapping plot leader was sentenced by the same judge as detailed in this Fox News account:

The other co-leader convicted of conspiracy charges in the foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 was sentenced Wednesday to nearly 20 years in prison.

Barry Croft Jr., who prosecutors recommended a life sentence, learned of his punishment a day after key ally Adam Fox was sentenced to 16 years. Croft was sentenced to 19 years and seven months.

Fox, 39, and Croft, 47, were convicted on two counts of conspiracy at a trial in August. Croft also was found guilty of possessing an unregistered explosive.  The conspirators were furious over tough COVID-19 restrictions that Whitmer and officials in other states had put in place during the early months of the pandemic, as well as perceived threats to gun ownership.

Croft, a Delaware trucker, regularly wore a tri-cornered hat common during the American Revolution and had tattoos on his arms symbolizing resistance -- "Expect Us" -- as he traveled to Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan to meet with like-minded extremists, according to the Associated Press. "Although he may not have had hierarchical control over all the other participants, he coordinated and pushed the implementation of the conspiracy from its inception to its final stages," Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler said in a court filing....

"The abduction of the governor was only meant to be the beginning of Croft’s reign of terror," Kessler said. "He called for riots, ‘torching’ government officials in their sleep and setting off a ‘domino’ effect of violence across the country."

A key piece of evidence showed Croft, Fox and others traveled to see Whitmer's vacation home in northern Michigan, with undercover agents and informants inside the cabal. At one point, Croft told allies, "I don’t like seeing anybody get killed either. But you don’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, you know what I mean?"

Croft's attorney tried to soften his client's role. In a court filing, Joshua Blanchard said the Bear, Delaware, man did not actually have authority over others and often frustrated them because he "just kept talking." Croft was smoking 2 ounces of marijuana per week, Blanchard said. "Simply put, to the extent that the jury determined he was a participant, as they necessarily did, he was a participant to a lesser degree than others," Blanchard insisted.

Two men who pleaded guilty and testified against Fox and Croft received substantial breaks; Ty Garbin is already free after a 2 1/2-year prison term, while Kaleb Franks was given a four-year sentence.

In state court, three men recently were given lengthy sentences for assisting Fox earlier in the summer of 2020. Five more are awaiting trial in Antrim County, where Whitmer’s vacation home is located.

"A Fiduciary Theory of Progressive Prosecution"

The title of this post is the title of this new article authored by Rebecca Roiphe and Bruce Green. Here is its abstract:

Progressive prosecutors differ from their more traditional counterparts primarily in the way in which they make decisions.  They tend to bind their discretion by announcing categorical policies rather than making fact-based decisions case by case.  This article catalogs the unusual degree of pushback progressive prosecutors have encountered from the public, legislatures, courts, police, and their own subordinate prosecutors.  Drawing on fiduciary theory, it explains this reaction as a response to progressive prosecutors’ abdication of their fiduciary role.  As a public fiduciary, prosecutors are entrusted with protecting the public’s abstract interest in justice, and an integral part of this role is exercising discretion in individual cases based on a broad array of relevant considerations.  This ad hoc discretionary decision-making process assures the public that prosecutors are drawing on their expertise to pursue justice in a basic sense rather than coopting the process for the benefit of some subset of the public.  We conclude by suggesting ways in which progressive prosecutors can pursue their conception of justice while still adhering to the fiduciary role.

"It is Time to Reform Federal Supervised Release"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new commentary at the ACS Expert Forum authored by Aliza Hochman and Jacob Schuman. I recommend the piece in full, and here are excerpts (with links from the original):

This fall, eight U.S. Senators (three Democrats and five Republicans) introduced the Safer Supervision Act of 2022, which aims to make federal supervised release more efficient, more effective, and less punitive.  As law professors who study criminal punishment and previously served in federal public defender offices, we urge Congress to pass this important legislation.

