NIKOLAY P. KOVALEV, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: n.kovalev@gmail.com

One of peculiar features of the military criminal justice system in Russia is that in some cases military defendants may apply for trial by jury. Unlike the existing U.S. court-martial jury and the Russian military jury of the early 1900s (World War I period) which were comprised of the members of the armed forces, in modern Russia jurors trying military defendants are civilians. This article aims to provide a brief history of military jury in Russia and identify issues of independence and impartiality in Russian military courts with participation of lay decision-makers. In particular, the article will analyze two high-profile cases which resulted in acquittals of Russian officers accused of killing several Chechen civilians during counter-terrorist operations in Chechnya.

DANIEL C. RICHMAN, Columbia Law School
Email: drichm@law.columbia.edu

This essay - written for the annual Duke Law Journal Administrative Law Symposium - explores the mechanisms of control over federal criminal enforcement activity that the Administration and Congress used or failed to use during George W. Bush's presidency. Particular attention is given to Congress, not because it played a dominant role but because it generally chose to play such a subordinate role. My fear is that the recent focus on management inadequacies or abuses within the Justice Department might lead policymakers and observers to overlook the hard questions that remain about how the federal criminal bureaucracy should be structured and guided during a period of rapidly shifting priorities, and about the role Congress should play in this process.

SIMON HALLIDAY, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
Email: simon.halliday@strath.ac.uk
NICOLA BURNS, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow - School of Law
Email: nicola.burns@strath.ac.uk
NEIL HUTTON, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow - School of Law
Email: n.hutton@strath.ac.uk
FERGUS MCNEILL, University of Glasgow - Department of Social Work - Jordanhill Campus
Email: F.McNeill@socsci.gla.ac.uk
CYRUS TATA, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
Email: cyrus.tata@strath.ac.uk

The study of decision-making by public officials in administrative settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda are well understood: how can socio-legal researchers get inside the heads of legal decision-makers in order to understand the uses of official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision-making practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre-sentence reports for the courts. This technique, called shadow writing, involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the social workers. By comparing these shadow reports with the real reports in a training-like setting, the social workers revealed in detail the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally.

STEVEN T. BROWN, University of Manchester
Email: steven.brown@stud.man.ac.uk
JO DEAKIN, University of Manchester - School of Social Sciences
Email: jo.deakin@man.ac.uk
JONATHAN W. SPENCER, University of Manchester - School of Social Sciences
Email: jonathan.w.spencer@man.ac.uk

The research on which this article is based examines public attitudes towards the reintegration of sex offenders into the community. Data were gathered using a variety of methods: an online, predominantly qualitative questionnaire, a postal questionnaire, predominantly quantitative, and meetings with community groups, such as residents' associations. The postal questionnaire was sent to employers (for distribution to staff) and mailed to 5,000 households in the north-west of England; a total of 979 people responded to both the online and postal questionnaires. This study is one of the largest surveys in the UK on what people think about the reintegration of sex offenders into the community post-conviction. The research findings indicate that people are not as punitive towards sex offenders as is assumed. However, feelings of insecurity in terms of the way sex offenders are managed in the community were expressed with a belief in the veracity of community notification strategies. Concern was also expressed in relation to how the community reintegration of sex offenders takes place.

ANDERS WALKER, Saint Louis University School of Law
Email: awalke16@slu.edu

Few racially motivated crimes have left a more lasting imprint on American memory than the death of Emmett Till. Yet, even as Till's murder in Mississippi in 1955 has come to be remembered as a catalyst for the civil rights movement, it contributed to something else as well. Precisely because it came on the heels of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Till's death convinced Mississippi Governor James P. Coleman that certain aspects of the state's handling of racial matters had to change. Afraid that popular outrage over racial violence might encourage federal intervention in the region, Coleman removed power from local sheriffs, expanded state police, and modernized the state's criminal justice apparatus in order to reduce the chance of further racial violence in the state. Though his results proved mixed, many of Coleman's reforms lived on, contributing to the end of public torture and lynching as an accepted mode of punishment in the state. This article discusses those changes, suggesting that they not only influenced the fight for civil rights, but encouraged the modernization of criminal justice in the South.

CLARE FIONA BYRNE, Northern Ireland Prison Service
KAREN F. TREW, Queen's University Belfast - School of Psychology
Email: k.trew@qub.ac.uk

Findings are presented of a qualitative exploration of offenders' accounts of themselves, their lives and their offending behaviour. Participants were nine male and nine female offenders, aged 19 to 50 years. A model of crime as described by these individuals was developed. Gendered meanings were explored in both men's and women's accounts. Pathways into crime described by the participants were shaped by a range of personal and social background influences and by processes related to negative social relations, positive evaluations of crime, and crime orientation. Changes in the same influences and processes, with a greater emphasis on the personal level, were apparent in participants' descriptions of their pathways out of crime.