Tag: Criminal Law

Beyond No-Man’s Land: Psychiatry’s Imprecision Revealed by Its Critique of SVP Statutes as Applied to Pedophilia – Note by Jennifer Jason

From Volume 83, Number 6 (September 2010)
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The field of psychiatry has identified a problem with the law, its source, and suggested a solution. The problem is “legislators . . . us[ing] psychiatric commitment [of sex offenders] to effect nonmedical societal ends.” The source is U.S. Supreme Court decisions allowing legislatures to use definitions of mental illness that have no basis in psychiatry: “As a consequence of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that are written ambiguously and tentatively, the bright line separating . . . [the legal conception of] mental disorder [(for the purposes of civilly committing sex offenders under sexually violent predator statutes)] from ordinary criminal behavior is difficult to draw and tests a no-man’s land between psychiatry and the law.” 

The solution is “[g]reater clarity and standardization . . . com[ing] from both sides: the legalists who interpret the law and the clinicians who apply and work under it.” A close analysis of the psychiatric critique of these statutes that allow for the civil commitment of sex offenders reveals psychiatry’s own imprecision within the bounds of psychiatry and in the domain of the overlap between psychiatry and the law.

 

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Thwarting California’s Presumptive LWOP Penalty for Adolescents: Psychology’s and Neuroscience’s Message for the California Justice System – Note by Ashley N. Johndro

From Volume 83, Number 2 (January 2010)
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In California, adolescents convicted of special circumstance first-degree murder are presumptively sentenced to life without the possibility of parole (“LWOP”) pursuant to section 190.5 of the California Penal Code. To date, California has sentenced more than 250 adolescents to die behind bars. Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience challenge this status quo. These disciplines suggest that adolescents are biophysically determined to suffer from poor decisionmaking capacities and behavior control. This Note argues that adolescent culpability is mitigated by currently valued standards, informed by science’s conception of the adolescent, and that adolescent crimes consequently warrant the lesser punishment of twenty-five years to life.

 

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Cyber Crime 2.0: An Argument to Update the United States Criminal Code to Reflect the Changing Nature of Cyber Crime – Note by Charlotte Decker

From Volume 81, Number 5 (July 2008)
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In 1945, two engineers at the University of Pennsylvania invented the first general-purpose electronic computing device—the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (“ENIAC”). The ENIAC was capable of 5000 simple calculations a second, yet it took up the space of an entire room, “weighed 30 tons, and contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and almost 5 million hand-soldered joints.” This machine cost over $1 million dollars, equivalent to roughly $9 million today. Over the next thirty years integrated circuits shrunk, yielding microprocessors able to perform millions and billions of calculations per second with new storage media able to hold megabits and gigabits of data. As a result, computers became smaller, more advanced, and dramatically less expensive. Still, prior to the late-1980s, these and other computers were “solely the tool[s] of a few highly trained technocrats.” In the mid-1980s, only 8.2 percent of American households contained computers. American public businesses, universities, and research organizations used only 56,000 large “general purpose” computers and 213,000 smaller “business computers”; private businesses used another 570,000 “mini-computers” and 2.4 million desktop computers; and the federal government employed between 250,000 and 500,000 computers.

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Unreasonably Wrong: The Supreme Court’s Supremacy, the AEDPA Standard, and Carey v. Musladin – Note by Padraic Foran

From Volume 81, Number 3 (March 2008)
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Plenty of injustices go judicially unresolved. On the Supreme Court’s docket, however, injustices in the criminal context have become alarmingly perfunctory, and the cause is a single procedural mechanism: a piece of legislation passed in 1996 called the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (“AEDPA”). Though in effect for more than ten years now, two representative cases serve to demonstrate the enormous power of the AEDPA.

 

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Intuitions of Justice: Implications for Criminal Law and Justice Policy – Article by Paul H. Robinson & John M. Darley

From Volume 81, Number 1 (November 2007)
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Recent social science research suggests that many if not most judgments about criminal liability and punishment for serious wrongdoing are intuitional rather than reasoned. Further, such intuitions of justice are nuanced and widely shared, even though they concern matters that seem quite complex and subjective. While people may debate the source of these intuitions, it seems clear that, whatever their source, it must be one that is insulated from the influence of much of human experience because, if it were not, one would see differences in intuitions reflecting the vast differences in human existence across demographics and societies.

 

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