Category: Scholarly articles

“Challenging the Punitiveness of ‘New-Generation’ SORN Laws“

Wayne Logan has a terrific new article on the recent challenges to sex offender registration and notification laws, forthcoming in the New Criminal Law Review.  Here is the abstract: Sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws have been in effect nationwide since the 1990s, and publicly available registries today contain information on hundreds of thousands of individuals. To date, most courts, including the Supreme Court in 2003, have concluded that the laws are regulatory, not punitive, in nature, allowing them to be applied retroactively consistent with the Ex Post Facto Clause. Recently, however, several state supreme courts, as well as…

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Appreciating the full consequences of a misdemeanor

Misdemeanor punishment is often deemed lenient, especially in the shadow of mass incarceration’s long prison sentences.  A typical sentence for a misdemeanor commonly consists of probation and a fine.  The full collateral and informal consequences of that misdemeanor, however, will often be far more punitive.  Those consequences can include months in jail, either pretrial or as a consequence of failing to pay fines and fees; reduced employment and earning capacity triggered by arrest and conviction records; the loss of housing, public benefits, financial aid, and immigration status.  In other words, the full punitive consequences of a misdemeanor are far from…

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“The Scale of Misdemeanor Justice”

There is a growing awareness that the consequences of a misdemeanor arrest or conviction have become exponentially more serious in recent years.  We also know that the misdemeanor system is enormous, and that its very size makes it particularly susceptible of abuse.  Yet we have very little reliable information about how many people in the United States have a misdemeanor record.  A new research report by Professors Megan Stevenson and Sandra Mayson begins to fill this gap, in the process challenging the conventional wisdom that the misdemeanor system is expanding. Based on “the most comprehensive national-level analysis of misdemeanor criminal…

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Erasing the line between felony and misdemeanor

Two provocative new scholarly articles examine the extent to which the crisp line historically drawn in law between felonies and misdemeanors is becoming increasingly ephemeral.  In Informed Misdemeanor Sentencing, Jenny Roberts points out that conviction of a misdemeanor has become exponentially more serious in recent years as the associated collateral consequences have increased in number and severity.  She urges judges to “explicitly acknowledge the many serious collateral consequences an individual suffers after any penal sanction, and incorporate those into the sentencing process to ensure that punishment is proportionate.”  She recommends that sentencing courts should make “more use of deferred adjudication as…

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“The Juvenile Record Myth”

A new article in the Georgetown Law Journal exposes the fallacy that delinquency adjudications don’t follow juveniles into adulthood, and documents the alarming extent to which records of juvenile delinquency adjudications have become almost as accessible to the public as records of adult convictions.  In The Juvenile Record Myth, University of Tennessee Law Professor Joy Radice argues that state confidentiality and sealing provisions often provide far less protection than is commonly believed, and that juveniles frequently face continuing legal restrictions and stigma.   Almost all states permit some degree of public access, and some even publish juvenile records online.  Using recent literature on…

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