“Supervised release” is the federal equivalent of parole.  Judges impose supervised release on convicted defendants at sentencing, to follow their term of imprisonment.  If a defendant violates a condition of supervised release, then the judge can “revoke” their supervision and send them back to prison for up to five years.  Officially, the purpose of supervised release is to “afford adequate deterrence,” “protect the public,” and to “provide … correctional treatment,” not to inflict punishment.  The supervision is meant to “fulfill[] rehabilitative ends, distinct from those served by incarceration.”

In reality, however, the federal supervised release system has become bloated and excessively punitive.  Over 100,000 people are currently serving terms of supervised release, which is more than five times the number in the 1970s....  In approximately one-third of cases, the government ultimately revokes the defendant’s supervised release, sending more than 15,000 people to prison annually. Supervised release has also become a “central front in the War on Drugs.”  Drug offenders make up the largest proportion under federal supervision, and judges impose drug-treatment conditions on more than half of all supervisees, with as many as 3,000 revocations every year for drug-use.

Working at federal public defender offices, we witnessed the excesses of this system firsthand. We routinely saw clients sentenced to five, ten, or even twenty years of supervised release, based on just a few words of explanation from the judge, condemning them to spend vast spans of their lives subject to carceral control with hardly any discussion or consideration.  We also defended multiple clients suffering from substance-use disorder who were sent to prison solely for violating their supervised release by relapsing during drug treatment.  These experiences made clear to us that the federal supervision system is in dire need of reform.

The Safer Supervision Act would make three important changes to federal supervised release.  First, the Act would require sentencing judges to conduct an “individualized assessment” of how much supervised release is appropriate when they sentence a defendant....  Second, the Act would create a presumption of early termination of supervised release for individuals who have completed half of their term of supervision, so long as they demonstrate “good conduct and compliance” and do not jeopardize public safety....  Finally, the Act would amend a widely condemned provision of federal law that requires judges to revoke supervised release and impose a prison sentence on supervisees who use drugs, possess drugs, or fail multiple drug tests....

In addition to these three substantive changes, the Act would also direct the Comptroller General to conduct a much-needed study on federal community supervision and reentry, including a public report on the work of the federal Bureau of Prisons and Office of Probation and Pretrial Services....

If enacted, the Safer Supervision Act would be the first legislation in history reducing the size and severity of federal supervised release.  The Act should appeal equally to conservatives wary of government waste and progressives concerned about overcriminalization.  The reforms it proposes are incremental but important and worthy of serious consideration by members of Congress.  We commend this bipartisan political effort to make federal community supervision more effective and more just.

"Criminal Justice Through Management: From Police, Prosecutors, Courts, and Prisons to a Modern Administrative Agency"

The title of this post is the title of this new article authored by Edward Rubin and Malcolm Feeley and available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

Our so-called criminal justice system is in fact a disorganized mélange of poorly supervised police departments, over-aggressive prosecutors, under-funded public defenders, chaotic criminal courts and overcrowded, under-controlled prisons and jails.  Many valid criticisms have been levelled against its particular components and the racist, classist and vindictive attitudes that motivate it.  This article identifies a more basic cause of the system’s failure and recommends a more comprehensive solution.  The various institutions that we use to deal with the problem of criminal activity are atavisms, holdovers from the pre-modern era when crime control was the defining feature of government (together with foreign affairs) rather than one element of a wide-ranging system of public administration. As a result, these institutions are frozen into outdated, balkanized and reactive formats that fail to achieve the system’s basic goal of crime prevention.

For considerably more than a century, our society has addressed other social issues such as education, public health, employment conditions, consumer safety and environmental degradation by creating administrative agencies with comprehensive responsibility and at least an expectation that they will develop a coherent strategy.  The same should be the case in criminal justice.  An integrated, hierarchically organized agency in each state would be able to plan general approaches, manage resources and coordinate functions, all essential tasks that are currently ignored or underdeveloped.  In addition, it would have the capacity to train staff, supervise their performance, punish misconduct, and develop new patterns of behavior that would detach criminal justice institutions from their pre-modern, militaristic origins.  An orderly administrative system of this sort is almost certainly the only way to alter the deeply ingrained patterns of behavior that continue to produce so much abuse and oppression in all our criminal justice institutions.  While constitutional law protections should not be diminished, the criminal trial, now utilized by only a few percent of all defendants, should not serve as the organizing principle of the system, but rather as a means for dealing with the most recalcitrant individuals, as it does in other areas of administration such as securities law and environmental protection.

