When the Courts Are Indifferent and Legislators Apathetic: Partnering with Prosecutors to Protect Public Defense

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Gould
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Olga V. Zakharchenko

Preparation of undergraduates and privat-docents for professorship in the late XIX – early XX century is considered on the example of Moscow University through the prism of the biography of a historian and a jurist Sergei Andreevich Kotlyarevsky. The uniqueness of his example lies in the fact that he defended four dissertations: master’s and doctoral dissertations on foreign history and master’s and doctoral dissertations on public law. This demonstrates some individualism of the trajectory showing his professional development and formation as a scientist and a teacher. The research perspective includes the process of young scientists’ formation from the moment of continuing working at the university’s profile department to prepare a dissertation up to obtaining the degree. Attention is paid to socio-political circumstances and conditions affecting the possibility of becoming a professional scientist and teacher. Both formal and special features of the training scientific and teaching staff inherent in a particular scientific community are noted. The professional development of future scientists and teachers of higher education was associated with active preparation for the defense of the master’s exam, the first teaching experience, scientific and research work. The best graduates were left at the departments with the support of leading university professors who saw new forces and future professionals in them. However, the personal contribution of the applicants themselves was important, since they were required to reveal their intellectual potential, pedagogical and research skills. At this, an important aspect was the opportunity to go on foreign business trips, in which not only the material of scientific research was collected, but knowledge was enriched as well, including getting to know the peculiarities of teaching in European countries and their socio-political life. The preparation process was completed with the public defense of the master’s dissertation and awarding a master’s degree. At the same time, the path to the teaching environment began, which required further disclosure of scientific potential and the defense of a doctoral dissertation in order to obtain a professorship.


Author(s):  
Greg Ridgeway

Crime is costly, yet we understand little about it. The United States justice system costs $280 billion per year, but compared to other areas, such as medicine and agriculture, we have few answers for the field's fundamental questions, like what causes crime and how we can best use our justice system to respond to it. In addition, the success or failure of the justice system impacts our safety, freedoms, and trust in government. Criminologists are working to bridge this gap in knowledge using methods that are fundamentally statistical, including randomized designs, case-control studies, instrumental variables, and natural experiments. This review discusses how criminologists explore the police, courts, sentencing, and communities and their effect on crime using daylight saving time, natural disasters, coding errors, quirks in funding formulas, and other phenomena to simulate randomization. I include analyses of racial bias, police shootings, public defense, parolees, graffiti, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings. This review should encourage statisticians to bring their methods and expertise to bear on criminological questions, as the field needs broader and deeper scientific examination.


The history of infanticide and abortion in Latin America has garnered increasing attention in the past two decades. Particularities of topic and temporal focus characterize this work and shape this bibliography’s geographic organization. Mexico possesses the most developed scholarship in both the colonial and modern periods. There, tracing of the persistence of pre-Conquest Indigenous medical knowledge and the endurance of paraprofessional obstetrical practitioners through the colonial era and into the 19th century features prominently and echoes some of the scholarship examining European midwives’ administration of plant-based abortifacients in the medieval and Early Modern eras. This topic plays a role, but a much less prominent one in scholarship on Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. Scholars of Brazil, the Caribbean, and circum-Caribbean have focused in particular on the issue of enslaved mothers’ commission of infanticide and abortion on their own children in the 18th and 19th centuries, a particularly fraught issue in the context of the abolition of the slave trade. A central assumption in much scholarship on the 19th-century professionalization (and masculinization) of obstetrical medicine is that the marginalization of midwives entailed a reduction in women’s access to abortion, although this position has been challenged in some recent scholarship on 19th-century Mexico in particular. The examination of the ways that the new republics perceived the crimes of infanticide and abortion in their legal codes, judicial processes, and in community attitudes is a central focus of 19th- and 20th-century scholarship. Scholars have remarked upon the considerable uniformity across all regions of a paucity of denunciations or convictions in the first half of the 19th century and the rise of criminal trials for both crimes in its last three decades. This change coincided (although no one has argued been provoked by) many countries’ issuance of national penal codes in the 1870s and 1880s. This intensification of persecution also coincided with the Catholic church’s articulation of an explicit condemnation of abortion (Pius IX’s 1869 bull Apostolicae Sedis), although demonstrating the concrete implications of this decree to the Latin American setting remains a task yet to be undertaken. Historians of both abortion and infanticide have also concentrated on defendant motives and defenses in criminal investigations. While some highlight defendants’ economic desperation, most scholars argue that the public defense of female sexual honor was a crucial motivator, which courts understood as a legitimate concern in 19th- and even mid-20th-century trials. Scholarship on 20th-century infanticide and abortion history continues to concentrate on fluctuations in attitudes toward honor, gender, and the family as influences on criminal codes and especially judicial sentencing for both acts, and toward the late 20th century on feminist efforts to decriminalize abortion that have met with varied success across countries.


