Issues

For many years, American legislatures have been steadily attaching a wide range of legal consequences to convictions—and sometimes even just charges—for crimes that are classified as “violent.” These consequences affect many key aspects of the criminal process, including pretrial detention, eligibility for pretrial diversion, sentencing, eligibility for parole and other opportunities for release from incarceration, and the length and intensity of supervision in the community. The consequences can also affect a person’s legal status and rights long after the sentence for the underlying offense has been served. A conviction for a violent crime can result in registration requirements, lifetime disqualification from employment in certain fields, and a loss of parental rights, among many other “collateral consequences.” While a criminal conviction of any sort relegates a person to a kind of second-class citizenship in the United States, a conviction for a violent crime increasingly seems even more momentous—pushing the person into a veritable third-class citizenship. This Article provides the first systematic treatment of the legal consequences that result from a violence charge or conviction. The Article surveys the statutory law of all fifty states, including the diverse and sometimes surprisingly broad definitions of what counts as a violent crime. While the Article’s aims are primarily empirical, concerns are raised along the way regarding the fairness and utility of the growing length and severity of sentences imposed on “violent” offenders and of the increasingly daunting barriers to their reintegration into society.

Intelligent machines increasingly outperform human experts, raising the question of when (and why) humans should remain ‘in the loop’ of decision-making. One common answer focuses on outcomes: relying on intuition and experience, humans are capable of identifying interpretive errors—sometimes disastrous errors—that elude machines. Though plausible today, this argument will wear thin as technology evolves. In this Article, we seek out sturdier ground: a defense of human judgment that focuses on the normative integrity of decision-making. Specifically, we propose an account of democratic equality as ‘role-reversibility.’ In a democracy, those tasked with making decisions should be susceptible, reciprocally, to the impact of decisions; there ought to be a meaningful sense in which the participants’ roles in the decisional process could always be inverted. Role-reversibility infuses the act of judgment with a ‘there but for the grace of god’ dynamic and, in doing so, casts judgment as the result of self-rule. After defending role-reversibility in concept, we show how it bears out in the paradigm case of criminal jury trials. Although it was not the historical impetus behind the jury trial—at least, not in any strong sense—we argue that role-reversibility explains some of the institution’s core features and stands among the best reasons for its preservation. Finally, for the sci-fi enthusiasts among us, role-reversibility offers a prescription as to when the legal system will be ready for robo-jurors and robo-judges: when it incorporates robo-defendants.

The burdens and challenges of discovery—especially electronic discovery—are usually associated with civil, not criminal cases. This is beginning to change. Already common in white-collar crime cases, voluminous digital discovery is increasingly a feature of ordinary criminal prosecutions. This Article examines the explosive growth of digital evidence in criminal cases and the efforts to manage its challenges. It then advances three claims about criminal case discovery in the digital age. First, the volume, complexity, and cost of digital discovery will incentivize the prosecution and the defense to cooperate more closely in cases with significant amounts of electronically stored information (ESI). Second, cooperation between the parties will not be sufficient to address the serious challenges that digital discovery presents to the fair and accurate resolution of criminal cases. And third, for that reason, digital discovery in criminal cases needs to be regulated more closely. In crafting such regulation, courts and legislators can build on the civil procedure model, which has grappled with the challenges of electronic discovery for over two decades. The civil procedure experience suggests that cooperation between the parties, active judicial involvement, and more detailed rules are essential to the effective management of digital discovery. The civil litigation model has its limitations, however, and policymakers must chart new ground to address some of the unique demands of criminal cases. Recognizing the significant resource and bargaining disparities in criminal cases, judges need to limit certain negotiated waivers of discovery so as to prevent abuse. Where the interests of justice demand it, courts may also need to help defendants obtain access to digital discovery in detention or gather digital evidence from third parties. These and other measures can help ensure that the cost and complexity of digital discovery do not undermine the fairness and accuracy of criminal proceedings.