Search results for ""Author Paul H. Robinson""

An illuminating exercise that challenges the reader's beliefs about the justice system A police trooper inspects a car during a routine traffic stop and finds a vast cache of weapons, complete with automatic rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and black ski masks-a veritable bank robber's kit. Should the men in the car be charged? If so, with what? A son neglects to care for his elderly mother, whose emaciated form is discovered shortly before she dies a painful death. Is the son's neglect punishable, and if so how? A career con man writes one bad check too many and is sentenced to life in prison-for a check in the amount of $129.75. Is this just? A thief steals a backpack, only to find it contains a terrorist bomb. He alerts the police and saves lives, transforming himself from petty criminal to national hero. These are just a few of the many provocative cases that Paul Robinson presents and unravels in Would You Convict? Judging crimes and meting out punishment has long been an informal national pasttime. High-profile crimes or particularly brutal ones invariably prompt endless debate, in newspapers, on television, in coffee shops, and on front porches. Our very nature inclines us to be armchair judges, freely waving our metaphorical gavels and opining as to the innocence or guilt-and suitable punishment-of alleged criminals. Confronting this impulse, Paul Robinson here presents a series of unusual episodes that not only challenged the law, but that defy a facile or knee-jerk verdict. Narrating the facts in compelling, but detached detail, Robinson invites readers to sentence the transgressor (or not), before revealing the final outcome of the case. The cases described in Would You Convict? engage, shock, even repel. Without a doubt, they will challenge you and your belief system. And the way in which juries and judges have resolved them will almost certainly surprise you.

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It has long been a commonly shared wisdom that humans need government to bring social order to what would otherwise be a chaotic and dangerous world.

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Research suggests that people of all demographics have nuanced and sophisticated notions of justice. In this intriguing new book, Paul H. Robinson demonstrates that judicial decisions that deviate from public conceptions of justice and desert can seriously undermine the American criminal justice system's integrity and legitimacy by failing to recognize or meet the needs of the communities it serves. Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert sketches the contours of a wide range of lay conceptions of justice, touching many if not most of the issues that penal code drafters or policy makers must face, including normative crime control, universal understandings of justice, culpability, principles of adjudication, grading sentencing, justification defenses, and judicial discretion. Robinson warns that compromising the American criminal justice system to satisfy other interests can uncover hidden the costs incurred when a community's notions about justice are not reflected in its criminal laws. By ignoring the intuitions of justice held by the communities they serve, legislators, policymakers, and judges undermine the relevance of the criminal justice system and reduce its strength and legitimacy, creating a gap between what justice a community needs and what justice a court or law prescribes.

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Can crime make our world safer? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes “trigger” improvement in our lives. Crimes That Changed Our World explores some of the most important trigger cases of the past century, revealing much about how change comes to our modern world. The exact nature of the crime-outrage-reform dynamic can take many forms, and Paul and Sarah Robinson explore those differences in the cases they present. Each case is in some ways unique but there are repeating patterns that can offer important insights about what produces change and how in the future we might best manage it. Sometimes reform comes as a society wrestles with a new and intolerable problem. Sometimes it comes because an old problem from which we have long suffered suddenly has an apparent solution provided by technology or some other social or economic advance. Or, sometimes the engine of reform kicks into gear simply because we decide as a society that we are no longer willing to tolerate a long-standing problem and are now willing to do something about it. As the amazing and often touching stories that the Robinsons present make clear, the path of progress is not just a long series of course corrections; sometimes it is a quick turn or an unexpected lurch. In a flash we can suddenly feel different about present circumstances, seeing a need for change and can often, just as suddenly, do something about it. Every trigger crime that appears in Crimes That Changed Our World highlights a societal problem that America has chosen to deal with, each in a unique way. But what these extraordinary, and sometime unexpected, cases have in common is that all of them describe crimes that changed our world.

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A form of subtle vigilantism threatens to undermine the justice system and is eroding community trust in law enforcement. A pervasive and destructive problem is afflicting our current justice system, eroding community confidence in law enforcement. "Shadow vigilantism" is a vicious cycle in which ordinary people, as well as criminal justice officials, are so fed up with the system's failures that they distort and subvert the system to force it to do the justice that it seems reluctant to do on its own. The effects of this lack of trust are pervasive and pernicious: citizens refuse to report a crime or help investigators; jurors refuse to indict or convict; and officials manipulate a system that is perceived to be unreliable. This downward spiral eventually undermines the moral authority of law enforcement and creates widening rifts in the community. This book examines many examples of how the community has responded when the justice system is perceived to fail, including the infamous murder of Emmett Till, which became a cause that spurred on the NAACP and the civil rights movement; the Lavender Panthers, which formed in response to gay bashing during the 1980s; the Crown Heights Maccabees, a neighborhood watch group that successfully reduced neighborhood crime when the police failed to do so; the Animal Liberation Front, which struck back at institutions for perceived abuses to animals; Operation Perverted Justice, an organization that used online chat rooms to out pedophiles by publicizing their personal information; and many others. Such examples highlight the importance of upholding a justice system that works to provide justice for all and is not perceived to condone legal technicalities that overturn just punishment, judicial rules that suppress evidence and let serious offenders go, and other actions that undermine public trust in the system.

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