Media echoes: Systemic effects of news coverage

This paper examines the effect of massive media coverage on a judicial system by analyzing 3,453 felony cases tried over a 10-year period. The cases span five years preceding and five years following two heavily covered daycare child abuse trials in Miami, Florida. Significant case-processing shifts provide evidence of coverage “echo” effects, which have been hypothesized to exist in the literature but have not been established empirically. High-profile case publicity echoes are thought to reverberate through judicial systems and to condition them to process similarly charged but nonpublicized cases differently than they would have been processed otherwise. Because they affect nonpublicized low-profile cases, news media echoes expand the effects of news coverage on the judicial system far beyond single high-profile cases. Although a significant echo is found in this study, it does not extend to all possible processing effects. The need to empirically study other media echoes in other jurisdictions is indicated.     

Constructing Hysteria: Legal Signals as Producers of Siting Conflicts Over Sexually Violent Predator Placements

Sexually violent predator (SVP) statutes define some sex offenders as dangerous enough to be segregated from society, but then require their release into local communities. This article examines how decision makers and community members interpret and respond to this inherent contradiction during disputes over SVP placements. The article departs from traditional moral panic explanations of reactions to sex offenders by linking literature on local siting conflicts to insights from legal mobilization studies in order to understand the origins and features of community opposition to sex offenders. Data from three case studies of SVP placements in California suggest that interpretations of what I call legal signals, or implicit messages embedded in state laws, produced these conflicts. The findings shed new light on the role of law in siting conflicts and collective action by explaining how state laws facilitate communities’ exclusion from siting decisions, encourage local opposition, and disempower already marginalized communities.     

Judgment and Calculation in the Selection of Sentence

Formal sentencing guidelines, which are increasingly seen as the best means of eliminating unwarranted disparity, have undoubted merits. Well-crafted guidelines can promote more transparent and coherent sentencing practices. Their primary goal will usually be to ensure that similarly situated offenders convicted of similar offences receive broadly similar penalties. This, in turn, should increase public confidence in the criminal justice system. Judicially-developed guidance has its own advantages. A judgment, unlike a statute or a formal guideline, must persuade its audience as to the merits of the decision reached. Appeal court sentencing judgments must (or ideally should) engage in some degree of moral reasoning so as to explain why a particular offence or offender deserves the penalty that is being imposed or upheld. Adjudication of this nature plays an important role in stimulating debate and deliberation about the purposes of punishment, the appropriate use of particular sentencing options, the relevance of various offence- and offender-related factors and other fundamental questions about which opinions will inevitably change over time. Although they may have distinct epistemic properties and different objectives, formal guidelines and judicially-developed principles have their own unique merits. We should therefore aim for a system that incorporates the best qualities of both. In practice, this means that guidelines should be so constructed as to leave space for judicial deliberation about fundamental principles and current practice. In this way, guideline creators and courts can continue to learn from each other.     

The Enemy Within: The Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Moral Panic

When there is a period devoid of sensationalistic biker news, the public’s concern about outlaw bikers can be quite low. All it takes is one overt act of violence to heighten the public’s fear of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs are the most current “dangerous class” which have been the subject of a moral panic in Canada. Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs as organized crime bodies are deemed to be the single most serious threat to the country—the enemy within. The gang war in British Columbia is fuelled by drugs supplied by the Hells Angels and there is a wide spread fear that these evildoers are trying to harm and tear apart the fabric of our society. This article provides a critical in-depth analysis of the construction of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang moral panic with the focus on Canada. The roles played by the media, politicians, and the public in using isolated, violent incidents to support their interests will be examined along with the interactions between these groups and the resultant punitive actions directed toward members of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.     

“媒体审判”的防治

从比较法的视角出发,通过对中外相关法例的比较考察,立足于我国的法治实践,分析了媒体审判与树立司法权威的关系,并且指出:对于确保司法公正来说,在法律制度的层面上,新闻自由与司法独立都具有基础性的价值,关键在于如何界定两者的界限使得彼此能够尽可能的和谐共存,并由此对界限之内的新闻自由予以更加有力的保护,对超出界限之外的不当报道和评论加以有效防治。在合理界定媒体自由报道和评论司法的界限时,应当综合考虑以下三种关系的平衡:其一是维系司法权威的成本与收益和保障新闻自由的成本与收益的平衡;其二是新闻自由权利与获得公平审判的权利之间的平衡;其三是国情与公理的平衡。     

