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The article focuses on the complex ethical and societal implications surrounding the forgiveness and mercy extended by racially vulnerable victims, particularly in cases of racial violence. It explores the tension between personal inclinations toward forgiveness and the broader implications for addressing systemic injustices and safeguarding the rights of future minority victims.

The widely applauded conviction of officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd employed the widely criticized felony murder rule. Should we use felony murder as a tool to check discriminatory and violent policing? The authors object that felony murder--although perhaps the only murder charge available for this killing under Minnesota law--understated Chauvin's culpability and thereby inadequately denounced his crime. They show that further opportunities to prosecute police for felony murder are quite limited. Further, a substantial minority of states impose felony murder liability for any death proximately caused by a felony, even if the actual killer was a police officer, not an "agent" of the felony. In these "proximate cause" jurisdictions, felony murder is far more often used to prosecute the (often Black) targets of police violence, than to prosecute culpable police. Previous scholarship on prosecution of felons for killings by police criticized such proximate cause rules as departures from the "agency" rules required by precedent. But today's proximate cause felony murder rules were enacted legislatively during the War on Crime and are thus immune to this traditional argument. The authors instead offer a racial justice critique of proximate cause felony murder rules as discriminatory in effect, and as unjustly shifting blame for reckless policing onto its victims. Noting racially disparate patterns of charging felony murder, and particularly in cases where police have killed, the authors call on legislatures to reimpose "agency" limits on felony murder as a prophylactic against discrimination. Finally, the authors widen this racial justice critique to encompass felony murder as a whole, urging legislatures to abolish felony murder wherever racially disparate patterns of charging can be demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the promise of compulsory voting for shoring up democratic legitimacy and play a decisive role in quelling the historical contestation of Black citizenship and distinctive philosophical connection between voting and political belonging.

The article analyzes the role of mens rea in criminal punishment under the reckless racism and hate crime law in the U.S. It points out the inability of contemporary mens rea requirements to address racist violence. Also discussed is the meaning of reckless racism. It explores counterarguments on enhanced punishment based on reckless racism and the role of the racism harm inflicted by recklessness on hate crimes.

On April 4, 2015, Police Officer Michael Slager gunned down Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina with a cool that resembled target practice. Scott's name joined a heartbreaking list of men of color killed by unjustified police violence. The video of the incident also broadcast to the world the spectacular violence always lurking beneath the surface of daily interactions between police and men of color. The Black Lives Matter" movement has fiercely insisted Scott's death not be viewed as an isolated incident but understood as woven into the fabric of American policing. American policing harms individual people of color, guts communities and establishes an image of Black or brown men as criminal. Tragically, current Fourth Amendment law insulates the very police practices that allow a different policing regime for communities of color and ensures that the rising death toll of unjustly killed Black and brown men will continue. This Article reveals why policing reform cannot be achieved by piecemeal alteration of case law or even by focusing on doctrinal law alone. First, the Article makes clear why the racial harms of contemporary policing are borne by individual persons of color, unravel communities of color, and change the very social meaning of race. Yet, careful examination of Fourth Amendment doctrine reveals the Supreme Court's commitment to viewing Fourth Amendment rights as individually held and thus devoid of racial and social context. This view purposefully silences the Fourth Amendment's ability to address the volatile interaction of race and policing. Without a philosophical transformation placing the Fourth Amendment on different theoretical grounds, our bonds as civic equals, there can be little progress. Changing our understanding of Fourth Amendment justification allows us to imagine a new world of policing. A world where policing must secure civic bonds requires disabling the ability of police to use pretextual stops as a tool of racial domination. But further, this Article illustrates how a different political justification naturally leads to untying powers of police we take for granted; separating traffic or order maintenance from criminal investigation. Thus, this Article serves as the philosophical grounding for the often-invoked shift of policing from a warrior culture to a guardian culture, illustrating not only how to prevent policing from standing as racial oppression but viewing policing as in service of our civic bonds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]