By Özlem ÖZMEN

Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen (2015) is a contextual play as the work derives its material from an actual histori- cal event, the abolition of capital punishment in the 1960s, and presents this topic in 2015 soon after the debates of reintroducing death penalty in Britain. The play refers to two distinct socio-historical backgrounds, 1960s Britain as the context of the plot, and the twenty-first century as the context of the audience/reader. Hangmen takes place on a very specific date in history, the year in which hanging was suspended in Britain. The comical portrayal of what seems to be the last hanging case in the country makes it possible to problematise the integrity of the judicial system at the time. Presentation of the rivalry between two famous executioners in the country, Harry Allen and Albert Pierrepoint, also underlines the play’s socio-political relation to a certain context. What is equally noteworthy about Hangmen is McDonagh’s choice of this topic at a time in which the issue of capital punishment is raised again in Britain. Concerning recent arguments about the reintroduction of death penalty, it is observed that McDonagh also initiates a discussion about the legitimation of state violence through a depiction of the history of hanging. In light of this observation, the aim of this article is to discuss McDonagh’s topical dark comedy as a political intervention in the debate over death penalty in Britain by mentioning t

Özmen, Ö. (2019). Political Contextuality of Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen: An Intervention in the Debate over Capital Punishment in Britain, Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences, 18 IDEA Special Issue, 92-101

By Eva Maghfiroh Institut Agama islam Syarifuddin Lumajang

Aggressive behavior is a form of behavior that can hurt other people. This behaviour comes from cognitive processes that are disrupted. Students, in Islamic boarding school, who experience aggressive behavior, can become aggressive too. This article discusses how teachers deal with students with aggressive behavior in Islamic boarding school. One of the ways, is to provide reward and punishment for them, who have aggrescive behavior

Dakwatuna : Jurnal Dakwadan Komunikasi Islam, 19p.

By Cindy Miller-Perrin* and Robin Perrin

Physical punishment remains a common practice in the USA despite significant empirical evidence of its potential harm and ineffectiveness, arguments that its use violates children’s human rights, and professional recommendations against its use. The purpose of the current paper is to offer explanations as to why, in the face of a worldwide movement to protect children from violence, the USA continues to support physical punishment of children. The paper also summarizes the various debates engaged in by experts that stem from these explanations for physical punishment and argue that the time has come to move beyond these debates and eliminate the physical punishment of children. We offer suggestions for changing attitudes and practices related to physical punishment of children in order to promote their health and well-being. We conclude by suggesting that the burden of proof in debates about physical punishment, which has typically fallen upon those who argue children should never be physica

Miller-Perrin and Perrin Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica (2018) 31:16, 7p.

By Ryan Casey, Fergus McNeill ,Betsy Barkas, Neil Cornish, Caitlin Gormley, and Marguerite Schinkel

In this paper, we draw on data from a recent study of how Covid-19 and related restrictions impacted on vulnerable and/or marginalised populations in Scotland (Armstrong and Pickering, 2020), including justice-affected people (i.e. people in prison and under supervision, their families and those that work with them; see Gormley et al., 2020). Focusing here mainly on interviews with people released from prison and others under community-based criminal justice supervision, we explore how the pandemic impacted on their experiences. Re ecting upon and re n- ing previous analyses of how supervision is experienced as pervasive punishment (McNeill, 2019), we suggest that both the pandemic and public health measures associated with its suppression have changed the pains and gains of supervision (Hayes, 2015), in particular, by exacerbating the suspension associated with it. We conclude by discussing the implications of our ndings for the pursuit of justice in the recovery from Covid-19.

Probation Journal, 1 17, 2021, 17p.

By James T. Graves, Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson

The U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)1 is not a popular law.2 Enacted in 1986 to deal with the nascent computer crimes of that era, it has aged badly. It has been widely criticized as vague, poorly structured, and having an overly broad definition of loss that invites prosecutorial abuse.

Perception Versus Punishment in Cybercrime

By Patrick G Bass Morningside College

Civil War prison historiography has enjoyed a kind of renaissance over the past two decades, using new sources, new research methodologies, and new theoretical frameworks. Both of these works from Kent State University Press are among the efforts in these new directions. Angela Zombek’s monograph Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Mili- tary Prisons is the more ambitious of the two works under review. Zombek approaches her subjects in a complicated manner. The struc- ture proceeds from background and general overview through specific investigations to a Reconstruction postscript. The introduction sum- marizes the entire work. The first chapter provides a deep background analysis of theories of penology before and during the American Civil War, which reaches from the European Enlightenment to the Lieber Code of the early 1860s. The second chapter centers on the overall con- tinuities of practices of penology throughout the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. The last full chapter (not the conclusion) looks at postwar legacies in terms of the triumph of continuity. The conclusion ably restates her findings.

