Professor of Law and the Robert C. Josefsberg in Criminal Justice Advocacy chairholder Scott Sundby discusses the case of Michigan parents Jennifers and Jason Crumbly, who are being tried for manslaughter for a school shooting committed by their soon. Sundby looks at the crime and its impact. Listen here to Season 12, Episode 3 of The Explainer.
Professor Sundby's writings focus on criminal law and constitutional law issues, including articles that have appeared in the Virginia, Columbia, Cornell, UCLA, and Texas law reviews. Much of his research has been conducted as part of the Capital Jury Project, a study funded by the National Science Foundation that is designed to understand how juries decide whether to impose the death penalty.
In interviewing jurors who have been faced with the wrenching choice between a life and death sentence, Sundby has been particularly struck by the intensely human nature of the decision as jurors grapple with moral, legal, and personal issues. His book, A Life and Death Decision: A Jury Weighs the Death Penalty, focuses on the human side of the decision by listening to how different jurors from the same case describe their jury's decision to impose a death sentence.
To obtain a prosecutor's viewpoint of the criminal justice system, Professor Sundby took a leave of absence from teaching and prosecuted cases as a Special Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He has been a visiting fellow at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia and at Universitat Jaume I in Castelló de la Plana, Spain, Universidad de San Andres in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was a Fulbright scholar and the Arthur Cox research fellow at Trinity College Dublin.
