Criminal Law & Process – Page 110 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

New Criminal Law Blog

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:September 24, 2010
Post category:Criminal Law & Process

I’ve recently launched Life Sentences Blog (http://www.lifesentencesblog.com/), in which I intend to track new legal developments and research relating to long prison sentences. Here’s how I explain my interests in the “About” page:

I am using this blog as a way to organize new information and ideas about sentencing and related topics, and to do a little “thinking out loud.” If the blog is also helpful to others, then so much the better. Since there are already a number of outstanding blogs that track sentencing and criminal law, the reader may be interested to know my particular areas of focus: federal sentencing law (especially Seventh Circuit), Wisconsin sentencing law, life without parole, post-conviction remedies, prisoner rights, victim rights, prisoner reentry, restorative justice, punishment theory, drug crime, history of crime and punishment, and the psychology of punishment and blaming. The questions that most interest me right now relate to the use of long prison terms (say, twenty years and up)–why do we use this type of punishment, when is it appropriate, how is its use structured by the law, how is long-term imprisonment experienced by inmates, and so forth.

I hope to have fresh posts up most days — at least until final exam season rolls around.

Best of the Blogs (Well Mostly the Immigration-Related Ones)

Post author:Jessica E. Slavin
Post published:September 4, 2010
Post category:Civil Rights Constitutional Interpretation Criminal Law & Process Human Rights Immigration Law

Refugee law does not get all that much attention in the blogosphere, even on the immigration-related blogs, probably because the numbers of refugees and asylees are so low in the context of U.S. immigration as a whole. This week, though, there was a little discussion of a new study showing that asylum-seekers’ success rates have gone up to about 50%. The study also confirms that asylum requests (that is, requests for refugee status made by people who are in the United States already) continue to fall. The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog mischaracterized the study to some extent, asserting that “Recently revealed statistics show that illegal immigration is down. But another method of gaining residence in the U.S. is up: seeking political asylum,” when, as I just explained, asylum requests actually continue to fall. It is only the rate of success that has gone up.

The increased success rate is surely due to the fact that more asylum seekers are finding legal representation: as the study explains, unrepresented asylum seekers have a success rate of about 11%, while those with attorneys have about a 54% chance of winning asylum. The study also shows that the dramatic disparities in grant rates by different judges continues (e.g., in the New York Immigration Court, judges’ asylum grant rates ranged from 6% to 70%).

In any event, the other statistics referred to in that WSJ Law Blog post are from a Pew Hispanic Center study showing a dramatic decline in the population of undocumented immigrants in the United States over the past few years.

New Comments Address Fraud Sentencing and Deferred Prosecution Agreements

Post author:Janine Y. Kim
Post published:August 27, 2010
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Federal Criminal Law & Process Federal Sentencing Legal Scholarship Marquette Law School

The latest issue of the Marquette Law Review features a student comment by Ryan Parsons on the treatment of “temporary victims” under the federal sentencing guidelines. In crimes such as bank fraud, individual accountholders that have been defrauded are often reimbursed by the bank and, therefore, made economically whole. Such reimbursed accountholders are often ignored for purposes of sentencing enhancement, even though reimbursement may not occur without time and effort expended by these temporary victims. Parsons describes how various courts have dealt with this phenomenon, as well as the Federal Sentencing Commission’s recent decision to include all such temporary victims in the enhancement calculation regardless of whether the defrauded accountholders even knew about the fraud. Parsons argues that in order for a sentence to accurately reflect the severity of the crime, temporary victims should be taken into account to the extent that they suffered actual, monetizable losses (e.g., time spent pursuing mitigation).

This issue also includes Rachel Delaney’s comment analyzing the use of deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) in the corporate crime context, ultimately calling for congressional regulation of prosecutorial discretion.