The Annals of Iowa Volume 78 Number 2 (Spring 2019) pps. 211-213

By Carl Toersbijns, Retired Corrections Administrator

This lecture is written by a layperson who seeks to simplify the process of punishment inside prisons while explaining its impact, intentionally or intentionally. It is also written to propose a theory that punishment should be temporary and not permanently imposed in perpetuity with time to allow society’s forgiveness and understanding of the long-term effects of penal state and its impact on criminalized people. To begin with, we must first acknowledge the fact that incarceration is massive in nature and tone and spoken of frequently and rapidly after a crime has been committed and adjudicated to the courts for sentencing and term of punishment.

January 7, 2023, 6p.

By Paolla Magioni Santini and Lucia C. A. Williams

Studies have shown that corporal punishment against children is a common family practice, causing damage to child development. Considering that parents are the main perpetrators of this type of aggression, parenting programs are needed to raise children without violence. This study aimed at performing a systematic review of parenting programs evaluations to reduce corporal punishment. Intervention procedures, as well as design, results and limitations were identified for each study. The PRISMA protocol (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) was used for reporting the results. A literature survey was conducted in Brazilian databases, as well as English ones from 1994-2014. One Brazilian study and eight international studies were selected as relevant, and only four used randomized controlled trials (RCT). All studies reported satisfactory results in decreasing aggression by parents against their children. Further research in the area with solid methodology is recommended.

Systematic Literature Review, 2016, 9p.

By Lucy Sorensen, Charmaine N. Willis, Victor Asal, and Melissa L. Breger

International attention to the issue of children’s rights and dignity has grown in recent years, both culminating in—and then drawing momentum from— the landmark United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989. The CRC represents a changing international consensus on the rights of children, emphasizing that children, as human beings, should have a certain level of autonomy and codified legal protections (Hammarberg 1990; Melton 2005; Reynaert et al. 2009). It is formidable in its range of provisions and its specificity: it states that children have the right to have their basic needs fulfilled (addressing issues of hunger, health care, edu- cation, and play); the right to participate in decisions affecting their own well-being; and the right to be free from harm (Hammarberg 1990; Melton 2005).

2024, 23p.

By MARÍA CASADO

La presente obra es un trabajo colectivo que analiza cada uno de los artículos y principios de la «Declaración Universal sobre Bioética y Derechos Humanos» adoptada por la UNESCO en 2005 para completar –en lo que se refiere al impac- to de la biotecnología y la biomedicina en los seres humanos y el entorno– la «Declaración Universal de Derechos Humanos» de 1948. La Declaración explici- ta como objetivo «Proporcionar un marco universal de principios y procedimien- tos que sirvan de guía a los Estados en la formulación de legislaciones, políticas u otros instrumentos en el ámbito de la bioética» y hace un especial énfasis en el análisis del concepto de dignidad humana en relación con la Bioética. Su rele- vancia para quienes nos ocupamos de la nueva disciplina Bioética es inmensa pero también es esencial para todos los ciudadanos, puesto que la supervivencia de la vidabuenaen el planeta exige tomar en serio lo en ella establecido.

Thomson Reuters, 2009, 600p.

By Clifton P. Flynn

Corporal punishment enjoys strong normative support in American society, even in the face of growing evidence suggesting that it may be potentially harmful. This arti- cle examines Americans' attitudes toward the physical punishment of children. Support for spanking varies along such social categories as race, education, religion, and region. The article concludes by discussing the implications of corporal punishment attitudes for scholars, professionals, and families.

University of South Carolina at Spartanburg, Aggression and Violent Behavior, Vol. I, No. 1, pp. 47-55, 1996, 9p.

