The Prosecutor and the Press: Lessons (Not) Learned from the Mike Nifong Debacle

Current projections indicate that by 2050, two in every three people will live in urban areas, and that cities will accommodate 3 billion people during this period. Cities are consuming three-quarters of the world's energy and causing three-quarters of global pollution. To reduce these impacts, new technologies have been considered in the development of smart sustainable cities, but technology has not always favoured the idea of sustainable consumption. To address this issue, we have aimed to focus on identifying the role of sustainable consumption within implementations of smart cities’ projects across Europe. We have selected a set of smart city projects in 76 cities in Europe from CONCERTO initiatives, Mapping Smart Cities in Europe, Energy Study for the Stockholm Region and Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas and classified them according to: smart governance, smart mobility, smart living, smart environment, smart citizens and smart economy. Furthermore, we established a number of categories for the classification of the evaluated projects based on their relevance to sustainable consumption, and considered several solutions for the integration of sustainable consumption in smart sustainable cities. The results show that in 18.9% of the projects, sustainable consumption is not relevant at all. The second classification shows the percentage of the remaining categories where sustainable consumption is relevant; 8.3% consider sustainable consumption as relevant even though it was not implemented in the project. These cities aim to achieve a higher level of sustainable consumption, which is expected to be included in future projects. If they keep themselves in this category, their behavioural consumption patterns will not change and the impact of citizens on the cities will remain the same. The majority of the projects, 54.2%, implemented technology to reduce consumption but if the projects do not coincide with the behaviour of citizens, a big rebound effect will occur. 37.5% of the projects consider relevant sustainable consumption to its full potential and this can change citizen’s behaviour. In conclusion, sustainable consumption is relevant in most of the projects analysed, with new technologies available to help energy savings and reduction of our consumption. However, if there is a lack of smart consumption from the citizens, the technologies available might not be sufficient and consumption could increase. One quarter of the analysed smart cities projects still do not consider the consumption behaviour of the citizens. This can be changed through campaigns and explanations targeting the population on how to manage and reduce energy and resource consumption. To reduce the negative impact of the cities’ growth, projects considering smart sustainable cities need to integrate sustainable consumption policies that account for citizens' behaviour

(Ad)ministering Justice: A Prosecutor\u27s Ethical Duty to Support Sentencing Reform

This article stakes out an ethical argument in favor of prosecutorial leadership on sentencing reform. Prosecutors have a duty as “ministers of justice” to go beyond seeking appropriate conviction and punishment in individual cases, and to think about the delivery of criminal justice on a systemic level ― promoting criminal justice policies that further broader societal ends. While other authors have explored the tensions between a prosecutor’s adversarial duties and “minister of justice” role in the context of specific litigation, few have explored what it means to be an “administer” of justice in the wider political arena. The author sets forth a new construct of what is required for a prosecutor to be a neutral, nonpartisan “administer of justice” in her legislative and public advocacy activities. Applying this paradigm to the ongoing national debate about sentencing reform, the author argues that a prosecutor’s administrative responsibilities as a leader in the criminal justice establishment and her fiduciary responsibilities as a representative of the sovereign should compel her to join in the effort to repeal mandatory minimum sentencing provisions for most drug and non-violent offenses. Not only are mandatory sentences in most instances unduly harsh, coercive, and inefficacious, but they allow for an arbitrary and discriminatory application that is essentially unreviewable by courts. The author distinguishes this argument against mandatory minimum penalties from the so-called “Smart on Crime” movement, by grounding a prosecutor’s duty to promote sentencing reform in ethical reasoning as opposed to pragmatic or cost-savings considerations. Even with robust political support from some of this nation’s most conscientious prosecutors, state legislatures are unlikely to repeal or cut back on all mandatory minimum sentences. Some mandatory prison terms ― for crimes such as murder, repeat offense OUI, and aggravated sexual offenses — will likely stay on the books notwithstanding the advocacy recommended above. A second question the author addresses in this article is how an ethical prosecutor should make plea bargaining decisions in the face of mandatory minimum prison terms retained by the legislature. While there has been substantial legal scholarship to date that has decried the manner in which mandatory minimum penalties have transferred sentencing discretion from judges to prosecutors, beyond that descriptive lament there has been very little attention paid to how exactly prosecutorial discretion might be more meaningfully constrained through internal self-regulation. Prosecutors can mitigate many of the harsh and unjust consequences of mandatory minimum sentences by instituting and publishing clear office policies governing when line prosecutors may dismiss or reduce charges that carry them. The author proposes specific guidelines that state prosecutors should adopt to ensure a consistent and even-handed application of mandatory minimum penalties, so that line prosecutors do not abuse the substantial discretion that has been afforded them in the plea bargaining process