"Punishment Externalities and the Prison Tax"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Sheldon Evans now available via SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

Punishment as a social institution has failed to live up to the quixotic ideals of theory and has descended into the practice of mass incarceration, which is one of the defining failures of this generation.  Scholars have traditionally studied punishment and incarceration as parts of a social transaction between the criminal offender, whose crime imposes a cost to society, and the state that ensures the offender repays this debt by correcting past harms and preventing future offenses.  But if crime has a cost that must be repaid by the offender, punishment also has a cost that must be repaid by the state.  These social costs of punishment start by impacting the offender, but inevitably ripple out into the community.

While the costs of crime remain a predominant theme in criminal justice, scholars have also recorded the economic, political, and social costs of punishment.  This Article contributes to this literature by proposing a paradigm shift in punishment theory that reconceptualizes punishment as an industry that produces negative externalities.  The externality framework recognizes punishment and its practice of mass incarceration as an institution that purports certain benefits, but also must be balanced with the overwhelming social costs it produces in the community.

Viewing punishment and the carceral state as an externality problem that accounts for community costs creates a unique synergy between law & economics and communitarianism that deepens punishment theory while carrying the practical value of exploring externality-based solutions.  This Article argues for a Pigouvian prison tax, among other externality solutions, that will gradually lower the prison population while reinvesting revenue in the most impacted communities to mitigate punishment’s social costs in future generations.

"The Inherent Problem with Mass Incarceration"

The title of this post is the title of this new essay authored by Raff Donelson now available via SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

For more than a decade, activists, scholars, journalists, and politicians of various stripes have been discussing and decrying mass incarceration.  This collection of voices has mostly focused on contingent features of the phenomenon. Critics mention racial disparities, poor prison conditions, and spiraling costs.  Some critics have alleged broader problems: they have called for an end to all incarceration, even all punishment. Lost in this conversation is a focus on what is inherently wrong with mass incarceration specifically.  This essay fills that void and supplies an answer, drawing on the early modern English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.  On the Hobbesian account developed here, mass incarceration is always wrong because it is always inconsistent with having a free society.

"Ohio's Not So Uncommon Punishment: Hold Your Sign in Shame"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper recently posted to SSRN and authored by Jon Michael Hilsheimer, a student at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.  This paper is part of a student paper series supported by OSU's Drug Enforcement and Policy Center, and here is its abstract:

Some first-year criminal law courses briefly discuss alternative punishments under the header of “scarlet letter” or “shaming” punishments.  Beyond a brief discussion in class and a case or two in the casebook, students are left without a clear picture of how frequently judges engage with these forms of alternative sentencing.  This paper provides an overview of shaming punishments in Ohio.  While it may not account for all instances of shaming punishments that have been administered, or a complete list of the judges that engage with the practice, this paper shows that the practice is not an infrequent occurrence in Ohio.  After providing a brief overview of the landscape of these punishments, this paper surveys how appellate level courts in other jurisdictions have handled challenges to shaming penalties.  The piece then concludes by applying the majority approach using Ohio’s statutory code and posits that there are insufficient statutory grounds for the current practice.

"The Efficiency Mindset and Mass Incarceration"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper now available via SSRN authored by Thea Johnson.  Here is its abstract:

Efficiency often carries a positive connotation. To be efficient, especially in a job, is to get things done quickly and with little wasted effort.  As such, it makes sense that lawyers and judges see efficiency, especially in the form of plea bargaining, as a normative good, particularly since it can be used in individual cases to achieve fair results in an often unfair system.  But this view of efficiency masks the darker side of the efficient administration of justice, which has contributed to some of the underlying causes of mass incarceration.