By Ian Ayres and  Fredrick E. Vars

In a substantial majority of states, invitees may bring concealed weapons onto private property unless the owner expressly tells them that firearms are not allowed. Five states after the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision flipped the presumption, enacting statutes that prohibit bringing firearms onto other people’s property without the owner’s express consent. These statutes have been attacked as violating the Second Amendment. While the Ninth Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the “no guns” default, the Second Circuit and other lower courts have enjoined application of the law with regard to private property open to the public. This Article, after analyzing the reasoning of the courts, proposes a legislative fix. States can enact “affirmative choice” rules which require commercial establishments, as a condition of doing business, to state whether or not they want their customers to be allowed to bring concealed firearms into their stores. An affirmative-choice requirement avoids constitutional concerns that some courts have had with a “no guns” presumption because the ability to bear arms on private property would only be restricted when the landowner so chooses. Without state action restricting gun rights, the statutes would not meet the Bruen threshold requirement. The Article explains why affirmative-choice laws are likely to better effectuate the preferences of landowners and why such laws would not pose compelled speech concerns.

Yale Law School, Public Law Research Paper,

By William R. Slomanson

As a result of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre of 20 first graders and 6 staff members, a number of states responded with a various programs seeking to avoid reoccurrences. They have not yet succeeded in completely restraining the ensuing gun violence. But states like California have robustly responded with generically designated “Extreme Risk Protection Orders” (ERPO). One version of the ERPO is the comparatively new GVRO (California 2014).

The validity of any gun law begins with the threshold issue applicable to all jurisdictions: the individual’s Second Amendment right to bear arms. The U.S. Supreme Court’s blockbuster 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022) conjured a new test for gun litigation. Bruen thus held that “the government must demonstrate that the [challenged] regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The Court’s ensuing 2024 building block connected both domestic and gun violence retraining orders. United States v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. ____, 144 S.Ct. 1889 (2024). There was no gun violence restraining order (GVRO) against Mr. Rahimi. But he did violate an analogous domestic violence restraining order (DVRO). Rahimi thus furnished the yardstick for measuring constitutional attacks on GVROs.

One may obtain various restraining orders in California, as listed in this essay. It focuses on Cal. Pen. Code § 18125 sets forth and analyses the statute’s three-option core. This essay also presents the associated GVRO Judicial Council forms. The next subsection provides selected case law regarding the GVRO regime’s key applications. Subjects covered include the Confrontation Clause; judicial assessments of the substantial evidence needed for a GVRO; hearsay evidence options; expert witnesses; oral v. written GVRO applications; notification requirements; and sanctions for misuse.Thomas Jefferson School of Law Research Paper 4930668, 38 California Litigation Reporter (forthcoming Nov. 2024)

By Maria M. Orsini, Peter Leasure, & Jana Hrdinova

After Ohio voted to legalize recreational marijuana in November 2023, and before recreational marijuana became available for sale in Ohio in August 2024, the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center surveyed Ohio’s K-12 school principals to inquire about how they anticipated marijuana legalization would impact their schools and their students. In spring 2025, the center again surveyed Ohio’s principals to explore their perceptions of how marijuana legalization has impacted their schools and students now that recreational marijuana sales have commenced. This second survey, which used a nearly identical online survey instrument, was distributed to principals to allow for a comparison of anticipated impacts prior to the beginning of marijuana sales and actual experiences after marijuana sales started. Overall, results from the 2025 survey aligned fairly closely with principals’ anticipated concerns in 2024, with a few areas seeing a lower level of experienced impact such as on dropout rates, students’ behavior at school, and overall school safety. While these results suggest that principals overall anticipated a worse impact of marijuana legalization prior to the beginning of recreational sales than what they experienced after sales commenced, this conclusion has two important caveats. First, while the perceived impacts on students are lower in a few areas than the anticipated impacts from 2024, this result does not mitigate the fact that at the high school and middle school levels, principals in 2025 reported concerning observations with respect to the increased use of marijuana among their students, students’ academic performance, health, and impact on school safety, among other things. Second, our survey recorded responses from a relatively small number of Ohio’s principals and only asked about their perceptions, which does not allow us to draw any definitive conclusions about the actual effects of marijuana legalization. If state legislators and voters want to explore the concrete impact of marijuana legalization on students, it is crucial to collect and study actual student data on metrics related to academic performance, behavioral issues, mental and physical health, marijuana and other drug use, and school completion. 

Ohio State Legal Studies Research Paper No. 928,

By Mark S. Brodin

Reflecting back a decade later, what is the legacy of Trayvon Martin’s case, a teenage life violently cut short, and a legal system that accepted his death without consequence? Among other things, there is “The Trayvon Generation,” poet Elizabeth Alexander’s ruminations on the young African Americans who have grown up in the haunting shadow of this killing, and the anguished mothers who cannot protect their children from such a fate. “[T]o African Americans and other racialized minorities, Martin’s death became emblematic of the extreme outcomes of racial profiling enmeshed in a history of criminal laws arbitrarily targeting Black men.”

