Course Details

The criminal justice system is a system for detecting and punishing those who break the law. The standard for criminal conviction is guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” To protect the innocent from wrongful conviction, there are numerous rights that are accorded to defendants, including the right to trial by a jury of one’s peers, the right against self-incrimination, the rules of evidence, the right to a court-appointed attorney, among many others. One question we will explore is: How reliable is the U.S. criminal justice system in convicting the truly guilty-that is, what percentage of defendants are found guilty really are guilty? Is this percentage different for different crimes or for crimes with different kinds of evidence? Is this percentage different for defendants of different races or different economic classes? What kinds of bias and at what stage of the process affect these percentages? What can and should be done about it?

Another question concerns the problem of differential rates of arrest and prosecution. Most evidence of drug use shows very little difference in rates of drug use among Whites and among African-Americans. If there were an unbiased system of arrest and prosecution, we would expect the racial make-up of those convicted of drug use to reflect the proportion of Whites and African-Americans in the general population. But this is not what we find. African-Americans are disproportionately arrested and convicted of drug use. What kinds of bias are responsible for these disproportionate results? What can and should be done about it?

These are the kinds of questions that the class will address. An important theme of the course will be that racial bias is an important element of bias in the criminal justice system, but it is not the only kind of bias. There are multiple levels of bias. We will make use of reports from the Innocence Project and other sources to obtain relevant statistical evidence on erroneous convictions and on bias in prosecutions and convictions.

The course readings will include selections from:
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, and Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, as well as other readings. There will also be required course videos, including the Netflix documentary “Thirteenth” and Season 1 of the Netflix series “Making a Murderer.” (The UW Library has advised me that I cannot legally use my Netflix membership to show the series to the class, so students will have to have access to Netflix during the months of October and November. If you don’t have a Netflix account, I hope you have access to an account through a family member. If not, if you start a new membership, you can get your first month free, so you only have to pay for one month.) Season 2 of the series “Making a Murderer” is currently in production. If it is released in time, the students may also be required to watch some or all of it. The students will become conversant with research on the criminal justice system and they will define, research, and report on one or more elements of bias in the system. They will learn to build an argument based on analysis of factual information and on well-articulated and well-defended normative convictions.

Students will write short answers to questions in class, as well as a reading/video response paper, and two longer papers. Each student will also co-lead one class discussion.