Undue Influence: A Prosecutor's Role in Parole Proceedings

Professor Cassidy explores what it means for a prosecutor to act as a “minister of justice” in the context of parole proceedings. He argues that prosecutors should not perceive themselves as zealous advocates in what is essentially an administrative setting, and that prosecutors should not oppose release simply because they believe that the nature and circumstances of the crime warrant continued incarceration. Rather, Cassidy argues that prosecutors ordinarily should refrain from personally testifying at parole hearings, and should submit written comments to the parole board only in those rare situations where the prosecutor is in possession of otherwise unavailable information pertaining to an inmate’s post-conviction behavior that would assist the board in making an accurate legal and factual determination. Cassidy surveys the approaches taken by parole board statutes and regulations in fifty states and discusses which of those approaches properly calibrate the scope and limits of a prosecutor’s input in release decisions

Divergences in the Effective Action for Acausal Spacetimes

The 1--loop effective Lagrangian for a massive scalar field on an arbitrary causality violating spacetime is calculated using the methods of Euclidean quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Fields of spin 1/2, spin 1 and twisted field configurations are also considered. In general, we find that the Lagrangian diverges to minus infinity at each of the nth polarised hypersurfaces of the spacetime with a structure governed by a DeWitt-Schwinger type expansion.Comment: 17 pages, Late

Plea Bargaining, Discovery, and the Intractable Problem of Impeachment Disclosures

In a criminal justice system where guilty pleas are the norm and trials the rare exception, the issue of how much discovery a defendant is entitled to before allocution has immense significance. This article examines the scope of a prosecutor’s obligation to disclose impeachment information before a guilty plea. This question has polarized the criminal bar and bedeviled the academic community since the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in United States v. Ruiz (2002). A critical feature of the debate has been the enduring schism between a prosecutor’s legal and ethical obligations – a gulf that the American Bar Association recently widened by issuing a controversial opinion interpreting Model Rule of Professional Conduct 3.8(d) to impose obligations on prosecutors well beyond the requirements of the due process clause. The author addresses the controversial subject of impeachment disclosures from both an institutional and a substantive perspective. A great deal of legal scholarship aims directly at the content of proposed law reform without considering the threshold and pivotal question of what institution is best situated to administer those duties imposed. The author argues that as a matter of institutional competence and legitimacy, the courts are far better equipped to enforce criminal discovery obligations through rules of procedure than bar disciplinary authorities are capable of doing through attorney conduct rules. With regard to the substantive issue - that is, how much impeachment evidence should be turned over by a prosecutor before a guilty plea - the author proposes a categorical approach to impeachment disclosures that will mediate the tension between the defendant’s interest in accurately assessing the strength and weaknesses of the government’s case, and the state’s interest in protecting the privacy and security of potential witnesses

Beyond Practical Skills: Nine Steps for Improving Legal Education Now

It has been five years since the Carnegie Report Educating Lawyers called upon law schools to adopt an integrated approach to professional education that teaches practical skills and professionalism across the curriculum. Yet so far, very few schools have responded to this clarion call for wholesale curricular reform. Considering the inertial effect of traditional law school pedagogy and the institutional impediments to change, this delay is not surprising. A fully integrated approach to teaching professional skills (such as the medical school model) would require major resource reallocations, realignment of teaching responsibilities, redesign of courses, and changes to graduation requirements. While I fully support such comprehensive reform, the pragmatist in me knows that it will take years to accomplish. My goal in this essay is to offer a “self-help” remedy for faculty members and administrators interested in responding to the Carnegie Report’s call for a greater emphasis on experiential education, but uninterested in waiting for the committee deliberations, reports, faculty votes, and tough resource trade-offs that lie ahead. We drag our heels at our own peril and to the serious disadvantage of our current students. What follows is a description of nine changes that individual faculty members and deans can make now to improve the professional education of law students. Although each initiative when viewed in isolation may seem modest, collectively they could have a huge impact on our programs

Character and Context: What Virtue Theory Can Teach Us About a Prosecutor\u27s Ethical Duty to Seek Justice.

A critical issue facing the criminal justice system today is how best to promote ethical behavior by public prosecutors. The legal profession has left much of a prosecutor’s day-to-day activity unregulated, in favor of a general, catch-all admonition to “seek justice.” In this article the author argues that professional norms are truly functional only if those working with a given ethical framework recognize the system’s implicit dependence on character. A code of professional conduct in which this dependence is not recognized is both contentless and corrupting. Building on the ethics of Aristotle and modern philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams, the author argues that virtue theory can help bridge the gaps in prosecutorial ethics where other forms of moral reasoning fail. The author analyzes three especially difficult ethical problems frequently confronted by prosecutors in the field. He demonstrates not only that the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and the ABA Criminal Justice Standards fail to answer any of these complex questions, but also that future attempts to more closely regulate how prosecutors should act in any of these nuanced situations are unlikely to succeed. The author argues that honesty, fairness, courage, and prudence are the primary virtues that citizens have a right to expect of their public prosecutors. He then demonstrates how these four key virtues might provide important guidance to conscientious prosecutors striving to do what is right. The author concludes by offering several insights into how the field of virtue ethics might inform both the structure and organization of government law offices, and the manner in which individual prosecutors working within these offices might perceive and fulfill their professional roles