I begin with a close look at the Zimmerman trial, expanding on my earlier Howard Law Journal article with new access to an official audio-visual transcript. Then I put the case in its historical context by surveying the American tradition of vigilantism and its incarnation in the “neighborhood crime watches” (like Zimmerman’s) that have become so pervasive. Next, I contrast the response of the legal system to black as compared to white self-defense in notable cases. I conclude with an appraisal of our self-defense law -- doctrine and practice -- and the compelling need to reform it in light of what we have learned about implicit bias, unconscious stereotyping, and their role split-second panicked decision-making.

106 Marquette Law Review 593 (2022)

Brandon L. Garrett,  Sandra Guerra Thompson,  Dottie Carmichael,  David Shil & Songman Kang

The highest volume of cases in the U.S. criminal system are misdemeanors, and every day, hundreds of thousands of people are detained pretrial in such low-level cases. In policy and in politics, pretrial rules have swung between a focus on protecting constitutional rights and the public safety dangers posed by releasing arrestees. The Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Salerno sought to promote a balance between protecting individual due process rights and public safety interests. A central constitutional and pressing policy question is what trade-off exists between pretrial liberty and reoffending. The highest profile jurisdiction to examine that question is Harris County, Texas, the third largest county in the United States, which has implemented the largest-scale and farthest reaching constitutional remedies in a misdemeanor bail system. In 2019, after years of federal litigation and a preliminary injunction finding pervasive constitutional violations, Harris County entered a Consent Decree requiring comprehensive reform. This Article describes the constitutional remedies this novel Consent Decree set out and the implementation of those remedies. This Article also addresses the central question of bail: whether pretrial release comes at a cost to public safety.

We find that the constitutional rights protections of the Consent Decree appear largely successful in that people are now promptly freed in misdemeanor cases without the requirement that they pay cash bail. More surprising, perhaps, we find that public safety has also powerfully benefited. We describe a steady decline in the numbers of both misdemeanor arrests and rearrests. Few could have predicted with any certainty what the results of this large-scale bail reform would be. The result suggests there is no necessary trade-off between constitutional rights and public safety. These findings have powerful implications for rethinking the structure and application of the Salerno balancing test and for jurisdictions considering wholesale bail reform.

By Emily Ryo, Ian Peacock, Weston Ley, and Christopher Levesque

 Whether and to what extent racial minorities experience harsher treatment or face worse outcomes in court are questions of fundamental importance for any justice system. Questions of racial inequality are especially salient in the context of removal proceedings that are triggered by immigrants’ criminal history. Many individuals in crime-based removal proceedings are immigrants of color who face a host of legal disadvantages that are tantamount to double penalties for the same crime for which they have already been punished through the criminal justice system. This Article offers, for the first time, systematic empirical analyses of crime-based removal proceedings decided between 1998 and 2023 in U.S. immigration courts. Our analyses produced three key findings. First, our results show that double penalties for immigrants in crime-based removal proceedings are large and growing. Second, there are significant racial disparities in the rate at which immigrants are released from detention and the rate at which they are ordered removed from the United States. Specifically, Hispanic immigrants with drug-related charges and Black immigrants with domestic violence or firearms charges face significantly worse outcomes than their counterparts. Third, non-white immigrants fare better when their presiding judges are of the same, rather than different, race. For white immigrants, however, they generally fare better than non-white immigrants regardless of the presiding judges’ race, and this white favoritism is more pronounced among some non-white judges than white judges. These findings have important implications for scholarship on the continuing salience of race and ethnicity in criminal and civil proceedings despite facially race-neutral laws, as well as policymaking aimed at advancing racial equality in our justice system. 

