Errors of Justice

Errors of Justice PDF Author: Brian Forst
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521528825
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In this book, Brian Forst takes a fresh new perspective on the assessment of criminal justice policy, examining the prospect of assessing policies based on their impact on errors of justice: the error of failing to bring offenders to justice, on the one hand, and the error of imposing costs on innocent people and excessive costs on offenders, on the other. Noting that we have sophisticated systems for managing errors in statistical inference and quality control processes and no parallel system for managing errors of a more socially costly variety - on matters of guilt and innocence - the author lays the foundation for a common sense approach to the management of errors in the criminal justice system, from policing and prosecution to sentencing and corrections. He examines the sources of error in each sector, the harms they impose on society, and frameworks for analyzing and reducing them.

Errors of Justice

Errors of Justice PDF Author: Brian Forst
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521528825
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In this book, Brian Forst takes a fresh new perspective on the assessment of criminal justice policy, examining the prospect of assessing policies based on their impact on errors of justice: the error of failing to bring offenders to justice, on the one hand, and the error of imposing costs on innocent people and excessive costs on offenders, on the other. Noting that we have sophisticated systems for managing errors in statistical inference and quality control processes and no parallel system for managing errors of a more socially costly variety - on matters of guilt and innocence - the author lays the foundation for a common sense approach to the management of errors in the criminal justice system, from policing and prosecution to sentencing and corrections. He examines the sources of error in each sector, the harms they impose on society, and frameworks for analyzing and reducing them.

Justice in Error

Justice in Error PDF Author: Clive Walker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The authors examine the various steps within the criminal justice system which have resulted in the conviction of the innocent, and suggest remedies as to how miscarriages might be avoided in the future. The contributors comprise academics, campaigners and practitioners

Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform

Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform PDF Author: Greg Berman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442268484
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
In this revised edition of their concise, readable, yet wide-ranging book, Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox tackle a question students and scholars of law, criminology, and political science constantly face: what mistakes have led to the problems that pervade the criminal justice system in the United States? The reluctance of criminal justice policymakers to talk openly about failure, the authors argue, has stunted the public conversation about crime in this country and stifled new ideas. It has also contributed to our inability to address such problems as chronic offending in low-income neighborhoods, an overreliance on incarceration, the misuse of pretrial detention, and the high rates of recidivism among parolees. Berman and Fox offer students and policymakers an escape from this fate by writing about failure in the criminal justice system. Their goal is to encourage a more forthright dialogue about criminal justice, one that acknowledges that many new initiatives fail and that no one knows for certain how to reduce crime. For the authors, this is not a source of pessimism, but a call to action. This revised edition is updated with a new foreword by Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., and afterword by Greg Berman.

Miscarriages of Justice

Miscarriages of Justice PDF Author: Clive Walker
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 1854316877
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
The authors examine the various steps within the criminal justice system which have resulted in the conviction of the innocent, and suggest remedies as to how miscarriages might be avoided in the future. The contributors comprise academics, campaigners and practitioners.

When Law Fails

When Law Fails PDF Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814762257
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Since 1989, there have been over 200 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. On the surface, the release of innocent people from prison could be seen as a victory for the criminal justice system: the wrong person went to jail, but the mistake was fixed and the accused set free. A closer look at miscarriages of justice, however, reveals that such errors are not aberrations but deeply revealing, common features of our legal system. The ten original essays in When Law Fails view wrongful convictions not as random mistakes but as organic outcomes of a misshaped larger system that is rife with faulty eyewitness identifications, false confessions, biased juries, and racial discrimination. Distinguished legal thinkers Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat have assembled a stellar group of contributors who try to make sense of justice gone wrong and to answer urgent questions. Are miscarriages of justice systemic or symptomatic, or are they mostly idiosyncratic? What are the broader implications of justice gone awry for the ways we think about law? Are there ways of reconceptualizing legal missteps that are particularly useful or illuminating? These instructive essays both address the questions and point the way toward further discussion. When Law Fails reveals the dramatic consequences as well as the daily realities of breakdowns in the law’s ability to deliver justice swiftly and fairly, and calls on us to look beyond headline-grabbing exonerations to see how failure is embedded in the legal system itself. Once we are able to recognize miscarriages of justice we will be able to begin to fix our broken legal system. Contributors: Douglas A. Berman, Markus D. Dubber, Mary L. Dudziak, Patricia Ewick, Daniel Givelber, Linda Ross Meyer, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, and Robert Weisberg.

Usual Cruelty

Usual Cruelty PDF Author: Alec Karakatsanis
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620975289
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to our society's normalization of the caging of human beings, and the role of the legal profession in perpetuating it Alec Karakatsanis is interested in what we choose to punish. For example, it is a crime in most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice; dice-wagerers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited, and be locked in cages. It's perfectly fine, by contrast, for people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the global supply of wheat; wheat-wagerers become names on the wings of hospitals and museums. He is also troubled by how the legal system works when it is trying to punish people. The bail system, for example, is meant to ensure that people return for court dates. But it has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who have not been convicted of anything. He's so concerned about this that he has personally sued court systems across the country, resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released from jail when their money bail was found to be unconstitutional. Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings—an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color and for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it.

