When Gender Meets Sex: An Exploratory Study of Women Who Seduce Adolescent Boys

This article describes the origins, design, and implications of a new study exploring female-perpetrated statutory rape against adolescent boys in the United States. In contrast to both legal frameworks, which typically regard statutory rape as a male-on-female phenomenon, and existing literature from the fields of psychology and psychiatry derived from clinical samples and sex offender registries, this study examines the incidence of female-perpetrated statutory rape using data from electronic news reports covering the period 1990-2008. In this short article, the author explains the advantages of her approach over those taken by prior scholars, in terms of the size of the data set and the scope of coverage, as well as her decision to focus on statutory rape exclusively, rather than on female sex abuse more generally. The article also discusses the projected implications of the study for understanding not only the crime of statutory rape, but also the gender assumptions implicit in conventional works on this topic

Victims’ Rights in the Diversion Landscape

In this Article, I explore the practical and theoretical conflicts that might surface when the diversion movement and the Victims’ Rights Movement intersect. I focus on two possible sites of tension: victim input into the diversion offer and the victim’s right to receive restitution as a term of diversion. Protocols to give victims greater voice in the justice process have been a mainstay of the burgeoning Victims’ Rights Movement for the past several decades, but I argue that those protocols must be understood within (and thus limited by) the contexts of fiscal responsibility, compassion for the offender, and proportionality in the justice system that lie at the heart of diversion schemes. Any other arrangement risks elevating retribution over rehabilitation and inserts a level of arbitrariness into the diversion process that would subvert our commitment to fairness and transparency

The Intimacy Discount: Prosecutorial Discretion, Privacy, and Equality in the Statutory Rape Caseload

This Article proceeds as follows. It begins in Part I by presenting the structural and case-based factors that scholars have identified as relevant to prosecutorial decision-making in the United States. Part II considers the existing social science research documenting the relationship between intimacy and criminal Justice treatment. Part III explains the empirical study of California prosecutors on which this Article\u27s data and conclusions are based. After introducing California\u27s statutory rape prosecution program in Part IV, the Article describes in Part V how the program\u27s underlying rationale led to the development and deployment of prosecutorial assessments of intimacy and exploitation in the statutory rape caseload. Part VI describes prosecutorial motivations behind the intimacy discount, while Part VII concludes by reflecting on the implications of the intimacy discount, both for the populations it affects and for the longevity of a controversial criminal law

Victims’ Rights in the Diversion Landscape

In this Article, I explore the practical and theoretical conflicts that might surface when the diversion movement and the Victims’ Rights Movement intersect. I focus on two possible sites of tension: victim input into the diversion offer and the victim’s right to receive restitution as a term of diversion. Protocols to give victims greater voice in the justice process have been a mainstay of the burgeoning Victims’ Rights Movement for the past several decades, but I argue that those protocols must be understood within (and thus limited by) the contexts of fiscal responsibility, compassion for the offender, and proportionality in the justice system that lie at the heart of diversion schemes. Any other arrangement risks elevating retribution over rehabilitation and inserts a level of arbitrariness into the diversion process that would subvert our commitment to fairness and transparency

The Law is Not the Case: Incorporating Empirical Methods into the Culture of Case Analysis

While I consider case analysis in the context of cultural defense jurisprudence, this Essay should be regarded as a case study of a more endemic problem in legal scholarship. In tackling such an area, my goal is not to overthrow centuries of legal analysis, but rather to explore how we, as legal scholars, might use social science techniques to more systematically investigate, document, analyze, and predict the state of a particular comer of the legal universe. The argument proceeds in two parts. Part II considers empirical approaches to the question raised by Lee: how might we ascertain the relationship between culture and culpability? I discuss several basic techniques, both quantitative and qualitative, that scholars can use to supplement traditional case analysis in this area. Part ill explains the importance of articulating theories that directly address institutional actors and motivations, not just correlations between variables, to further our understanding of how patterns emerge in the criminal justice process. I argue that passive accounts or abstract explanations of case outcomes do not adequately capture the complexities of the justice process, and therefore prove unsatisfying to those who wish to predict future events. I conclude by offering some comments about the relationship between law and social science and by expressing optimism about the future of legal scholarship

The New Prosecution

This Article proceeds as follows. Part I introduces the Statutory Rape Vertical Prosecution Program that took shape in California in the mid-1990s. In addition to explaining how this program emerged and its central features, I highlight the aspects of the SRVPP that distinguish California statutory rape prosecutors from the traditional image of the local prosecutor in the United States. Part II offers some background on the new prosecution and the problem-oriented approach to criminal justice, explaining how this model differs from the traditional crime-based or case-based method of criminal justice work. In Part III, I use empirical data derived from surveys and interviews with prosecutors to explore more fully the ways in which the new prosecution\u27s problem-oriented model has taken hold in the SRVPP units across California, and I compare the successes of this approach to those described in the literature about problem-oriented policing. I address prosecutorial resistance to the new prosecution in Part IV. In Part V, I discuss the implications of these problems for prosecutors and the gendered nature of these effects. I then speculate as to why these issues have proved to be more salient in the prosecution context than in the police arena and suggest ways in which the institution of prosecution might be reformed to accommodate the new prosecution\u27s problem-solving, crime reduction strategies. In Part VI, I examine the implications of the new prosecution\u27s wide-ranging problem-oriented approach for victims and defendants, as prosecutors\u27 ideas about responsibility, commitment, and appropriate relationships are given strength through the new social worker role. I lastly consider the impact of the new prosecution on society generally, given the symbolic and real-world consequences of reconstructing old social problems as new issues for the criminal justice system to solve

Prosecution in 3-D

Despite the multidimensional nature of the prosecutor’s work, legal scholars tend to offer a comparatively flat portrait of the profession, providing insight into two dimensions that shape the prosecutor’s performance. Accounts in the first dimension look outward toward external institutions that bear on prosecutors’ case-handling decisions, such as judicial review or the legislative codes that define crimes and punishments. Sketches in the second dimension encourage us to look inward, toward the prosecutor’s individual conscience. In this Article we add depth to the existing portrait of prosecution by exploring a third dimension: the office structure and the professional identity it helps to produce or reinforce. In addition to understanding the office’s explicit policies, new prosecutors must discover the unwritten social rules, norms, and language of the profession and of their particular offices. These informal instructions do more than simply define how a prosecutor acts; they define who a prosecutor is. Our theory of prosecution also explains how different dimensions of the role interact. The structure of a prosecutor’s office helps determine and bolster the professional identity of the attorneys who work there; that identity, in turn, has the capacity to powerfully shape the prosecutor’s outputs. To investigate this third dimension of criminal prosecution at the state level, we conducted semi-structured interviews with misdemeanor and drug prosecutors in three offices during the 2010 calendar year. Our discussion here focuses on two particular features of office structure—the hierarchical shape of the organization’s workforce and the hiring preference for experience—to examine differences they can make in a prosecutor’s professional identity. In particular, the prosecutor’s basic attitude toward autonomy (or, conversely, the team) produces ripple effects on her relationships with other lawyers and police and on the value she places on achieving consistency across cases. By viewing prosecution through this lens, we hope to offer managers of prosecutors’ offices greater power to shape the work of their attorneys and to give the public deeper insight about the work done in its name in the criminal courts