Minnesota Law Review, v. 109, 2025

By David Abrams and  Priyanka Goonetilleke

Each year, millions of Americans rely on public defenders to fulfill their Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Despite being the linchpin of the criminal justice system, public defense remains both underfunded and understudied. This article provides empirical analysis to contribute to a critical question: How should public defender systems be structured? Criminal justice advocates, scholars, and the American Bar Association strongly favor vertical representation in public defense. Under this model, a single public defender represents a defendant throughout their case, from initial appearance through sentencing. The alternative approach—horizontal representation—operates like an assembly line: Different attorneys handle each stage of a case, from preliminary hearings to pretrial conferences to trials. The preference for vertical representation stems from the intuitive belief that continuity of representation improves outcomes for defendants. However, no prior empirical work has tested this assumption. Using a natural experiment created by the Defender Association of Philadelphia’s transition from a fully horizontal representation system to a partially vertical one, we find no evidence that increasing attorney continuity improves defendant outcomes. These findings have significant implications for how public defender offices should allocate their scarce resources. While vertical representation is considered by many as the ideal, our results cast doubt on whether the additional resources and logistical challenges relative to horizontal representation are justified, given the current reality of underfunded public defense. As jurisdictions nationwide grapple with a chronic lack of resources for public defense, this article provides crucial empirical evidence to inform decisions about how best to uphold defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

New York University Law Review No. 5 (forthcoming), Northwestern Law & Econ Research Paper No. 25-05, Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 25-22, U of Penn, Inst for Law & Econ Research Paper No. 25-10, 

By Stacy Caplow

Everyone agrees: Immigration law is in crisis.  One aspect of immigration law is particularly intransigent: the impact of a criminal conviction on lawful permanent residents [LPRs]. In combination, immigration statutes and case law construct an almost inescapable box for LPRs whose movements, security, and liberty are threatened the moment they step into a criminal court. A conviction can prevent international travel, thwart naturalization, mandate detention and, worst of all, result in deportation. A conviction might cause problems at a port of entry, at a USCIS service center, at a prison or, most alarmingly, after an ICE knock on the front door years after the conviction and even the completion of the sentence. While the immigration consequences of a conviction are hydra-headed, the focus of this paper will be on LPRs facing removal who stand to lose “all that makes life worth living.”[1]

Sometimes the removal process moves on an express track—a predestined outcome with no possible relief. The more fortunate LPR may be able to delay, and a few may even avoid deportation, but all pay a steep fare of time, anxiety, uncertainty and often a loss of freedom. However long the trip or wherever its final destination, in many cases it is difficult or even impossible to justify the painful journey which may cause long term disruption, or ultimate exile from family, employment and community.

Scholars, legislators, and advocates have focused on the unfairness of many harsh immigration laws, but the search for solutions is frustrating given the unlikelihood of statutory changes at the federal level, particularly for noncitizens impacted by the criminal legal system. There have been many proposals and recommendations as well as a few notable initiatives, but these steps offer either imperfect or deficient protections for LPRs.

If federal law is intractable, what can give?  This paper argues that state legislative initiatives provide opportunities to loosen the stranglehold of federal immigration law.  Some states already have passed laws designed specifically to help immigrants avoid immigration consequences. These efforts to safeguard Lawful Permanent Residents from deportation could be adopted more widely or expanded to provide even more protections for any noncitizens caught in the criminal legal system.

 Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No. 793, 

By Scott L. Cummings

This Article examines the development and rapid innovation of the autocratic legal playbook in America: the strategic blueprint used to destroy democracy through law. It argues that this playbook, with roots in autocratizing countries abroad, is now being implemented with brutal efficiency in the United States through the unprecedented abuse of executive power. The Article analyzes how autocracy has taken hold of the world’s oldest democracy with such velocity and examines what it means for the future of democracy around the world. It begins by defining the autocratic legal playbook as the roadmap for using law to undermine democratic guardrails that keep the executive within constitutional limits. The Article traces the evolution of the American playbook from Hungary’s autocratic transformation after 2010, to President Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, to Project 2025, to the Trump 2.0 strategy of “flooding the zone” with executive orders. The Article’s central contribution is to reveal the operating principles and tactical innovations of the American playbook—premised on the subversion of truth and the conflation of legitimate policy change with illegitimate democratic attacks—while demonstrating how these principles are being systematically mobilized to target and disable key independent institutions that check executive power: government legal offices, law firms and the bar, courts, administrative agencies, universities, civil society, and the media. Because the core of autocratic legalism is creating the appearance of legality to justify attacks on the rule of law, the Article pays special attention to the legal profession, showing how actions against lawyers and courts are designed to achieve the ultimate autocratic objective: controlling the authority to define law. The Article concludes by considering how to “reverse engineer” the playbook, drawing on critical lessons from how democracies have died, and been resuscitated, in other countries to outline steps for saving American democracy in this watershed moment—before it is too late.

UCLA Law Review, Forthcoming, UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 25-31,