To combat mass incarceration, reformers must think seriously about how to break lawyers and judges of their efficiency mindset.  Legal culture change in criminal courts is unlikely to be driven by legislation, court action, or lawyers and judges themselves.  Instead, this Essay suggests other sources of power that may break the efficiency mindset.  By examining these sources of power — both inside and outside of the legal culture — the Essay hopes to offer some ideas for how legal actors might start to, or be forced to, re-envision their role in mass incarceration.

Federal judge sentences Steve Bannon to 4 months of imprisonment for contempt of Congress

As reported in this USA Today piece, "Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison Friday, three months after his conviction on contempt of Congress charges for defying a subpoena from the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack." Here is a bit more:

The Justice Department had sought a six month prison term for Bannon and recommended that he pay a maximum fine of $200,000 for "his sustained, bad-faith."... While Bannon initially refused to comply with the panel's summons, citing a claim of executive privilege, prosecutors said Monday that the Trump operative's actions were "aimed at undermining the Committee’s efforts to investigate an historic attack on government."

Bannon's attorneys argued that a sentence of probation was more appropriate. "The legal challenges advanced by Mr. Bannon were not meritless or frivolous and were aimed at protecting his constitutional rights," attorney Evan Corcoran argued in court documents. "For these reasons, the fact that Mr. Bannon chose to put the Government to its burden at trial should not preclude him from receiving a reduction to his offense level based on acceptance of responsibility."

Prior related posts:

• Should "pardoned conduct" be part of Steve Bannon's sentencing after his convictions for contempt of Congress? 
• Feds urging six months' imprisonment and $200,000 fined for Steve Bannon as punishment following his convictions for criminal contempt of Congress 

"A Nat-Con Case for Criminal Justice Reform"

The title of this post is the title of this new essay authored by Marc A. Levin at Law & Liberty. I recommend the full piece, and here is just a taste from the start and closing of the piece:

From the halls of Mar-a-Lago to the streets of Chicago, all Americans have a stake in the fair application of criminal law by a system they can trust. Indeed, there cannot be a policy area in which a principled approach is more important than in criminal justice, where lives and liberties are at stake.  So how do the principles of the emergent national conservatism movement apply to criminal justice policy?  Can they inform a center-right approach to public safety that draws on the overlap between national conservatism’s Christian worldview and universal truths?

A July 2022 manifesto entitled “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles” crystallizes the tenets of this movement that seeks to address many Americans’ apprehension about the coarsening of our culture and erosion of our national identity.  These concerns naturally implicate the criminal justice system, which becomes the last backstop when society’s norms and institutions from the family to the education system prove inadequate, leaving the law as the only remaining form of social control, weak as it often is....

[N]either conservatives of any stripe nor anyone else should back policies that are inconsistent with public safety. However, within that universe, the principles of the manifesto are consistent with four factors for evaluating criminal justice policies: 1) Are they deeply rooted in our best traditions and in alignment with our founding principles of liberty?; 2) Do they protect and strengthen families?; 3) Do they address not just individual culpability but also drivers of criminal activity, including family breakdown, exposure to trauma, addiction, mental health, and the neighborhood environment; and 4) Do they nurture and sustain the public’s confidence in the rule of law as an expression of our shared morality?

Those policies that check these boxes can lead to a stronger, fairer, safer, and more unified nation, an objective that both national conservatives and all Americans can embrace.

Severe federal drug sentence in a sad, high-profile case with so many stories within

I sometimes say to students (and on this blog) that certain cases could alone provide a robust foundation for teaching about so many different aspects of sentencing theory, policy and practice. Upon reading this Washington Post account of the high-profile federal sentencing of Eric Kay for providing the drugs that led to the death of Tyler Skaggs, I am yet again struck by how many notable issues and stories are sometimes tucked within a single sentencing. Here are some of the details:

Eric Kay, the former communications director for the Los Angeles Angels, was sentenced Tuesday to 22 years in prison after being convicted in February of providing the drugs that caused the 2019 death of pitcher Tyler Skaggs.  District Judge Terry Means said he went above the minimum 20 years Kay faced because of remarks he made in prison.   Prosecutors played a tape of a prison phone conversation in which Kay, whose calls were monitored and recorded, said of Skaggs: “I hope people realize what a piece of s--- he is. … Well, he’s dead, so f--- him.”

