Origins of
Classical School
Classical criminology theory began in the Enlightenment, i.e., in the 18
century. The Age of reason.
Creation of the concept of rights. Rights: unilateral entitlement.
Before Law was relational and obligational.
Law becomes subjective and in becoming subjective it generates rights
Criminal justice was not as we know it today. It was let’s say, quite
arbitrary. Ordeal.
Beccaria was a true law reformer. He single handedly transformed the
criminal justice system of
all Europe and indirectly of North America and the rest of the world.
US Bill of
Rights and modern criminal justice system. French Declaration of Man 1789
French Revolution
Jeremy Bentham said of him when he read his book: WHAT IS THERE LEFT FOR
US TO DO?
Neoclassical criminology:
· Individual rights and due process: conditional sentences, alternative modes of incapacitation that don’t require imprisonment, such as home confinement, the use of halfway houses, psychological treatments, etc.
· Law and order: death penalty and general deterrence
DUE PROCESS: Legal
rights
Law and Order
General deterrence
A relationship exists between crime rate and the factors of
(i)
Certainty
(ii)
Severity
(iii)
Celerity of the punishment
Where deterrence has been found it is the certainty and not the severity
of the punishment that seems to influence people.
Informal sanctions
The fear of informal sanctions, such as disapproval of significant
others leading to embarrassment and shame, may have a greater reducing impact
than the fear of formal legal punishments.
Rethinking deterrence
Specific and general deterrence should be considered interactive and not
independent.
Incarceration is limited as a deterrence and the best solution is to use
alternative measures, such as conditional sentencing, and to try to return the
offender to the community.
Sentence
enhancements
Three strikes out policy in the US: people convicted of three violent
offenses receive a mandatory life term without parole.
(i)
Three-time criminals are on the verge of aging
(ii)
Current sentences for violent crimes are already severe
(iii)
The police would be in danger because two-time offenders would violently
resist a third arrest, knowing they face a life sentence.
Choice Theory
Beginning in the mid 1970’s the classical approach began to reemerge and
the rehabilitation of criminals –a tenet of positivism- came under attack.
Choice theory (James Q. Wilson, 1975):
·
Criminals are rational actors who plan their crimes, fear punishment and
deserve to be penalized for their misdeeds.
·
Efforts should be made to reduce criminal opportunity by deterring would
be criminals and incarcerating known offenders.
·
Does crime pay?
The concepts
of rational choice
·
A crime occurs when an offender decides to risk violating the law after
considering both personal factors –need for money, revenge, thrills,
entertainment- and situational factors –how well a target is protected, the
efficiency of local police force.
·
Reasonable criminals evaluate the risk of apprehension, the seriousness
of expected punishment, the potential value of the criminal enterprise and his
immediate need for criminal gain.
·
The decision to commit a crime is a personal decision based on weighing
the available information.
·
Rational choice theorists view crimes as both offense-specific, i.e., offenders
will react selectively to the characteristics of the particular offense, and
offender-specific, i.e., each criminal makes decisions.
The decision to commit crime is structured by the choice of:
·
Where the crime occurs
·
The characteristics of the target
· The means (techniques) available for its completion
Since 1973, 111 people in 25 states
have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. (Latest
release, Joseph Amrine, July 28, 2003).
98% of dead row inmates are male, 8% are
Hispanic, 42% are black.
10 years average time since conviction to
execution.
In the quarter (1976) century between restoration of the Illinois death
penalty and Governor George Ryan's blanket clemency order, 298 men and women
were sentenced to death in Illinois. Of those, 17 were exonerated — a rate of
5.7%, the highest exoneration rate of the 38 states with death penalties on
their books. 17 were factually innocent
Anthony Porter had exhausted his appeals, his family had made
his funeral arrangements, and he was just 50 hours away from execution when he
won a reprieve from the Illinois Supreme Court in late 1998.
