Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper is part of a larger study on the military capital punishment system. The code governing the military death penalty system mirrors the code of a typical civilian death sentencing system. Yet, despite the language of the military death sentencing statute and rules, after 1990 a person accused of a murder that implicates military discipline and control faces significantly more punitive outcomes at each step of charging and sentencing than a similarly situated person accused of committing a conventional civilian murder. The paper explores the equal justice implications of this finding as well as implications for the rule of law.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Murder and the law of murder are an unacknowledged anchor for the whole fear of crime/war on crime model of governance. Because of the central focus of both fiction and non-fiction television on murder, it is stimulus to the penal appetite that is constantly replenished by acts of random violence. Most of us who advocated an end to mass incarceration, tip toe around murder, even suggesting we could keep murderers in prison longer if we did not have a war on drugs, etc. But if the legal response to murder is part of what helps set our social appetite for punishment, leaving that unreformed may operate to prevent any longterm draw down of mass incarceration. It also adds to the racial concentration of punishment and the imagination of crime since around half of all homicides in America involve African Americans as victims and or perpetrators. California is a model of this problem with all paroles for murder now requiring the governor to agree, the numbers have become tiny (even if slightly improved under Scharzenegger).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines how individual violent events between gangs string together to form /chains of murder/—a series of connected interactions that unfolds over time and space. I argue that the consequences of individual gang murders spread beyond the immediate dyadic conflict through a process of social contagion as gangs negotiate the immediate conflict, as well as how its outcome might affect the social standing
of the gang vis-à-vis other groups in the social context. Using homicide data in Chicago and a social network approach, I maintain that such processes are driven by norms of reciprocity and the use of violence as a form of status management. In short, when a gang is confronted with an external threat, it seeks to (1) exert its own dominance over its opponent, (2) back-up its claims of solidarity and status through observable acts of violence, and (3) avoid being subordinate to others in the social context. In Chicago, such
murderous interactions create an overarching network of contentious relations and even a gang “pecking order.”

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In recent years, a shift has occurred in the criminal justice response to infant death. Mothers in Australia and Canada are increasingly likely to be charged with murder after a suspicious death – a trend that seems in contradiction with developments in this field in England. Newspaper accounts form a primary source of the knowledge that most people possess about the criminal justice system and especially about specific criminal cases. In this paper, I compare the newspaper reports about the murder trials of mothers with the transcripts of those trials. These newspaper accounts provide some insight into the ways in which infant death and maternal responsibility are being (re)constructed within Canadian and Australian public discourse as moral issues that fit legitimately within the purview of the criminal justice system. I consider the extent to which feminist critiques of the neo-liberal tendency to over-criminalisation and of the increasingly punitive normative conceptions of mothering in contemporary western society have the potential to counter this reconstruction of moral responsibility.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Since 1993 more than 400 women and girls have been tortured and brutally murdered in Ciudad Juarez. This fenomenon was neglected by the mexican authorities until 2003, when Mexico was submitted to unprecedented transnational pressure by a large group of national and international actors such as Amnesty International, the Washington Office on Latin America, the United Nations or the Interamerican Comission of Human Rights. Although Mexico has invested considerable resources and has taken a number of important measures to put an end to the situation, the murders still continue and justice has not been delivered to the families of the victims. In this paper I argue that, although the international society has not yet seen the desired results happen, this transnational pressure has triggered within the mexican authorities a process of socialization by which the country is moving towards the meeting of international standards regarding women´s rights protection and the mexican authorities have been entangled in a process of arguing. As a result of this now Mexico understands and signifies the Juarez problem in a different fashion.