Life in Prison for Stealing $48: Rethinking Second-Degree Robbery as a Strike Offense in Washington State

The Washington State legislature should remove second-degree robbery as a final strike because of the large sentencing disparity between the POAA’s mandatory sentence of life without parole versus the Washington State Sentencing Guidelines Commission’s sentencing range for this offense. But second-degree robbery should remain as a first or second strike offense to serve the goal of deterrence, and failing that, to ensure the incarceration of offenders whose crimes escalate in violence. This Comment begins by discussing the history of three strikes legislation both nationally and in Washington State and explains why three strikes laws became popular in the mid-1990s. Part II also addresses the elements and sentencing of second-degree robbery under Washington’s current sentencing structure. Part III provides an overview of the sentencing process in Washington State, including the background of the Washington Sentencing Guidelines Commission and its goals; the role of both the governor and the Washington State Clemency and Pardons Board in granting clemency; and the severity of life in prison without parole. Part IV addresses why the POAA should be amended to better align with the reality of how Washington prosecutors use second-degree robbery as a strike offense. Part IV also assesses the disconnect between the outcomes and the goals behind three strikes laws, and the politics behind criminal sentencing legislation including Washington State Senate Bill 5292 and Senate Bill 5236

Life in Prison for Stealing $48: Rethinking Second-Degree Robbery as a Strike Offense in Washington State

The Washington State legislature should remove second-degree robbery as a final strike because of the large sentencing disparity between the POAA’s mandatory sentence of life without parole versus the Washington State Sentencing Guidelines Commission’s sentencing range for this offense. But second-degree robbery should remain as a first or second strike offense to serve the goal of deterrence, and failing that, to ensure the incarceration of offenders whose crimes escalate in violence. This Comment begins by discussing the history of three strikes legislation both nationally and in Washington State and explains why three strikes laws became popular in the mid-1990s. Part II also addresses the elements and sentencing of second-degree robbery under Washington’s current sentencing structure. Part III provides an overview of the sentencing process in Washington State, including the background of the Washington Sentencing Guidelines Commission and its goals; the role of both the governor and the Washington State Clemency and Pardons Board in granting clemency; and the severity of life in prison without parole. Part IV addresses why the POAA should be amended to better align with the reality of how Washington prosecutors use second-degree robbery as a strike offense. Part IV also assesses the disconnect between the outcomes and the goals behind three strikes laws, and the politics behind criminal sentencing legislation including Washington State Senate Bill 5292 and Senate Bill 5236

It's a Bird, It's a Plane: Some Remarks on the Airbus Appellate Body Report (EC and Certain Member States – Large Civil Aircraft, WT/DS316/AB/R)

The emergence of Airbus transformed the market structure of the LCA industry into a duopoly of similar-sized full-range manufacturers. The financing of Airbus's upfront investment expenditures came in a significant proportion from public funds, which violated, in the US's opinion the SCM Agreement. While the Appellate Body follows this view of things to a large extent, it does so in a measured way: the category of per se illegal export subsidies is interpreted with a view to the manipulation of normal market conditions; the distortion on competitive conditions matters, not the increase of exports as such. Other aspects of subsidies law clarified are the relationship between effect and subsidy. They are closely related but not identical; rightly, the report operates from the premise that the SCM Agreement's regime focuses on the effect, and not on the subsidy as such, which is a manifestation of a political choice by a sovereign Member state. The Appellate Body affirms that a subsidy has a ‘life’, a shorthand for a beginning and an end: it follows that the effect of a subsidy is not bound to be permanent but is bound to terminate. It is to be regretted that the Appellate Body avoided clarifying to what extent partial privatization, hence sale of assets at market prices to private investors, ‘extinguish’ subsidies

Sludge and Ordeals

Is there an argument for behaviorally informed deregulation? In 2015, the United States government imposed 9.78 billion hours of paperwork burdens on the American people. Many of these hours are best categorized as “sludge,” understood as friction, reducing access to important licenses, programs, and benefits. Because of the sheer costs of sludge, rational people are effectively denied life-changing goods and services. The problem is compounded by the existence of behavioral biases, including inertia, present bias, and unrealistic optimism. A serious deregulatory effort should be undertaken to reduce sludge through automatic enrollment, greatly simplified forms, and reminders. At the same time, sludge can promote legitimate goals. First, it can protect program integrity, which means that policymakers might have to make difficult tradeoffs between (1) granting benefits to people who are not entitled to them and (2) denying benefits to people who are entitled to them. Second, it can overcome impulsivity, recklessness, and self-control problems. Third, it can prevent intrusions on privacy. Fourth, it can serve as a rationing device, ensuring that benefits go to people who most need them. Fifth, it can help public officials to acquire valuable information, which they can use for important purposes. In most cases, however, these defenses of sludge turn out to be far more attractive in principle than in practice. For sludge, a form of cost-benefit analysis is essential, and it will often demonstrate the need for a neglected form of deregulation: sludge reduction. For both public and private institutions, “Sludge Audits” should become routine, and they should provide a foundation for behaviorally informed deregulation. Various suggestions are offered for new action by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees the Paperwork Reduction Act; for courts; and for Congress

