Criminal Law & Process – Page 168 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Kahan on Law Enforcement in the Inner-City

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:October 7, 2008
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Speakers at Marquette

Yale Professor Dan Kahan delivered a terrific public lecture here yesterday on his theory of cultural cognition. I am excited to see his program today with Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, moderated by Mike Gousha. For more than a decade, Kahan has been one of the legal academy’s most original and thought-provoking writers on inner-city law enforcement. It should be very interesting to hear him discuss the particular challenges facing Milwaukee with D.A. Chisholm, who has already initiated several intriguing new programs during his short time in office.

In preparation for the program, I have been reviewing a couple of Kahan’s classic law review articles on inner-city policing.

Priorities for the New President: Restore Parole in the Federal Criminal Justice System

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:October 3, 2008
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Federal Criminal Law & Process

This is part of a series of posts this month focusing on priorities for a new presidential administration.

In the area of federal criminal law, the next administration ought to undertake a number of initiatives: polish the Department of Justice’s tarnished image by ensuring that appointments to leadership positions are rigorously merit-based and by avoiding dubious prosecutions that appear politically motivated; make the federal criminal justice system a real leader and innovator in developing community-based alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenders; likewise, make the federal system a leader and innovator in implementing restorative justice and other processes that are more responsive to victim needs than conventional criminal case processing; seek the elimination of mandatory minimum sentencing statutes; and bring greater coherence and transparency to an executive clemency process that was extraordinarily kind to Scooter Libby, but that rarely does anything for offenders who are not politically connected. Although I regard all of these as matters of considerable urgency–and will perhaps blog about some of them at greater length later this month–I might put still another initiative at the top of the list: restore the possibility of parole release for federal prisoners.

Responding to Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:October 1, 2008
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Milwaukee Race & Law Wisconsin Criminal Law & Process

The Sentencing Project has just published a new edition of Reducing Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System, a manual for policymakers that describes numerous best practices for addressing disparities. This publication should be of particular interest in Milwaukee and Wisconsin, which have some of the worst criminal justice disparities in the nation. As The Sentencing Project described in a May publication, blacks in Milwaukee are seven times more likely than whites to be arrested for a drug offense, the second-highest such disparity among the forty-three major American cities analyzed. Similarly, a state-level analysis by Human Rights Watch determined that blacks in Wisconsin are forty-two times more likely than whites to receive a prison term for a drug conviction, the highest such disparity among the thirty-four states studied.

Of course, to say that there are racial disparities is not to say the disparities are necessarily unwarranted. For instance, if it turned out that blacks committed serious drug crimes more frequently than whites, then at least some of statistical disparities might be warranted. Still, the magnitude of the racial disparities in Milwaukee and Wisconsin is so high, particularly in comparison to national norms, that there is good reason to believe we do indeed have a serious problem.