Means said he had been dreading sentencing Kay, 48, who was convicted of drug distribution resulting in death, because he felt mandatory minimums were “excessive.”  But the judge said the prison conversations showed a “refusal to accept responsibility and even be remorseful for something you caused.”

In his own remarks, Kay apologized for having “spewed vitriol” about Skaggs, prosecutors and the jury, in that and other prison correspondence. “I wanted to blame Tyler for all of this,” Kay said, calling his words “so wrong and foul.”

The emotional sentencing hearing spelled a bleak end to this phase of a legal saga that began when Skaggs, 27, was found dead in a Southlake, Tex., hotel room July 1, 2019, with oxycodone and fentanyl in his system. Kay has indicated he will appeal his conviction.  Kay, like Skaggs, was a user of illicit opioids.  During Kay’s trial in February, witnesses including several Major League Baseball players said he shared black market pain pills with them, though the government has not suggested he did so for profit.

Federal prosecutor Erinn Martin stated that Kay was in Skaggs’s hotel room when he choked on his own vomit — a contention based on key card evidence — and that he didn’t try to save the pitcher because “he freaked out and decided to save himself and his job” or because he was incapacitated himself. Martin said Tuesday that Kay knew the drugs he gave Skaggs were “likely or potentially counterfeit” and could contain fentanyl.

Kay, who did not take the stand in his own defense during the trial, did not directly address the government’s version of events Tuesday but expressed remorse for his actions, blaming his addiction.  “I will spend the rest of my days in repair,” said Kay, who wore an orange jumpsuit and was in arm and leg shackles, during remarks in which he sometimes sobbed.

Skaggs’s family members said Kay was responsible for the pitcher’s death in their own remarks in court Tuesday. “Eric Kay knew that the drugs he was giving to my son and other players [were] laced with fentanyl,” said Skaggs’s mother, Debbie, adding that “a strict sentence … has the power to dissuade people from providing lethal drugs to others.” ...  “I know no matter how much time Eric Kay gets it won’t bring back Tyler,” Skaggs’s father, Darrell, said in a statement read in court by Tyler’s aunt. “But the longer he is incarcerated, the safer everyone is.”

Kay, who was raised upper-middle class in Southern California and educated at Pepperdine University before rising to earn a six-figure salary with the Angels, had no previous criminal record.  But Martin, the prosecutor, said Kay’s prison correspondence was evidence that he hadn’t learned his lesson.  In emails and phone calls, Kay referred to the “trash-ass Skaggs family,” derided the jurors as “rednecks” with missing teeth and referred to a federal prosecutor’s “horrible makeup.” Martin also noted that Kay was allegedly caught with suboxone while in jail. “That kind of person reoffends,” Martin said. “Eric Kay isn’t going to stop.”

Kay’s attorney, Cody Cofer, said his client’s jailhouse remarks reflected the resentment of a man coming to terms with being separated from his family for two decades. “The notion that he is likely to reoffend is just not supported,” Cofer said.

Means said Kay should be incarcerated near his home of California, where he has three sons, the youngest of whom is 12. Kay’s middle child, 20-year-old Carter, said during the sentencing hearing that his father “wouldn’t do something bad willingly” and urged the judge to be lenient. “My little brother needs him most,” Carter Kay said. “I haven’t seen him smile in a while.”...

Since Kay’s trial, one of his attorneys, Reagan Wynn, has been suspended from practicing law after a Texas bar panel found he “failed to explain” to another client the facts of his criminal case. In a May hearing in Kay’s case, his other attorney at the time, Michael Molfetta, appeared to blame Wynn for having left Kay without representation during a meeting with probation officials before his sentencing....