制度正义视角下的司法自由裁量权

司法正义应从制度正义的内在视角进行分析,而制度正义一方面来自于立法设定,另一方面不能脱离法官自由裁量权的合理运行。法律判断与司法判断在本质上是一种规范意义上的价值判断。在既定法条件下,司法自由裁量权的合理运行必须以制度正义为基础进行思考。     

Messy Business: Media Representations of Administrative Sanctions for Corporate Offenders

Enforcement against corporate offenses is increasingly carried out by specialized regulatory agencies. These often use publicity as a regulatory tool, in the expectation that disclosure of sanctions will invoke the threat of reputational damage and broadcasts a moral message about desired behavior. This article investigates how media represent administrative offenses in the Dutch financial market, in terms of punitiveness for offenders and in terms of the message about the wrongfulness and harm of offenses. Media coverage of administrative fines is messy in several senses. First, adverse publicity is unpredictable and disproportionally affects small firms in comparison with large, professional firms. In addition, it is also messy in terms of its contribution to the prevention of corporate misbehavior. Media do not unequivocally disapprove of financial market offenses. Rather than clarifying the demarcation line between right and wrong, media describe financial market behavior as a grey zone where differences of opinion can exist over whether certain behavior constitutes an offense. More than a publicity sanction or moral message, media was found to frame offenses by retail banks and capital market firms in terms of the power struggle between firms and the regulatory authority.     

Media Coverage of Capital Murder: Exceptions Sustain the Rule

Scholars have demonstrated that prominent media coverage of crime shapes the creation of public policies. More subtly, such coverage can also sustain existing policies. In this paper, we ask: which capital crimes captivate the media and thus sustain popular support for the death penalty? To answer the question, we examine newspaper coverage of capital murders that occurred in Harris County (Houston), Texas between 1992 and 1999. Our findings reveal that prominent media coverage presents a distorted reality in which brutal crimes tend to be committed by minority offenders against vulnerable, “worthy” victims. Thus, the public mandate for capital punishment is sustained by atypical crimes that conform to existing cultural templates about criminal threat and victimization.     

Predicting Proportionality: The Case for Algorithmic Sentencing

A basic principle in sentencing offenders is proportionality. However, proportionality judgments are often left to the discretion of the judge, raising familiar concerns of arbitrariness and bias. This paper considers the case for systematizing judgments of proportionality in sentencing by means of an algorithm. The aim of such an algorithm would be to predict what a judge in that jurisdiction would regard as a proportionate sentence in a particular case. A predictive algorithm of this kind would not necessarily undermine justice in individual cases, is consistent with a particularistic account of moral judgment, and is attractive even in the face of uncertainty as to the legitimate purposes of punishment.     

专业法律知识的媒体供给与社会正义的维护——基于昆山案中舆论、司法、媒体互动的考察

维护社会正义是舆论、媒体与司法实践的共同目标。从系统论看,三者之间的良性互动有助于社会正义的实现。司法案件舆论引导是三者互动的一种常见状态。在司法案件舆论引导中,供给专业法律知识能够促进三者的良性互动。本文以极具代表性的昆山案为例展开案例研究,发现新闻媒体通过法学专家向公众供给专业法律知识、司法机关自媒体向公众供给专业法律知识,能够促进舆论与司法的良性互动,实现司法案件舆论引导效果。社会正义的维护并非仅靠法治实现,司法与舆论、媒体的互动能够更好地落实法治的正义精神。     

"A tempest in a cocktail glass": mothers, alcohol, and television, 1977-1996

This article examines the portrayal of pregnancy and alcohol in thirty-six national network evening news broadcasts (ABC, CBS, NBC). Early coverage focused on white, middle-class women, as scientific authorities and government officials warned against drinking during pregnancy. After 1987, however, women who drank during pregnancy were depicted as members of minority groups and as a danger to society. The thematic transition began before warning labels appeared on alcoholic beverages and gained strength from official government efforts to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome. The greatest impetus for the revised discourse, however, was the eruption of a "moral panic" over crack cocaine use. By linking fetal harm to substance abuse, the panic suggested it was in the public's interest to control the behavior of pregnant women.     

Using Social Media to Measure Temporal Ambient Population: Does it Help Explain Local Crime Rates?

