Safety or Liberty?: The Bogus Trade‐Off of Cross‐Deputization Policy

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90325/1/j.1530-2415.2011.01246.x.pd

Implicit Racial Bias in Public Defender Triage

Despite the promise of Gideon, providing “the guiding hand of counsel” to indigent defendants remains unmanageable, largely because the nation’s public defender offices are overworked and underfunded. Faced with overwhelming caseloads and inadequate resources, public defenders must engage in triage, deciding which cases deserve attention and which do not. Although scholars have recognized the need to develop standards for making these difficult judgments, they have paid little attention to how implicit, i.e., unconscious, biases may affect those decisions. There is reason to suspect that unconscious biases will influence public defender decisionmaking due to generations of racial stereotypes specific to stigmatized groups and crime. This Essay urges legal scholars and practitioners to consider how implicit biases may influence the rationing of defense entitlements and suggests ways to safeguard against the effects of these unconscious forces

Interrogating Racial Violence

This symposium essay constructs a theory of police racial violence that is based upon the social psychology of contemporary bias. Our examination of this violence through the lens of the mind sciences reveals that it is an inevitable and foreseeable consequence of current policing strategies and culture, even in the absence of institutional and individual racial animus. These practices, such as stops and frisks, create an environment that nurtures the unconscious racial biases and self-threats that can lead even consciously egalitarian officers to be more likely to use force disproportionately against Black suspects relative to suspects of other races. This Essay argues that if the state is to take seriously the project of protecting citizens from violence, then it must contend with the role of both unconscious racial biases and self-threats in producing racially disparate violence. Although one way to achieve this is to change existing legal doctrines to account for the pernicious effects of these psychological processes, our focus is examining ways to transform current policing strategies to better protect citizens from racial violence