教學大綱 Syllabus

課程簡介Course Description

Course Description/Objectives

Mass incarceration, mass post-conviction supervision, significant outcome disparity and elusive systems-wide alignment, continue to be the defining characteristics of the U.S. criminal justice system. This seminar will examine criminal justice reform in the United States from both policy and advocacy perspectives. The course will examine: 1) the problems with the American criminal justice system; 2) the institutional actors involved in the effort to create criminal justice reform; 3) the ideas currently circulating to address specific problems in the system; and 4) the strategies used in pressing for criminal justice reform through both policy change and litigation. The seminar will highlight the roles and interests of key stakeholders in the criminal justice system—including judges, prosecutors, law enforcement, correctional officers, as well as scholars and advocates for reform.

Balancing the need for individual accountability, the fundamental constitutional mandate to protect the rights of the accused, and the community’s desire and expectation for public safety is the central challenge to establishing a fair, efficient, and just criminal justice system. The course will provide you with an overview of the issues, challenges and outcomes that define the criminal justice system in the United States and a review of the theories, processes and procedures that create them.

Here are the questions we will explore: What are society’s goals? What are the system’s goals? How do the results align with the goals? What are the issues that drive the need for reform and what are the challenges that complicate the effort to reform?

The first three parts of the course will introduce you to the issues of constitutional criminal procedure in the United States. Our primary focus will be issues arising out of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the United States Constitution. We will also cover a few procedural issues such as plea bargaining, eyewitness identification, and jury trials. We will help you build a foundational knowledge about substantive and procedural issues of American criminal procedure. In addition, the course will help you develop strong analytical and reasoning skills for legal practices.

Underlying the discussion of constitutional criminal procedure is a debate about police power. It is a conversation that brings up hard issues of racial justice, poverty, surveillance, and why we criminalize certain behaviors. The constitutional rights protected in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments are limitations on government power. How society has balanced those rights has changed over time and continues to evolve. We are in the middle of a national conversation on race and criminal justice, and this class will address how that police power has been directed against African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, and citizens in poor communities. Every generation must balance issues of privacy, liberty, public safety, criminal investigation, and punishment anew.

In the last two parts of the course, we turn to the professional and ethical laws governing attorneys in the criminal justice system. We will cover issues affecting both prosecutors and defense attorneys and the applicable rules of professional conduct. The course will work to deepen your understanding of the role and responsibilities of criminal justice attorneys in society. Specifically, we will deal with questions underlying the responsibilities of prosecutors and defense lawyers to self, society, client, and the profession. The class will provide you with the analysis and authorities necessary to understand the issues and underlying policies. Issues concerning the lawyer’s role in criminal law practice and roles within the context of the adversary system are examined in some detail, as is the idea of professionalism.