Judge Jed Rakoff, author of the new book Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free; former Judge Paul Cassell of the University of Utah College of Law; and Carissa Byrne Hessick of the University of North Carolina Law School discuss the current challenges in American criminal justice today and proposals for reform. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
Participants
Judge Jed Rakoff has served since March 1996 as a District Judge for the Southern District of New York. He frequently sits by designation on the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals. His most noteworthy decisions have been in the areas of securities law and criminal law. Judge Rakoff has written over 170 published articles, 750 speeches, and 1800 judicial opinions, and has co-authored five books, the most recent of which is Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free: And Other Paradoxes of Our Broken Legal System.
Paul Cassell is Ronald N. Boyce Presidential Professor of Criminal Law and University Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Utah College of Law. He previously served as a District Court Judge for the District of Utah from 2002 - 2007. Professor Cassell has also published numerous law review articles and is a co-author of the nation's only law school textbook on crime victims' rights, Victims in Criminal Procedure, as well as the co-author of Debating the Death Penalty: The Experts from Both Sides Make Their Case.
Carissa Byrne Hessick is the Ransdell Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she also serves as the Director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining is a Bad Deal, which will be published in October of 2021.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Jed Rakoff, Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free: And Other Paradoxes of Our Broken Legal System
- Jed Rakoff, The New York Review of Books, "Why Innocent People Plead Guilty"
- Ed. Beloof, Cassell, Garvin, and Twist, Victims in Criminal Procedure, 4th Edition
- Ed. Hugo Adam Bedau and Paul Cassell, Debating the Death Penalty: Should America Have Capital Punishment? The Experts on Both Sides Make Their Best Case
- Paul Cassell, “Can We Protect the Innocent Without Freeing the Guilty?” in Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution: Twenty-Five Years of Freeing the Innocent
- Paul Cassell and Kate Smith, National Constitution Center's Interactive Constitution, “The Fifth Amendment Criminal Procedure Clauses”
- Paul Cassell and Emil Bazelon, We the People podcast, “Will Coronavirus Change Criminal Justice?”
- Jeffrey Rosen and Paul Cassell, C-SPAN, “Supreme Court Landmark Cases: Miranda v Arizona”
- Paul Cassell and Margaret Garvin, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, “Protecting Crime Victims in State Constitutions: The Example of the New Marsy's Law For Florida”
- Paul Cassell, Arizona Law Review, “Overstating America’s Wrongful Conviction Rate? Reassessing the Conventional Wisdom About the Prevalence of Wrongful Convictions”
- Paul Cassell and Amos Guiora, Utah Bar Journal, “Point/Counterpoint on the Miranda Decision: Should It Be Replaced or Retained?”
- Paul Cassell, Boston University Law Review, “Still Handcuffing the Cops? A Review of Fifty Years of Empirical Evidence of Miranda's Harmful Effects on Law Enforcement”
- Carissa Byrne Hessick, Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining is a Bad Deal
- Carissa Byrne Hessick, Iowa Law Review, “Picking Prosecutors”
- Carissa Byrne Hessick, Washington University Law Review, “Criminal Clear Statement Rules”
- Carissa Byrne Hessick, Boston University Law Review, “Civilizing Criminal Settlements”
- Carissa Byrne Hessick, Cornell Law Review, “Double Jeopardy as a Limit on Punishment”
- Carissa Byrne Hessick, California Law Review, “Recognizing Constitutional Rights at Sentencing”
- Malcolm Feeley, The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court
- 115th Congress, H.R.5682 - FIRST STEP Act (2018)
- Pennsylvania Office of the Victim Advocate, Marsys Law
- Miranda v. Arizona (1966)
- United States v. Tigano, No. 15-3073 (2d Cir. 2018)
- Kang-Brown, Montagnet, and Heiss, The Vera Institute, "People in Jail and Prison in 2020"
- The National Registry of Exonerations
- Cooper, Meterko, and Gadtaula, The Innocence Project, "Innocents Who Plead Guilty: An Analysis of Patterns in DNA Exoneration Cases"
- National Academy of the Science, Identifying the Culprits: Assessing Eyewitness Identification
- The Innocence Project, "Eyewittnes Identification Reform"
Subscribe to Live at the National Constitution Center
You can also listen to this program and more as a podcast! Live at the National Constitution Center features live constitutional conversations and debates featuring leading historians, journalists, scholars, and public officials hosted at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and across America. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. Check out the Media Library for Live at the National Constitution Center podcast episodes.
