The prevalent criminal justice practices in the U.S. have produced levels and patterns of incarceration that fewer and fewer politicians, scholars, and citizens care to support. There seems to be widespread consensus that the system is indicted as unjust by its outcomes no matter how these outcomes came about. But if that is so, how can it be turned back? Who should be eligible for release, and on what grounds? This article addresses the position of black prisoners serving very long sentences. Many of these prisoners are at risk of missing out under current legislative and administrative proposals designed to reduce overall levels of imprisonment. Partly this is due to the fact that the wrong of mass incarceration is often understood as a wrong suffered at the collective level by what has come to be referred to as “overpunished communities.” It is unclear how the existence of that collective wrong affects the permissibility of continued punishment at the individual level. This article develops an argument that, at the individual level, being a black prisoner serving a very long sentence gives rise to a moral entitlement for a review of the need and justification for continued incarceration. The article outlines the basic shape of a clemency scheme devised especially for these prisoners as a moral imperative for a reform process intended to remedy penal injustice.

What is the rate of wrongful conviction? This question may be implicit in Blackstone’s ratio: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” Scholarship designed to provide an empirical answer, however, emerged only with the rise of the “innocence movement” in the United States. This article does not provide another study estimating the rate of wrongful felony conviction either for a specified sample, such as death sentences within a specified time period, or for an entire jurisdiction. Instead, we evaluate the rate question itself and assess its importance to innocence scholarship and action. We first trace the question’s intellectual lineage, and its historical and ideological roots among innocence believers and innocence skeptics. We then describe and evaluate all or most of the published studies attempting to estimate the wrongful conviction rate. Next, we discuss a reoccurring limitation of this published work, namely, its failure to account for or its unsubstantiated assumptions about guilty pleas and misdemeanor convictions among innocent defendants. Finally, we question the continued importance of the rate question in light of the modern innocence movement and its growing accomplishments.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Arizona v. Gant fundamentally altered the law governing police searches of vehicles incident to the arrest of a vehicle occupant. To date, there has been no empirical examination of Gant’s impact on line officers. The present study does so using data from a survey of police officers that assessed their ability to apply Gant. Although 93 percent of the officers had been taught Gant and 77 percent had received training within the twelve months prior to completing the survey, 67 percent incorrectly applied Belton, rather than Gant. Moreover, nearly half of the sample were missing constitutionally permissible opportunities to search the vehicle under either of Gant’s two prongs. Concerningly, officers who had received recent training on vehicle searches were significantly less likely to identify correct search protocols under Gant’s evidence prong. The implications of these findings are discussed.

In 2018, the Supreme Court issued a little noticed decision, Currier v. Virginia, that signaled a potential revolution in the Double Jeopardy Clause doctrine. This essay uses that decision to reconsider the Clause’s disparate protections, seeking coherence in this long-confused area of law. In doing so, it finds that the central protections of the Clause are best understood through a single, novel framework: the jury-preservation theory of double jeopardy. This essay explicates the theory, explaining its roots in the Revolutionary Era jury, its applications to modern double jeopardy law, and its implications for Currier and future double jeopardy cases.

In June 2018, a new Reform came into effect in the Judea and Samaria Area (the West Bank; hereinafter “the Area”). For the first time, victims of terror activity that was adjudicated in military courts in the Area, acting under international law, were given statutory rights. These victims were awarded new procedural rights, including the right to receive information regarding the proceedings against the defendant, updates regarding plea bargains, release from prison, and pardon. The rights that crime victims are now entitled to, following the Reform, will allow them to state their opinion on and take part in the proceeding, though not entirely so. The article describes the new Reform regarding victims of terrorism in the Area. It explains the legal, international, and social factors that were at the basis of the Reform. It portrays how these changes are compliant with principles of international law and of foreign legal systems relating to enhancing the protection of crime victims. The article then explores the normative changes expected as a result of the Reform and performs a preliminary evaluation of future developments resulting from its application, de facto. Simultaneously, the article poses criticism to certain aspects of the Reform, such as regarding the enforcement of compensation awarded to victims of terrorism in the Area, and offers suggestions for improvement.

A young defense attorney earns his client, charged in federal court with bank robbery, a jury acquittal. (It’s the attorney’s first.) One would expect the impartial judge to thank the jury for its service. Instead, this one harangues both jury and defense attorney (“entailing changes in his complexion from red to purple to dead white”), publicly rails against the verdict, attempts to bar the jurors from future service, refuses to release the defendant, and successfully prods prosecutors to bring a duplicative state prosecution that would end in conviction for the same crime. To anyone who respects the rule of law—or at the very least to anyone who respects the American jury—this should be deeply troubling. Yet when it took place in a Chicago federal courtroom in December 1953, state prosecutors leapt at the federal judge’s call. And when the appeal of the duplicative state prosecution reached the United States Supreme Court, the defendant lost 5-4. Criminal practitioners know that result as Bartkus v. Illinois, 359 U.S. 121 (1959), a rule of double-jeopardy “dual sovereignty” that the Court reaffirmed in 2019. But next to nobody appreciates how it began in that Chicago federal courtroom. That history comes to life in the unpublished notes of the remarkable defense lawyer. It is a story that underscores just how wrongheaded is the legal rule, and that makes vivid the abuse of judicial power.

Although an offender’s conduct before and during the crime is the traditional focus of criminal law and sentencing rules, an examination of post-offense conduct can also be important in promoting criminal justice goals. After the crime, different offenders make different choices and have different experiences, and those differences can suggest appropriately different treatment by judges, correctional officials, probation and parole supervisors, and other decision makers in the criminal justice system. Positive post-offense conduct ought to be acknowledged and rewarded, not only to encourage it but also as a matter of fair and just treatment. This essay describes four kinds of positive post-offense conduct that merit special recognition and preferential treatment: the responsible offender, who avoids further deceit and damage to others during the process leading to conviction; the debt-paid offender, who suffers the full punishment deserved (according to true principles of justice rather than the sentence actually imposed); the reformed offender, who takes affirmative steps to leave criminality behind; and the redeemed offender, who out of genuine remorse tries to atone for the offense. The essay considers how one might operationalize a system for giving special accommodation to such offenders. Positive post-offense conduct might be rewarded, for example, through the selection and shaping of sanctioning methods, through giving preference in access to education, training, treatment, and other programs, and through elimination or restriction of collateral consequences of conviction that continue after the sentence is completed.

Which interpretive tasks should be delegated to machines? This question has become a focal point of “tech governance” debates. One familiar answer is that while machines are capable of implementing tasks whose ends are uncontroversial, machine delegation is inappropriate for tasks that elude human consensus. After all, if human experts cannot agree about the nature of a task, what hope is there for machines? Here, we turn this position around. When humans disagree about the nature of a task, that should be prima facie grounds for machine delegation, not against it. The reason has to do with fairness: affected parties should be able to predict the outcomes of particular cases. Indeterminate decision-making environments—those in which human disagree about ends—are inherently unpredictable in that, for any given case, the distribution of likely outcomes will depend on a specific decision maker’s view of the relevant end. This injects an irreducible dynamic of randomization into the decision-making process from the perspective of non-repeat players. To the extent machine decisions aggregate across disparate views of a task’s relevant ends, they promise improvement on this specific dimension of predictability. Whatever the other virtues and drawbacks of machine decision-making, this gain should be recognized and factored into governance. The essay has two parts. In the first, we draw a distinction between determinacy and certainty as epistemic properties and fashioning a taxonomy of decision types. In the second part, we bring the formal point alive through a case study of criminal sentencing.