The reprieve was granted
not out of concern that Porter might be innocent but solely because he had
tested so low on an IQ test that the court was not sure he could comprehend
what was about to happen to him, or why. The court's intent was merely to
provide time to explore the question of the condemned man's intelligence, but
it had an unanticipated consequence: It gave a Northwestern University
Professor David Protess, private investigator Paul Ciolino, and a team of
journalism students time to investigate the case and establish Porter's
complete innocence.
Porter had been
convicted of two murders. The victims, Marilyn Green, 19, and Jerry Hillard,
18, were shot to death in the bleachers overlooking a swimming pool in
Washington Park on the South Side of Chicago shortly after 1 a.m. on August 15,
1982. Police originally surmised that the crime had been an armed robbery, but
it is now known to have resulted from a dispute over drug money.
Immediately after the
shooting, police interviewed William Taylor, who had been swimming in the park
pool when the murders occurred. Taylor at first said he had not seen the person
who committed the crime. Later at the station, he said he had seen Anthony
Porter run by right after he heard the shots. After another 17 hours of
interrogation, Taylor told police that he actually had seen Porter shoot the
victims.
Taylor's evolving story
turned Porter, a South Side gang member, into the only suspect, even though the
police had been given information casting suspicion on others: Ofra Green,
mother of the female victim, had told the police that she suspected that the
murders had been committed by a man named Alstory Simon, who had been in a
heated dispute with Jerry Hillard over drug money. Mrs. Green also said she had
seen Simon and his wife, Inez Jackson, with the victims shortly before they
turned up dead.
Police did interview
Simon and Jackson, but according to statements the Northwestern team eventually
obtained from the pair, just showed them a photograph of Porter and asked if
they had any information about the crime. Simon and Jackson responded that they
had not been in the park that night. They said they were asked nothing further
and never heard from the police again. A few days later, Simon and Jackson
moved to Milwaukee.
After hearing that his
name had been mentioned in connection with the double murders, Anthony Porter
went to the police station. Despite his protestations of innocence and the lack
of physical evidence connecting him with the murders, he was arrested and
charged with the two murders, one count of armed robbery, one count of unlawful
restraint, and two counts of unlawful use of weapons.
Although Porter
qualified for representation by the Cook County Public Defender's Office, his
family thought he would be better off with a private lawyer. They retained
Chicago attorney Akim Gursel, agreeing to pay him $10,000. However, they paid
him only $3,000. Gursel later said that, due to lack of funds, he stopped
investigating.
In September of 1983,
Porter went on trial before Judge Robert L. Sklodowski and a jury in Cook
County Circuit Court. During the trial, Gursel once fell asleep; the transcript
shows that Sklodowski awakened him. After the prosecution rested, Gursel called
only two alibi witnesses and a photographer who had taken aerial shots of
Washington Park. The jury deliberated nine hours before convicting Porter on
all counts
The next day, Gursel
waived Porter's right to a jury for sentencing, and a bench sentencing hearing
began before Sklodowski. At the conclusion of the first phase of the hearing,
at which it was determined that Porter was eligible for the death penalty,
Sklodowski noted that the jury had not been formally dismissed. At that point,
Gursel told Sklodowski he had discovered that one of the jurors and Marilyn
Green's mother attended the same church. Since the juror had failed to disclose
the relationship during the jury voir dire, Gursel moved for a mistrial.
Sklodowski briefly
inquired of the juror, asking whether it was in fact true. "Yes, but that
didn't make any difference to me about that," the juror responded. Sklodowski
then asked when she realized she knew Ofra Green, and the juror replied,
"After it had got started and everything was going on." Sklodowski
then asked, "But, it made no difference to you, right?" "No,
that is right," said the juror. The jury was then discharged, and
Sklodowski denied Gursel's motion for a mistrial. Gursel protested that
Sklodowski's inquiry of the juror had been too cursory to determine whether
there had been actual prejudice, but Sklodowski wouldn't budge.