Youth Justice ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 147322542093813 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Phillippi ◽  
Jeffrey Berman ◽  
Casey L. Thomas ◽  
Kaylin Beiter ◽  
Ariel Test

This study examines client and parent/guardian perceptions of holistic juvenile public defense. A total of 66 subjects responded to a structured survey measuring satisfaction with holistic representation. Differences between perceptions were analyzed using paired T-tests and the Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to analyze strength of association and interrelationships among variables and satisfaction. Qualitative data were collected through open-ended survey questions. The findings of this study indicate that holistic defense was perceived positively as measured by high client satisfaction. Further empirical research is necessary to evaluate the outcomes of holistic models and offer comparison to traditional models.


2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 128-147
Author(s):  
Loch K. Johnson

James J. Angleton, who served as chief of counterintelligence for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1954 to 1974, was an important figure in the Cold War and, in a sense, the first line of defense against clandestine Soviet intelligence operations directed against the United States and its allies. In 1975 a U.S. Senate investigative committee—informally known as the Church Committee and led by Senator Frank Church—called Angleton to testify in public on his approach to counterintelligence, especially how he had become involved in illegal domestic operations in the United States. His testimony to committee staff investigators preceding the hearing, along with his public statements to senators during the hearing, displayed an extreme view of the global Communist threat. Amid ongoing revelations in the mid-1970s of illegal CIA actions, Angleton proved unable to mount an effective public defense of his approach.


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Lucas Blaize Davies ◽  
Alissa Pollitz Worden

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Azul A. Aguiar Aguilar

With the transition to democracy, Latin American countries have embarked on implementing judicial reforms to redesign justice-sector institutions and build up the rule of law in the region. Reform efforts included empowe¬ring the courts, granting political independence to the public prosecutor’s office, professionalizing the public defender offices and implementing the accusatory criminal system in justice-sector institutions. To what extent are the reforms tar¬geted at the public defender offices changing the way legal defense is provided? In this article, after discussing a theoretical framework that captures and opera¬tionalizes the concepts of a merit-based career system, an accusatory criminal justice system and effective legal representation, I examine the extent to which the changes of transitioning from an inquisitorial to an adversarial system and from a non-merit-based career system to a merit-based career system have affec¬ted the way legal counsel is provided at subnational public defender offices. To accomplish this, I provide both a de jure and de facto measures (indicators of reform implementation). To identify the de jure indicators, I consulted legal texts (constitutions and secondary laws), and to gauge how the de facto indi¬cators work, I relied on interviews with public defenders, reports and academic documents. I collected 50 interviews with public defense attorneys from three Mexican states: Baja California Sur, Jalisco and Nuevo León. Findings from these states suggest that as reform implementation advances, public defenders have more tools to offer legal representation; more specifically, they are better trained, in addition to having higher salaries, a lower caseload per defender and increased access to forensic services.


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