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Childbearing Under Unbearable Circumstances: The Importance of Abortion Ban Exceptions for Victims of Sexual Violence and the Current Bias Against Sex Trafficking Victims
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Reasonable for Whom? A Consideration of the Appropriate Reasonableness Standard Where Battered Woman Syndrome Evidence is Relevant to a Duress Defense
Get PDFMe, Myself and My Digital Double: Extending Sara Greene’s Stealing (Identity) from the Poor to the Challenges of Identity Verification
Get PDFIdentity is an essential part of the human condition. When one’s identity is stolen or when a state rejects a citizen’s identity, the consequences can be devastating to one’s notion of selfhood as well as undermine their economic security. In Stealing (Identity) from the Poor, Sara Greene explores the serious harms suffered by low-income people who are victimized by identity theft. She explains that our plutocratic regime of identity theft laws serves the interests of wealthier Americans at the expense of those experiencing poverty.
This Essay extends Greene’s analysis and framing to the harms of identity verification systems, particularly in unemployment insurance (UI) programs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, UI programs faced massive demands as people lost work, and criminal syndicates fraudulently claimed billions of dollars in benefits. In response, states hastily adopted automated identity verification systems that ended up denying benefits to millions of needy and eligible workers. These systems failed along three dimensions. First, they were designed with privileged users in mind, thus leaving vulnerable people in the digital divide unable to navigate their requirements. Second, identity verification determinations were implemented without adequate due process or clear standards. Third, the privatization of identity verification systems limited transparency and accountability to citizens. This Essay explores the challenges of identity verification in our automated age and suggests several paths forward for more equitable systems
Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration in Colombia: Lost human rights opportunities for ex-combatants with disabilities
Get PDFThis article examines whether and how the circumstances of Colombian ex-combatants with disabilities were recognized in the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) processes in the period following the adoption of the 2016 peace agreement. Our results suggest severe procedural and substantive shortcomings during the drafting of the peace agreement and the implementation of the DDR processes that exacerbated the exclusion of ex-combatants with disabilities from available opportunities for their social, economic, and political reintegration. We conclude that a better understanding of the disabling impact of conflict and the ex
A Review of Maryland’s Juvenile Justice System: Are the Adjudicative Competency Standards and Procedures Incompetent?
Get PDFA Butterfly in COVID: Structural Racism and Baltimore\u27s Pretrial Legal System
Get PDFSummer of 2020 represented a potentially pivotal moment in the movements against mass incarceration and for racial justice. The authors commenced a study of Baltimore’s pretrial legal system just as the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and urgent cries of Black Lives Matter appeared to present a once-in-a-generation opportunity for meaningful decarceration. Over forty-four weekdays in June and July, the team observed bail review hearings in 509 cases and collected extensive data from the arguments and recommendations offered by the pretrial agency and prosecuting and defense attorneys. Unfortunately, the hoped-for reform failed to materialize as judges held nearly 62% of all defendants “without bail,” sending detainees back to jail indefinitely despite the pandemic and despite their legal presumption of innocence. Even worse, stark racial inequalities persisted.
This Article argues that the failed reform of Baltimore’s pretrial legal system represents a larger triumph of structural racism and that nothing short of radical transformation of the body politic will end such systemic racism. After describing the original empirical study, presenting a critical history of pretrial justice struggles in Maryland, and relating representative narratives of detainee experiences, the Article employs a novel analysis that reveals a basic pattern of structural injustice replicating itself, like DNA in cells. When plotting the addresses of study defendants onto maps of Baltimore, the unmistakable pattern of a butterfly emerges. This evokes the vital work of Dr. Lawrence Brown who has famously observed that “hypersegregation” in Baltimore looks like a Black butterfly. The Black butterfly represents the physical manifestation of systemic racism; it reveals a pattern of inequality that cuts across economic, political, and other socio-cultural systems.
Using data from the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, this Article visualizes the connection between pretrial injustice and structural racism through a series of original computer-generated maps. These maps connect neighborhood indicators measuring racial composition, median household income, transportation services, access to home Internet, and other non-criminal markers of advantage and disadvantage to the stories of individual criminal defendants from the Article’s study. The contours of the Black butterfly continuously re-appear, suggesting an inextricable relationship between judicial institutions of “criminal justice” and institutions meting out economic, political, and socio-cultural opportunity.
Though it is dispiriting that unequal pretrial detention continued relentlessly in Baltimore despite the pandemic and then-Chief Judge Barbera’s call for racial justice, Baltimore’s experience in the time of COVID exemplifies the challenges faced everywhere by those seeking to dismantle structures of racism. Lessons learned from Baltimore apply to the entire nation. Ultimately, analysis of the butterfly in the time of COVID underscores the necessity of connecting all reform efforts aimed at confronting inequality across all domains. Indeed, structural racism has a Hydra-like quality. If you ignore the body and simply cut off one head, two will grow back in its place. Only Herculean focus and a willingness to burn out injustice across the whole monster can lead to meaningful change