It’s Time to Confront Failures of Justice (Part I)
This is the first in a five-part series where we’re guest blogging about our new book Confronting Failures of Justice: Getting Away With Murder and Rape, available here, which asks the question nobody seems to want to ask in legal academia: why is the justice system so bad at punishing crime? If one listened to modern academics, one might believe America’s justice system punishes everyone, everywhere, for everything. But the truth is that our “carceral state,” for all its supposed punitiveness, barely punishes serious crime at all. The following is an excerpt from the book’s first chapter.
Most killers get away with murder. In 2020, there were around 22,000 murders in America, and police solved just over 10,000—less than 50%. Commonly, almost half of these solved cases result in no homicide conviction. Even more troublingly, homicide has the best victimization-conviction ratio of any offense. Most other crimes are rarely punished. Of more than 980,000 aggravated assaults annually, only around 7.4% end in a conviction. Of more than 460,000 rapes and sexual assaults annually, 97.2% end in no felony conviction. Hundreds of thousands of murderers, assaulters, and rapists remain free. What explains these regular failures of justice?
This book attempts to answer that question by examining the doctrines, practices, and conditions in the criminal justice system that allow serious criminals to escape the punishment they deserve. There are few simpl
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