The Law's Flaws

The Law's Flaws PDF Author: Larry Laudan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848901995
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This is a book about the law's failure as a system of empirical inquiry. While the US Supreme Court repeatedly says that the aim of a trial is to find out the truth about a crime, there is abundant evidence that many of the rules of evidence and legal procedure are not truth-conducive. Quite the contrary; many are truth-thwarting. Relevant evidence of defendant's guilt is often excluded; reasonable inferences from the available evidence are likewise often excluded. When a defendant elects not to testify, jurors are told to draw no inculpatory inferences from the former's refusal to be questioned. If evidence of prior crimes committed by the defendant is admitted (and often it is excluded), jurors are strictly told to use them only for deciding whether the defendant lied during his testimony and not as evidence of his guilt. Making matters worse, the most important evidence rule of all (saying that defendant can be convicted only if there are no reasonable doubts about his guilt) is monumentally vague; and judges are under firm instruction to decline jurors' frequent requests to explain what a 'reasonable doubt' is. Lastly, this book examines the fact that American courts collect little information about how often they convict the innocent and no information about how often they acquit the guilty. This is tragic because ignorance of the error rates in trials and in plea bargains means that citizens have no grounds for confidence in the judicial system; such a condition of non-transparency should be unacceptable in a democracy. Reform is urgent and this book sketches some of the necessary changes.

A Wilderness of Error

A Wilderness of Error PDF Author: Errol Morris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123696
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
Soon to be an FX Docuseries from Emmy® Award-Winning Producer Marc Smerling (The Jinx) featuring the author Errol Morris! Academy Award–winning filmmaker Errol Morris examines one of the most notorious and mysterious murder trials of the twentieth century In this profoundly original meditation on truth and the justice system, Errol Morris—a former private detective and director of The Thin Blue Line—delves deeply into the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case. MacDonald, whose pregnant wife and two young daughters were brutally murdered in 1970, was convicted of the killings in 1979 and remains in prison today. The culmination of an investigation spanning over twenty years and a masterly reinvention of the true-crime thriller, A Wilderness of Error is a shocking book because it shows that everything we have been told about the case is deeply unreliable and that crucial elements of case against MacDonald are simply not true.

Forms of Justice

Forms of Justice PDF Author: Daniel A. Bell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742580407
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
What is justice? Great political philosophers from Plato to Rawls have traditionally argued that there is a single, principled answer to this question. Challenging this conventional wisdom, David Miller theorized that justice can take many different forms. In Forms of Justice, a distinguished group of political philosophers takes Miller's theory as a starting point and debates whether justice takes one form or many. Drawing real world implications from theories of justice and examining in depth social justice, national justice, and global justice, this book falls on the cutting edge of the latest developments in political theory. Sure to generate debate among political theorists and social scientists, Forms of Justice is indispensable reading for anyone attentive to the intersection between philosophy and politics.

When Justice Fails

When Justice Fails PDF Author: Robert J. Norris
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611638561
Category : Criminal justice, Administration of
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Wrongful convictions have become a prominent concern in state and federal systems of justice. As thousands of innocent prisoners have been freed in the United States in the past few decades, social science researchers and legal actors have produced a wealth of new insights about how and why mistakes occur and what can be done to help prevent further injustices. When Justice Fails surveys the field of innocence scholarship to offer an overview of the key research, legal, and policy issues associated with wrongful convictions. Topics include the leading sources of error, the detection and correction of miscarriages of justice, the aftermath of wrongful convictions, and more. The volume includes references to historic and contemporary instances of miscarriages of justice and presents information gleaned from media sources about the cases and related policy issues. The book is ideally suited for use in undergraduate classes which focus on wrongful convictions and the administration of justice. PowerPoint slides are available to professors upon adoption of this book. You can download a sample of the full 139-slide presentation here. If you have adopted the book for a course, contact [email protected] to request the PowerPoint slides. "The learning objectives presented in the beginning of each chapter are accomplished through a variety of ways. Importantly, regardless of a student's background, discussions are presented from so many different angles that the material is tailored to all readers. Each chapter starts with a case study, introduces new concepts, discusses the related law, and concludes with presenting policy reforms. The authors not only present the issues related to wrongful convictions but the potential solutions as well." -- Matthew R. Hassett, UNC-Pembroke "I will continue to frequently open this book and read it to make myself a better police officer and to pass on knowledge to do my part in preventing wrongful convictions." -- Earthen McEachen, Senior Capstone student at Curry College in Boston