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"Deregulating Guilt: The Information Culture of the Criminal System"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the title of this interesting new paper from the always interesting Professor  Alexandra Natapoff.  Here is the abstract: The criminal system has an uneasy relationship with information.  On the one hand, the criminal process is centrally defined by stringent evidentiary and information rules and a commitment to public transparency.  On the other, largely due to the dominance of plea bargaining, criminal liability is determined by all sorts of unregulated, non-public information that never pass through the quality control of evidentiary, discovery, or other criminal procedure restrictions.  The result is a process that generates determinations of liability that are often unmoored from systemic information constraints...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on February 11, 2009 (boomark / email).