Molfetta also has since left the case. In an interview with The Washington Post, Sandy Kay said her son had received a poor legal defense. “Tyler Skaggs was an adult male who willfully chose to engage in dangerous behavior that ended in his death,” Sandra Kay said. “And to hold someone else accountable for that is a great injustice.”

"Retributivism"

The title of this post is the title of this new book chapter by Mitchell Berman which I just came across via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

Retributivism is a family of theories that purport to justify criminal punishment by reference to a wrongdoer’s negative desert.  Individual members of the family differ from one another on many issues, including what it is that wrongdoers deserve and what is the character and force of the fact that they deserve it.  This chapter lays out one retributive theory and sketches defenses of that theory against prominent anti-retributivist objections, including objections grounded in determinism.  According to the theory this chapter dubs 'prospect retributivism', culpable wrongdoers deserve to experience their wrongdoing as personally costly to them, and the state assumes a pro tanto duty to cause wrongdoers to experience those costs in virtue of barring retaliation by victims and their surrogates.

"Expanded Criminal Defense Lawyering"

The title of this post is the title of this new article recently posted online and due to be published in the January 2023 issues of the Annual Review of Criminology. The article is authored by Ronald Wright and Jenny Roberts, and here is its abstract:

This review collects and critiques the academic literature on criminal defense lawyering, with an emphasis on empirical work.  Research on criminal defense attorneys in the United States has traditionally emphasized scarcity of resources: too many people facing criminal charges who are “too poor to pay” for counsel and not enough funding to pay for the constitutionally mandated lawyers.  Scholars have focused on the capacity of different delivery systems, such as public defender offices, to change the ultimate outcomes in criminal cases within their tight budgetary constraints.  Over the decades, however, theoretical understandings of the defense attorney's work have expanded to include client interests outside the criminal courtroom, reaching the broader social conditions connected to the alleged criminal act.  Researchers have responded by asking a broader range of questions about the effectiveness of defense counsel outside the courtroom and by using improved data to study the effectiveness of lawyers at discrete procedural stages.

Another look at Oregon's drug decriminalization efforts now a few years in

A have done periodic posts (some linked below) over the last couple of years based on press accounts of Oregon's drug decriminalization efforts after state residents in Fall 2020 passed Measure 110 to makes possession of small amounts of various illicit drugs punishable by only a civil citation.  This new AP article, headlined "After rocky start, hopes up in Oregon drug decriminalization," provides the latest "updates from the front."  Here are excerpts:

Two years after Oregon residents voted to decriminalize hard drugs and dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to treatment, few people have requested the services and the state has been slow to channel the funds.

When voters passed the state’s pioneering Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act in 2020, the emphasis was on treatment as much as on decriminalizing possession of personal-use amounts of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs.

But Oregon still has among the highest addiction rates in the country. Fatal overdoses have increased almost 20% over the previous year, with over a thousand dead. Over half of addiction treatment programs in the state lack capacity to meet demand because they don’t have enough staffing and funding, according to testimony before lawmakers.

Supporters want more states to follow Oregon’s lead, saying decriminalization reduces the stigma of addiction and keeps people who use drugs from going to jail and being saddled with criminal records. How Oregon is faring will almost certainly be taken into account if another state considers decriminalizing.

Steve Allen, behavioral health director of the Oregon Health Authority, acknowledged the rocky start, even as he announced a “true milestone” has been reached, with more than $302 million being sent to facilities to help people get off drugs, or at least use them more safely. “The road to get here has not been easy. Oregon is the first state to try such a bold and transformative approach,” Allen told a state Senate committee Wednesday.

