I am so very pleased to report on that the latest issue of the
Federal Sentencing Reporter is now available online here. This issue is titled Making Sense of Sentencing Data and it has a number of terrific articles from an array of authors examining sentencing data issues from a number of perspectives. I highly encourage everyone to check out the full issue, and here is a list of the original articles in this FSR issue:
Deciphering Data by Steven L. Chanenson & Douglas A. Berman
Mapping The Modern Sentencing Data Landscape From the Bird’s Eye: The Sixth Circuit’s Efforts to Breathe Life into Substantive Reasonableness Review by Xiao Wang
The Stress of Injustice: Public Defenders and the Frontline of American Inequality
The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper now available via SSRN and authored by Valerio Baćak, Sarah Lageson and Kathleen Powell. Here is its abstract:
Fairness and due process in the criminal justice system are all but unattainable without effective legal representation of indigent defendants, yet we know little about attorneys who do this critical work public defenders. Using semi-structured interviews, this study investigated occupational stress in a sample of 87 public defenders across the United States. We show how the intense and varied chronic stressors experienced at work originate in what we define as the stress of injustice: the social and psychological demands of working in a punitive system with laws and practices that target and punish those who are the most disadvantaged. Our findings are centered around three shifts in American criminal justice that mani