Tag: Murray

“The Future of the President’s Pardon Power”

The Collateral Consequences Resource Center is pleased to announce a series of online panels on successive Tuesdays in September, starting on September 14, that will explore in depth the use of the pardon power by President Donald Trump, and how it both reflects recent trends in pardoning and is likely to influence pardoning in the future. The first panel, on September 14, will discuss Trump’s abandonment of the bureaucratic tradition in pardoning and what this reveals both about his concept of office and about the nature of the constitutional power.  The second panel, on September 21, will consider whether Trump’s pardons may prompt much-needed reforms in sentencing law and practice.  The third panel, on September 28, will consider possible changes in how the pardon power is administered resulting from its idiosyncratic use by President Trump, and whether the Justice Department should remain responsible for advising the president in pardon matters.

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How to expand expungement: base it in retribution instead of rehabilitation

A thoughtful new article by Brian Murray recommends a new way of conceptualizing expungement that should make it easier for reformers to justify facilitating access to this record relief.  In “Retributive Expungement,” forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Murray argues that expungement should be seen as a way to end warranted punishment rather than to recognize and incentivize rehabilitation.  The argument goes that if the legal and social disadvantages of a criminal record function as part and parcel of the criminal sentence imposed by the court, as opposed to a loosely related system of civil penalties that are activated by other laws and other actors, then the court has an obligation at some point to discharge it.  While this argument is not new, Murray places it squarely in a modern retributivist framework. In an earlier era, the drafters of the 1962 Model Penal Code embraced this idea of tying up the loose ends of criminal punishments through court-ordered dispensation, although they chose a more transparent form of remedy in judicial vacatur or set-aside.  Before that, this function of ending punishment was performed by executive pardon.  In modern times, as ubiquitous background checking has made a criminal record a lasting […]

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CCRC scholarship round-up – August 2019

Editor’s note:  This past year has seen a burgeoning of scholarship dealing with collateral consequences broadly defined, from lawyers, social scientists, and philosophers.  CCRC’s good friend Alessandro Corda has selected fifteen notable articles published in 2018-19, with information, links, and abstracts.  They are organized into five categories: (1) Legal collateral consequences (2) Collateral consequences and criminal procedure (3) Sex offender registration laws (4) Informal collateral consequences (5) Criminal records, expungement, sealing, and other relief mechanisms A complete and regularly updated collection of scholarship on issues relating to collateral consequences and criminal records can be found on our “Books & Articles” page.  From time to time we will preview and comment on new articles, and Alessandro has promised to provide another round-up by the end of the year.  We hope he will continue indefinitely in the role of CCRC’s official bibliographer.  (A PDF copy of this scholarship round-up is here.)

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New era for expungement reform? Too soon to tell.

A new article in the Harvard Law & Policy Review evaluates some of the recent legislative efforts to deliver relief from the burden of collateral consequences through new or expanded expungement laws.  In “A New Era for Expungement Law Reform? Recent Developments at the State and Federal Levels,” Brian Murray argues that many of the newer record-closing laws are far too modest in scope and effect to have much of an impact on the problem of reintegration, citing Louisiana and Maryland enactments as examples of relief that is both too little and too late.  He admires Indiana’s broad new expungement scheme, which limits use of records as well as access to them, regarding it (as do we) as an enlightened exception to a general legislative aversion to risk.  He considers recent legislation in Minnesota to fall into a middle category — and we could add Arkansas as another state to have recently augmented and clarified older record-closing laws.  Our round-up of new expungement laws enacted just this year finds very little consistency from state to state, with Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and New Jersey all experimenting with different approaches. Murray appreciates the need for a multifaceted approach to the problem of criminal records, and […]

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