One expert, though, told the lawmakers the effort is doomed unless people with addictions are nudged into treatment. “If there is no formal or informal pressure on addicted people to seek treatment and recovery and thereby stop using drugs, we should expect continuing high rates of drug use, addiction and attendant harm,” said Keith Humphreys, an addiction researcher and professor at Stanford University and former senior adviser in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Of 16,000 people who accessed services in the first year of decriminalization, only 0.85% entered treatment, the health authority said. A total of 60% received “harm reduction” like syringe exchanges and overdose medications. An additional 15% got help with housing needs, and 12% obtained peer support....

Under the law, people receive a citation, with the maximum $100 fine waived if they call a hotline for a health assessment.  But most of the more than 3,100 tickets issued so far have been ignored, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. Few people have dialed the hotline.

Tera Hurst, executive director of Oregon Health Justice Recovery Alliance, which is focused on implementing Measure 110, said coerced treatment is ineffective. Hurst said it’s important to focus on “just building a system of care to make sure that people who need access can get access.”  Allen called the outlay of million of dollars — which come from taxes on Oregon’s legal marijuana industry — a “pivotal moment.”...

Centro Latino Americano, a nonprofit serving Latino immigrant families, plans to use its $4.5 million share to move treatment services to a bigger space and hire more staff, said manager Basilio Sandoval.  “Measure 110 makes it possible for us to provide this service free of charge,” Sandoval said. “This allows us to reach people we could not serve previously because of a lack of insurance.”

Scott Winkels, lobbyist for the League of Oregon Cities, said residents are running out of patience.  “People are going to need to see progress,” Winkels said.  “If you’re living in a community where you’re finding needles, how many times do you need to see a needle in a park before you lose your cool?”

Some prior related posts:

• Spotlighting many challenges "winning the peace" after drug decriminalization reform in Oregon 
• Checking in with Oregon's drug decriminalization effort one year in
• Different perspectives one year after Measure 110 took effect decriminalizing low-level drug possession in Oregon

"Is Criminal Law Unlawful?"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new article authored by Paul Gowder and available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

A legal theorist reading contemporary criminal justice scholarship is confronted with a troubling sense of dissonance. Foundational to modern accounts of the concept of law are rules, and the chief modality of law’s operation in ordinary peoples’ lives is said to be in enforcing those (primary) rules.  Normative theories by philosophers of law typically deploy this rule- oriented character as a key virtue of legal systems, whether in Fullerian theories of the moral value of law itself in terms of their facilitation of autonomous self-application of rules, or in theories of the rule of law according to which one of the key criteria of good legal systems is that they only coerce individuals pursuant to rules.

Yet criminal justice scholars have known for decades that rule-enforcement is at best incidental to vast swathes of criminal justice.  Even before the advent of “broken windows” policing, a large portion of police work was focused on coercively organizing public space, with minimal regard to the rules of substantive law.  Scholars of misdemeanor adjudication — the judicial destination of the arrests that result from this mode of policing — have described a process in which the ultimate disposition of defendants is unconnected to any serious effort to determine whether some law has been violated.  This lawlessness of criminal justice is exacerbated by, and itself exacerbates, America’s underlying system of race and class hierarchy.  In short, instead of a system of law enforcement, American criminal justice is a key exemplar of what critical race scholars have called “structural racism,” in which individual and organizational incentives reproduce racially unjust outcomes even in the absence of individual racial malice.

Legal philosophers must reconcile their theories with reality by confronting the fact that a sector of American “law” with immense practical significance does not, in fact, constitute an application of law (for conceptual theorists) or the rule of law (for normative theorists) at all.

In this context, some lessons may be drawn from an analogous juridical context.  A handful of scholars have suggested that the system of criminal justice is more administrative than legal.  Moreover, advocates and scholars have long articulated severe critiques of the federal administrative state on rule of law grounds.  Thus, the discourse around the administrative state can serve as a model for how legal theorists should confront the criminal justice state.

While some scholars appear to have supposed that the notion of legality simply does not apply to the administrative state, others have propounded radical challenges to that state which have reflected a willingness to sacrifice other important interests in the pursuit of legal fidelity.  Results such as the recent Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. E.P.A. have suggested that even the pursuit of existential policy goals like combatting climate change must give way to the concept of legality underneath challenges to the administrative state.  If such challenges are any model to follow, then rule of law advocates and scholars must at least consider similar radical challenges to the criminal justice system, such as police abolition, to be on the table.

