Summary Of Upside Down Mississippi Problem

Summary:

This law review addresses the problem the author, Jordan Gross, refers to as the “Upside Down Mississippi Problem.” Officially, it is referred to as the “Mississippi Problem”, and defined as “the failure of state courts, particularly in the South, to fully protect the rights of economically and racially marginalized defendants, most often poor African Americans” (10). Essentially, due to federalization, standardization and nationalization in the past, there has been a gap created between federal criminal law and state criminal law. This particularly occurs in cases where there is concurrent jurisdiction or, in other words, both the state and federal governments are able to prosecute the criminal case. Many times, the federal prosecution

Gross points out that federalization, in and of itself, threaten to disturb the balance between the federal and state governments. This threat of disturbance also impacts the disparity gap in sentencing and could quite possibly be oppressing creativity.

Thankfully, in more recent times, there has been a move to reverse the disparity and restore the balance between federal and state governments. Federalization, standardization and nationalization were not by design; they evolved from the politics and concerns of the time. These concerns included the state being able to effectively regulate conduct in every economic standing, in addition to the federal concern that multiple states were not willing or able to protect the constitutional rights of all

The Supreme Court has done most of their part, and it is now time for Congress to step up and make a much larger effort to close this gap permanently. Gross’s proposal for closing this gap completely is making an amendment to the Rules Enabling Act that requires the federal courts comply with the state criminal procedures and sentencing practices when prosecuting in a concurrent jurisdiction. “To address this inverted Mississippi Problem, this article proposes federal legislation requiring federal courts to apply state procedure in concurrent jurisdiction prosecutions where their application of state procedure will have substantive impacts in the prosecution”