A challenge for studies assessing routine activities theory is accounting for the spatial and temporal confluence of offenders and targets given that people move about during the daytime and nighttime. We propose exploiting social media (Twitter) data to construct estimates of the population at various locations at different times of day, and assess whether these estimates help predict the amount of crime during two-hour time periods over the course of the day. We address these questions using crime data for 97,428 blocks in the Southern California region, along with geocoded information on tweets in the region over an eight month period. The results show that this measure of the temporal ambient population helps explain the level of crime in blocks during particular time periods. The use of social media data appear promising for testing various implications of routine activities and crime pattern theories, given their explicit spatial and temporal nature.     

Police Accountability and the Media

This article explores First Amendment theory and the role of the media in generating police accountability through public understanding of police organizations. We argue that free speech theory can and should look beyond "abridgment" issues and raise questions about the civic responsibility of the press to inform the public about key governmental institutions. The media's concern with crime news, we found, vastly overshadows its coverage of the police us a complex, in-teresting, and expensive governmental agency. Reporting about police institutional patterns and policies contributes more toward fulfilling First Amendment values-not only that of "checking" police excesses, but of facilitating the goal of enlightened citizen participation in local government.
Those who won our independence believed…that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject.     

Examining Media Coverage of Drugs in Malaysian Media

Asian Journal of Criminology - It has been well-established that, in the USA, the news media contributes to the construction of moral panics regarding the use and users of various types of drugs....     

Understanding judicial discretion

The main aim of this paper is to clarify the dispute over judicial discretion by distinguishing the different senses in which claims about judicial discretion can be understood and by examining the arguments for these various interpretations. Three different levels of dispute need to be recognized. The first concerns whether judges actually do exercise discretion, the second involves whether judges are entitled to exercise discretion, and the third is about the proper institutional role of judges. In this context, the views of Dworkin, Raz, Perry, Greenawalt, and Sartorius are examined. Finally, it is suggested that a resolution of the judicial discretion controversy requires a satisfactory theory of the justification of judicial decisions.     

Examination of newspaper coverage of Hate Crimes: A moral panic perspective

The role of the media in the construction of social problems is well documented in the social science literature. In some cases, the process of constructing social problems creates a moral panic. In this paper, we contend that a moral panic occurred in the late 1990s regarding hate crimes because of the disproportionate amount of media attention given to the issue. From this panic grew a movement to enact the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1999. We quantify Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s (1999) indicators of a moral panic by triangulating sample data, official statistics, and editorials/opinion polls. Results suggest that a moral panic over hate crimes occurred in America during 1998 and 1999.     

How an Elite-Engineered Moral Panic Led to the U.S. War on Iraq

Critics argue that the G.W. Bush administration deliberately misled the U.S. public about an Iraqi threat after 9/11 but empirical evidence that presidential deception influenced public support for war has been lacking. An examination of presidential rhetoric concerning Iraq in the U.S. media revealed that it changed in tone after 9/11, consistent with moral panic processes. Logistic regression analysis of public opinion leading up to the war revealed that shifts in support for invasion directly mirrored presidential rhetoric. The findings of this study suggest that the Bush administration engineered a moral panic over Iraq with the support of the media.     

Police professionalism and cynicism reconsidered: An assessment of measurement issues

A hierarchical logistic model is used to analyze data on Three Strikes-eligible offenders in California and the counties in which they are sentenced. The analysis finds that discretion is widely exercised by elected prosecutors and judges in the administration of Three Strikes. Discretion functions as a “safety valve” and preserves some sentencing proportionality, but may also allow political concerns to influence sentencing decisions. A more conservative political environment is strongly associated with stricter application of the law. Consistent with racial threat theory, eligible felons are more likely to receive Three Strikes sentences in counties with larger Latino populations. However, the size of the black population has no significant effect. Higher unemployment rates are associated with more stringent application of the law. Prosecutorial and judicial discretion benefits offenders unequally. Controlling for legally relevant factors, black offenders are more likely to receive Three Strikes sentences, while younger ones are less likely.     

Effects of Reducing Judicial Sentencing Discretion

This article uses a nationwide sample of state criminal cases to show the effects of reducing judicial sentencing discretion on disparities across rural-urban, southern-northern, black-white, and poor-nonpoor defendants. Judicial sentencing discretion is defined as the ratio between (1) the range in years within which a judge is allowed to sentence, and (2) the minimum number of years the judge must give when there is no probation. The data do indicate specific differences in sentencing between states of high judicial discretion and those of low judicial discretion, and the relationship of these disparities to discrimination is discussed.