"Irrational Collateral Sanctions"

The title of this post is the title of this new article now available via SSRN and authored by Michael Zuckerman.  Here is its abstract:

In the modern era, a criminal sentence is rarely truly over just because someone has served their time.  Instead, both legal and social barriers continue to haunt most people who have been convicted of crimes for years.  These barriers often persist long past the point of making good sense.

While social barriers like stigma are not always easy for lawyers and lawmakers to address, legal barriers like so-called “collateral sanctions” (also known as “collateral consequences”) are their bread-and-butter.  In Part I of this Essay, I tell an anonymized client story that illustrates many of the existing efforts to blunt the effects of collateral sanctions in Ohio.  In Part II, I discuss in more depth both the problem of collateral sanctions and both the challenges and opportunities posed by existing remedial efforts.  In Part III, I discuss the opportunity for rational-basis challenges to irrational collateral sanctions when other remedial opportunities are unavailing. 

"Policing Mass Incarceration"

The title of this post is the title of this recent article available via SSRN authored by Fred O. Smith, Jr.  Here is its abstract:

In Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky issues an indictment of the Supreme Court, charging that institution with facilitating undue state violence, wrongful convictions, invasions of dignity, and racial inequality.  The Supreme Court has produced these consequences by offering needlessly narrow remedies for constitutional wrongs and by issuing crabbed constructions of criminal procedural rights.  Chemerinsky’s indictment is written with clarity, comprehensiveness, and humanity.

This Book Review argues that mass incarceration presents an immense barrier to the author’s goals of producing less violent, more accurate, less invasive, and less racist policing.  First, many of Chemerinsky’s proposals for police reform assume a system of criminal trials.  In our system of mass incarceration, the overwhelming majority of incarcerated persons never receive a trial.  If the criminal legal system did attempt to rely on trials instead of coerced guilty pleas, the system would collapse under the weight of the sheer number of people we prosecute.  Second, Chemerinsky argues that we should revisit and raise the requisite standard for police to search a suspect from reasonable suspicion to probable cause.  But in a system of mass incarceration, probable cause is not hard to come by. The more things we label “crime,” the more reasonable it is to believe that someone is likely committing one.  Third, mass incarceration feeds on legal reforms that are not aimed at decarceration.  A “criminal caste” is more tolerable if the government gives the caste members “rights” before stripping them of humanity and core dimensions of citizenship.

It is imperative to reverse and control mass incarceration to achieve lasting transformation of the police.  There is no equitable way to police in a world of mass incarceration. 

"The Miseducation of Carceral Reform"

The title of this post is the title of this new article now available via SSRN authored by Fanna Gamal. Here is its abstract:

Public education looms large in criminal law reform.  As states debate what to invest in — other than criminal law enforcement — to provide safety and security to the public, public schools have emerged as a popular answer.  Today, legislatures move money from prisons to public education, arguing that this reinvestment can address the root causes of mass incarceration.  This Article analyzes this reinvestment trend from the perspective of public schools.  It takes seriously the possibility that diverting money from incarceration to public education can help address the root causes of mass incarceration and it argues that realizing this possibility requires a more expansive approach to reinvestment than is demonstrated in current legal reforms.  This expansive approach to reinvestment situates the provision of education within a constellation of interconnected needs, increases power over diverted funds for those who have historically been excluded from educational decisions, and confronts the underlying race, class, and gender resentments used to justify asymmetrical spending on incarceration and public education.  By analyzing reinvestment approaches to carceral reform from the perspective of public schools, this Article underscores the contested nature of the reinvestment movement.  It maps both the restrictive and transformative directions carceral reinvestment can take, and it points to several promising efforts that make use of a more transformative approach to reconfigure the relationship between public welfare and the carceral state.