After the Supreme Court's ruling in Crawford v. Washington that a criminal defendant's right to confront the witnesses against him is violated by the admission of testimonial hearsay that has not been cross-examined, lower courts have overturned convictions in which hearsay from children was admitted after child witnesses were either unwilling or unable to testify. A review of social scientific...

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 37 No. 6, June 2010 695-708 DOI: 10.1177/0093854810363721 © 2010 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology AUTHORS’ NOTE: Christopher T. Lowenkamp is now at the Administrative Offices of the U.S. Courts. Matthew D. Makarios is now at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside. Richard Lemke is now at the University of West Georgia. This res...

All Courts rule ex-post, after most economic decisions are sunk. This can generate a time-inconsistency problem. From an ex-ante perspective, Courts will have the ex-post temptation to be excessively lenient. This observation is at the root of the rule of precedent, known as stare decisis. Stare decisis forces Courts to weigh the benefits of leniency towards the current parties against the bene...

We present a positive political theory of criminal sentencing and test it using data from the United States Sentencing Commission. Under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, judges can use “offense-level adjustments” (fact-based decisionmaking) to lengthen or shorten the Guidelines’ presumptive sentences. Judges also can use “departures” from the Guidelines (law-based decisionmaking) to lengthen or ...

Progressive reformers envisioned a therapeutic juvenile court that made individualized treatment decisions in the child's "best interests." The Supreme Court's Gault decision provided the impetus for transforming the juvenile court from an informal welfare agency into a scaled-down criminal court. Since Gault, the juvenile court procedures increasingly resemble those of adult courts, although i...

The use of phallometric evidence by Canadian criminal courts has steadily increased since the early 1980s. Phallometry was initially considered by courts to be a potentially useful tool in the determination of accused persons' culpability; however, its contemporary use is limited to the postconviction contexts of sentencing and dangerous and long-term offender applications, as one of several me...

Title of Document: THE DETERMINANTS OF COURTMARTIAL DECISIONS: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE AIR FORCE’S CRIMINAL COURT PROCESS Patricia D. Breen, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed By: Professor Brian D. Johnson, Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice In spite of many similarities with civilian criminal courts, public debate continues about further “civilianizing” the modern court...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been offered as a basis for criminal defenses, including insanity, unconsciousness, self-defense, diminished capacity, and sentencing mitigation. Examination of case law (e.g., appellate decisions) involving PTSD reveals that when offered as a criminal defense, PTSD has received mixed treatment in the judicial system. Courts have often recognized testimo...

Section 78 of PACE gives the courts a discretion to exclude from a criminal trial evidence which has been obtained unfairly. The section has resulted in much case law. This article is an attempt to analyse the principles which the courts use to decide whether or not to exercise the discretion to exclude. It starts by examining the decisions of the appellate courts in order to try to identify th...