Promoting Progress with Fair Use

The Intellectual Property (IP) Clause provides that Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. In the realm of copyright, Congress and the courts have interpreted the clause as granting Congress a power not to promote progress but to establish limited IP monopolies. To return to an understanding of the IP power better grounded in the constitutional text, Congress and the courts should ensure that any IP enactment promote[s] ... Progress by considering whether it improves the quality or quantity of knowledge and aids the dissemination of knowledge, and whether it does so better than prior IP enactments. The courts can exercise the fair-use doctrine to aid in this re-constitutionalization of IP law by applying a fifth fair-use factor. This proposed fifth factor would balance the progress-promoting value of the alleged infringer\u27s use against the progress-promoting value of enforcing the copyright holder\u27s rights. Reviewing courts should presume that any alleged infringement is fair if it promotes progress better than the enforcement of the copyright

The impact of maternal control on children’s anxious cognitions, behaviours and affect: an experimental study

Controlling parenting is associated with child anxiety however the direction of effects remains unclear. The present study implemented a Latin-square experimental design to assess the impact of parental control on children’s anxious affect, cognitions and behaviour. A non-clinical sample of 24 mothers of children aged 4-5 years were trained to engage in (a) controlling and (b) autonomy-granting behaviours in interaction with their child during the preparation of a speech. When mothers engaged in controlling parenting behaviours, children made more negative predictions about their performance prior to delivering their speech and reported feeling less happy about the task, and this was moderated by child trait anxiety. In addition, children with higher trait anxiety displayed a significant increase in observed child anxiety in the controlling condition. The pattern of results was maintained when differences in mothers’ levels of negativity and habitual levels of control were accounted for. These findings are consistent with theories that suggest that controlling parenting is a risk factor in the development of childhood anxiety

Seeing More than Orange: Organizational Respect and Positive Identity Transformation in a Prison Context

This paper develops grounded theory on how receiving respect at work enables individuals to engage in positive identity transformation and the resulting personal and work-related outcomes. A company that employs inmates at a state prison to perform professional business-to-business marketing services provided a unique context for data collection. Our data indicate that inmates experienced respect in two distinct ways, generalized and particularized, which initiated an identity decoupling process that allowed them to distinguish between their inmate identity and their desired future selves and to construct transitional identities that facilitated positive change. The social context of the organization provided opportunities for personal and social identities to be claimed, respected, and granted, producing social validation and enabling individuals to feel secure in their transitional identities. We find that security in personal identities produces primarily performance-related outcomes, whereas security in the company identity produces primarily well-being-related outcomes. Further, these two types of security together foster an integration of seemingly incompatible identities—”identity holism”—as employees progress toward becoming their desired selves. Our work suggests that organizations can play a generative role in improving the lives of their members through respect-based processes

A Brook with Legal Rights: The Rights of Nature in Court

Over two decades ago, Professor Christopher Stone asked what turned out to be a question of enduring interest: should trees have standing? His question was recently answered in the affirmative by a creek in Pennsylvania, which successfully intervened in a lawsuit between an energy company and a local township to prevent the lifting of a ban against drilling oil and gas wastewater wells. Using that intervention, this Article examines whether such an initiative might succeed on a broader scale. The Article parses the structure, language, and punctuation of Article III, as well as various theories of nonhuman personhood to see if, like corporations, the Constitution might be sufficiently capacious to allow nature direct access to Article III courts. Finding toeholds in these theories, the Article identifies some institutional and practical problems with allowing nature to appear directly in court. The Article suggests possible answers to these problems, such as limiting the type of cases brought by nature to those that involve important and/or irreplaceable resources threatened by government inaction and requiring that nature must be represented by lawyers who have sufficient expertise, commitment, and resources to prosecute her interests. While success is not guaranteed, nor can it ever be, the author hopes that others, like the lawyers representing Little Mahoning Creek, will petition for judicial relief in nature‘s name. Given the rigidity and hostility of the current Court‘s standing jurisprudence, the intransigence of Congress, and the over-crowded agenda of the Executive Branch, this may be the only way to protect our disappearing natural resources