After the second phase
of the death penalty hearing the next day. Sklodowski found nothing in
mitigation sufficient to preclude imposition of the ultimate sanction. Calling
Porter "a perverse shark," Sklodowski sentence him to die.
In February of 1986, a
sharply divided Illinois Supreme Court denied Porter's direct appeal. The
principal issue was whether Porter had been denied a fair trial before an
impartial jury. Writing for a four-member majority, Justice Howard C. Ryan
concluded that, since the juror in question did not realize until after the
trial began that she knew the mother of one of the victims, it was unlikely
that their relationship had been close. Justice William G. Clark filed a
dissenting opinion, saying the majority had no basis for speculating on the
closeness of the relationship and, therefore, the conviction should be vacated.
Justice Seymour Simon filed a separate dissent, joined by Justice Joseph H.
Goldenshersh, in which he noted that the colloquy between Sklodowski and the
juror lasted just seconds and had been leading and otherwise deficient.
Porter petitioned for
certiorari, which was denied seven-two by the U.S. Supreme Court the following
October. Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan dissented, saying the
majority of the state high court had erred in requiring the defendant to bear
the burden of showing actual prejudice when the probability of bias was as
substantial as it appeared in the Porter case.
Next, Porter filed a
post-conviction petition alleging he had been denied effective assistance of
counsel by Gursel's failure to locate and call four trial witnesses who could
have suggested that Alstory Simon and Inez Johnson actually committed the
murders. By this time, Sklodowski had left the bench in disgrace over a
financial scandal, and the case was assigned to Judge Richard C. Neville, who
denied relief. In January of 1995, the Illinois Supreme Court, in an opinion
written by Justice Charles E. Freeman, unanimously affirmed Neville.
In a petition for a
federal writ of habeas corpus, Porter asserted essentially the same errors that
he had raised in the state courts. U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Norgle,
Sr., denied relief in 1996. The following year, Norgle's decision was
unanimously affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in an
opinion written by Judge Michael S. Kanne. After certiorari was denied on March
23, 1998, Porter's execution was set for September 23.
At this point, a
volunteer Chicago lawyer, Daniel R. Sanders, took the case and had Porter's IQ
tested. It was measured at 51, which meant that Porter likely was mentally
retarded. Sanders was then joined by four other pro bono lawyers — Lawrence C.
Marshall, Alan L. Goldman, Aviva Futorian, and Joseph M. Tobias — in
challenging the impending execution. Although it is legal in Illinois to
execute the mentally retarded, the team filed a last-minute petition with the
Illinois Supreme Court, arguing that Porter's mental capacity rendered him
incapable of understanding his punishment and, therefore, that he should not be
executed.
Fifty hours before
Porter was scheduled to die, the court granted a stay of execution, ordering
the Cook County Circuit Court to hold a competency hearing to determine whether
Porter was fit to be executed. Soon after the stay was granted, Protess,
Ciolino, and the students started investigating the case.
In December of 1998,
William Taylor recanted his testimony to Ciolino and one of the students. He
said in an affidavit that police had pressured him to name Porter as the
shooter. On January 29, 1999, Alstory Simon's now-estranged wife, Inez Jackson,
told Protess, Ciolino, and two of the students that she had been present when
Simon shot Green and Hillard. She said she did not know Anthony Porter, but
that he most certainly had nothing to do with the crime. Four days later, on
February 3, Alstory Simon confessed on videotape to Ciolino, asserting that he
had killed Hillard in self-defense after the two argued over drug money. Simon
claimed the shooting of Marilyn Green had been accidental.
Two days later, Porter
was released from prison on a recognizance bond and the murder charges against
him were officially dropped the next month. Porter thus became the tenth person
sentenced to death in Illinois under the present capital punishment law to be
released based on innocence.
In September of 1999, Alstory Simon pleaded guilty to two counts of second degree murder and was sentenced to 37.5 years in prison. Anthony Porter has since filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Chicago police.