Can a woman who kills her cheating husband convince a jury she was justified? Newly published research suggests it’s unlikely. However, she is liable to get a shorter sentence than a man convicted under the same circumstances. That’s the conclusion of a study of love-triangle homicides by psychologists Laurie Ragatz of West Virginia University and Brenda Russell of Penn State Berks. Utilizing an Internet survey of 458 people (63 percent men), they explored the various ways ingrained attitudes and prejudices shape our views of criminal defendants. As they report in the Journal of ... Read More
Prison-Based Gerrymandering Dilutes Blacks’ Voting Power
June 3, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
Sixty-six percent of the inmates in the state of New York come from New York City. But 91 percent of them are incarcerated upstate, in communities where they have long been counted by the U.S. census. On paper, this means prisoners belong not to the communities from which they've come (and to which they eventually will return), but to places where they can neither vote, check out a library book or attend a local school. The counting quirk sounds like a quandary for demographers. But it also means, come gerrymandering time, that many urban black communities look smaller than they actually ... Read More
New Conditions of Probation
April 13, 2010 • By • 5 Comments
When she applied for the job of probation director in Travis County, Texas, Geraldine Nagy was ushered into a seat in the county courthouse law library with its expansive view of downtown Austin. She was surrounded at the table by six judges who would eventually become her superiors, and who began peppering her with questions. With each answer, Nagy proselytized about her ideas for a department that would rely extensively on research-based procedures that worked to reduce recidivism. "I specifically said my goal would be to implement evidence-based practices, and that I'd really look at ... Read More
A Mind of Crime
February 23, 2010 • By • 8 Comments
Kent Kiehl, a prominent neuroscientist hired to study an admitted murderer named Brian Dugan, had already been under cross-examination in the hushed, wood-paneled suburban Chicago courtroom for more than an hour when a brain diagram, hatched with X's, was projected on a screen. The X's marked areas where Kiehl had discovered abnormally low grey matter density in Dugan's brain. In a curious meeting of law and neuroscience, those X's would help jurors decide whether he should be executed or sentenced to life in prison. Did the way Dugan's brain had developed leave him spring-loaded for violence? ... Read More
The Exonerator
January 5, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
The photographic pose seems a cliché now, given the frequency with which it's been struck during the past 25 years: Jim McCloskey, a self-taught private investigator, stands next to a man or a woman just released from prison after serving time for a murder or a rape committed by somebody else. Sometimes a third person shows up in the photograph, quite likely a lawyer who helped McCloskey expose the incompetence or misconduct of police detectives, prosecutors, crime laboratory analysts, psychiatrists, defense attorneys, judges, jailhouse informants, well-intended witnesses and jurors. There ... Read More
U.S. Prison Populations Drifting Down
December 8, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
For the first time in decades, a number of states are reporting a decline in their prison populations. Figures just released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2008 indicate that 20 states now house fewer prisoners. "We're seeing several trends come together here," says Marc Mauer, executive director of the advocacy group The Sentencing Project. "Crime rates have been declining for 15 years, and the fiscal crisis every state is facing has forced them to confront the massive costs of prisons. We're past the point where you can build prison cells and college classrooms. You have to make ... Read More
The Rampant Growth of Life Without Parole
July 22, 2009 • By • 2 Comments
A new study by The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform, notes that one out of every 11 prisoners in state and federal lockups is serving a life sentence, and of those, nearly one-third, more than 41,000 convicts, have been sentenced to life without parole. The report notes that life without parole judgments have tripled since 1992, and nearly two-thirds of prisoners serving these sentences are ethnic and racial minorities. As noted in my recent Miller-McCune.com piece — "Should Minors Ever Face Life Without Parole?" — the U.S. already has more ... Read More
Should Minors Ever Face Life Without Parole?
July 7, 2009 • By • 2 Comments
The Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons struck down the death penalty for juveniles, citing the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But that left another possible Eighth Amendment issue on the table: whether sentences of life without parole for juveniles are constitutional. That question is now being considered on both the judicial and legislative levels. In the term beginning this October, the Supremes will hear two cases — one involving a 13-year-old sex offender, the other a 17-year-old probation violator present when a felony murder ... Read More
Today’s Threat Level: Yellow, With a Chance of Phlegm
July 2, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
Mark Nicas works at the Center for Advancing Microbial Risk Assessment at the University of California, Berkeley, a position funded in part by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate. Or to put it another way: The Department of Homeland Security pays Nicas to study spittle. But rest assured: The terrorists haven't gotten their hands on a Loogie of Mass Destruction. Here's how Dr. Matthew Clark, director of the DHS grant program, explained it in a press release: "In terms of homeland security, knowing how germs are spread is an important factor in ... Read More
Freeze! You’re Under Examination
June 30, 2009 • By • 2 Comments
It's about 15 months into his four-year-long sentence at Rhode Island's minimum-security prison, and on an unseasonably brisk spring morning, Joseph has a visitor. A guard escorts the inmate, who sports a shaved head and large-framed glasses perched on a prominent nose, to a conference room just beyond a metal detector and a front door that clangs every time the deadbolt is deactivated. Joseph, who looks small in his oversized prison-issued khakis, doesn't normally get visitors. For most of his 50 years, he's been in and out of prison while battling HIV, other sexually transmitted diseases, ... Read More
