Criminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the 21st Century (13th Edition ed.). Retrieved from
He claims the prejudices of the judicial system handed out mandatory sentencing for those who used their constitutional right to have a trial by jury. The author builds a relationship with the audience by using Pathos in order to compel them to recognize the urgency to change the current law. Girault explains the failing logic of the law on page 225, he states that communities were to be made safer and instead of targeting petty crimes the focus would be to bring down kingpins, however after three decades of the SRA it still was a failure. Girault defines the sentencing reform act as discriminatory and states that minorities are hugely effected by this law and states ”Black people are overwhelming charged, convicted and sentenced at a higher rate to federal crimes since the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act.” (Girault 228).
Justice Quarterly: JQ, 15(3), 577-581. Retrieved October 6, 2017, from https://bethelu.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.bethelu.idm.oclc.org/docview/228157991?accountid=56725 Saferstein, R. (2015). Criminalistics: An Introduction to Forensic Science (11th Ed.). Boston: Pearson. Retrieved October 6, 2017, from
Primary Annotated Bibliography McCleskey v Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987) McCleskey v Kemp is a Supreme Court case that highlighted racism in the death penalty process. The petitioner in the case provided a controversial statistical study that correlated racism in death penalty sentencings. The Supreme Court Justices were asked to answer the question of whether or not the statistical study provided could substantiate that the sentence in the case violated the petitioner’s eighth and fourteenth amendment rights. This case will be the main focus of my research paper.
Because of these rules that law enforcement officials have created, mass incarceration rates have sky rocketed. When the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education (1995) released their survey, the noticed that 95 percent of people described an African American person to be a typical drug user and only five percent of people described the typical drug consumer to be of another race. Nonetheless, the people in the 95 percent range showed cognitive bias as a result of only 15 percent of African Americans in 1995 were drug users. Where as, the majority of the White race consisted of drug users. Alexander responds by saying, “There is no reason to believe that the survey results would have been any different if police officers or prosecutors have been the respondents” (2011, p. 106).
Some people might think he is an expert of criminology because of the way he wrote the article. For this reason, it was easier for me to take his opinion more seriously. He understands the need to express himself in a manner that is easy to read and understand. By writing in this way, he can easily persuade someone to his point of view. Jacoby’s description of prison life was a very persuasive emotional appeal.
The biggest disparity that was found was when a death penalty case involved a white victim and a black defendant. After reviewing the death penalty cases, there was an indication that “twenty-two percent of cases received the death penalty when a black defendant and white victim were involved….compared to only three percent when there was a black victim and white defendant involved.” The study broke this data down further and looked at the percentages of when a prosecutor seeks the death penalty. The study found that prosecutors sought the death penalty in “seventy percent of cases that involved white victims and black defendants and only nineteen percent when the roles were reversed.”
2014. Criminological Theory. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education inc. Rengifo, Andres F 2009.
Coker gives great evidence that supports racial injustice in the criminal justice system. She discusses on the Supreme Court’s rulings and accusations of racial preference in the system. This article is helpful because it supports my thesis on race playing a role on the system of criminal justice. Hurwitz, J., & Peffley, M. (1997). Public perceptions of race and crime: The role of racial stereotypes.
Lippman, Matthew. (2017). Essential Criminal Law (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Malani, Anup. (2007)
With the amount of pages that are written by students and professions in criminal justice, there is an obligation to finish the work. It does not matter what the subject is, using APA style within criminal justice is very important. It truly brings consistency, eases information, and helps to enable criminal justice professionals to give
Senior Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis David B. Muhlhausen, PhD argues that “there is little evidence to suggest that minorities are treated unfairly. Second, capital punishment produces a strong deterrent effect that saves lives” (2007). Muhlhausen’s statement can be considered bias because he could possibly be disregarding data that was not processed by his place of employment, The Heritage Foundation Center. Muhlhausen is not the only person to claim that little evidence has been found supporting that the fact that minorities are treated unfairly. Fellow lawyer and Legal Director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, Kent Scheidegger agrees with Muehlhausen’s claim by arguing that the research the research the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation has done “does not prove or even raise a reasonable suspicion that race is a significant factor in either the charging decision or the sentencing decision in California capital cases (2008).”
Julia Angwin’s article, “Machine Bias”, focuses on racial bias in a “crime-predicting” software used by judges and courts. Angwin explains how these computer programs try predict the likelihood of an individual committing another crime in the future, and then assigning them a risk score based on the findings. Unfortunately, as Angwin explains, these programs are usually sent out into the market without first being tested; This means that court officials are using unverified statistics to determine the sentencing of defendants, which has lead to high controversy over such programs. In addition, a lack of transparency by the program creators have lead many to believe that the software was created with an internal racial bias. Angwin explains
In addition, in a study about Widening the scope on complaints of police misconduct. Policing, “not all excessive force cases consist of a white
Assignment Nine Critical criminology is the idea that the media and the criminal justice system are the things that shape the publics view on crime. These sources influence our ideas of who commits crime and who is victimized by crime. These sources use their influence of crime to continue to control how the public sees crime and uses that to further their own agenda. Whereas, left realism is the idea that the depicted visions of crime are somewhat true. Some people are more likely to be victimized, however the media and criminal justice systems over exaggerate these crimes in order to instill higher levels of fear.
