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Criminal procedure largely ignores remorse and apology or, at most, uses them as proxies for an individual defendant's badness. The field is preoccupied with procedural values such as efficiency, accuracy, and procedural fairness, to the exclusion of the criminal law's substantive moral values. Likewise, most legal scholars either ignore remorse and apology or squeeze them into the individual badness model, neglecting the broader roles that they can play in reconciling and educating offenders and healing victims and communities. This narrow focus on individual badness slights the broader value of remorse and apology and misses a crucial point. Crime is more than just individual wrongdoing; it harms social relationships. Currently, remorse and apology serve only as poor gauges of how much deterrence and retribution individual offenders need. Ideally, these tools would play much larger roles in mending the social relational harms from crime. Remorse and apology are valuable ways to heal wounded relationships; vindicate victims; and educate, reconcile, and reintegrate offenders into the community. Criminal procedure should encourage and use remorse and apology to serve these substantive values at every stage, from before arrest through charging to pleas and sentences. The broader aim is twofold: to recognize the social dimension of criminal wrongdoing and punishment and to break down the artificial separation between substantive values and criminal procedure by harnessing procedure to serve the criminal law's substantive moral goals., CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. REMORSE, APOLOGY, AND CURRENT CRIMINAL JUSTICE A. The Individual Badness Model B. Remorse and Apology in Criminal Procedure C. Remorse and Apology in the Literature II. THE [...]

Scholars have long studied the relationship of structural constitutional principles like checks and balances to democracy. But the relationship of such principles to democracy in criminal punishment has received less attention. This Essay examines that relationship and finds it fraught with both promise and peril for the project of democratic criminal justice. On the one hand, by blending a range of inputs into punishment determinations, the constitutional fragmentation of the punishment power can enhance different types of influence in an area in which perspective is of special concern. At the same time, the potentially positive aspects of fragmentation can backfire, encouraging tunnel vision, replicating power differentials, and making it easier for more well-resourced voices to drown out others. Thus, the same structure that generates valuable democratic benefits for punishment also falls prey and contributes to serious democratic deficits. But despite its drawbacks, we cannot and should not abandon the Constitution's fragmented approach to crime and punishment. The more promising move is to look for ways to make different loci of influence and representation more meaningful within our existing framework, doing more to ensure that multiple voices are heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses criminal sentencing reforms in the U.S. as of November 2012, focusing on a call for the use of notice-and-comment sentencing which encompasses various factors such as sentencing guidelines, plea bargains, and prosecutorial decisions in the final determination of a criminal defendant's sentence. It states that the notice-and-comment sentencing model is similar to an administrative law approach which reportedly values the importance of public participation.

An essay is presented on the deterrence, retributivism, and the significance of various evidentiary and procedural rules toward the program. It discusses the evidence and substantive criminal law theory. The author believes that it is important to understand the different relationships of deterrence and retributivism in order to know the functioning of mediating rules.

This white paper is the joint product of nineteen professors of criminal law and procedure who share a common conviction: that the path toward a more just, effective, and reasonable criminal system in the United States is to democratize American criminal justice. In the name of the movement to democratize criminal justice, we herein set forth thirty proposals for democratic criminal justice reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]