Savage Criminal Justice; Torture in. the Change from Inquisitorial to Adversarial Institutions in Mx

Date
-
Event Sponsor
Center for Latin American Studies
Location
Bolivar House, 582 Alvarado Row, Stanford, CA

What restrains police brutality --illegal arrests, coercion of witnesses, fabrication of evidence and the use of torture to extract confessions? The literature has focused on various features of democracy that restrain torture, including electoral accountability mechanisms, constitutional provisions and judicial independence. These democratic institutions are insufficient unless criminal justice procedures establish effective judicial checks on criminal prosecutors and police. With a focus on Mexico, we study a monumental transformation taking place in Latin America in the last two decades -- the change from inquisitorial to adversarial criminal justice -- to estimate the causal effects of this institutional change on torture. Our findings demonstrate that torture and other forms of police brutality remained a generalized practice in criminal trials years after the transition to democracy, and that militarized security interventions during the Drug War aggravated these abuses. We provide valid causal evidence that torture and other forms of police brutality decreased with the implementation of the criminal justice reform.

Beatriz Magaloni is Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is also director of the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab.Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations. Her second book, The Political Logic of PovertyRelief (co-authored with Alberto Diaz Cayeros and Federico Estévez), also published by Cambridge University Press, studies the politics of poverty relief. Why clientelism is such a prevalent form of electoral exchange, how it distorts policies aimed at aiding the poor, and when it can be superseded by more democratic and accountable forms of electoral exchange are some of the central questions that the book addresses.In 2010 she founded the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab (POVGOV) within FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. There she pursues a research agenda focused on governance, poverty reduction, electoral clientelism, the provision of public goods and criminal violence. Most of the work at POVGOV is conducted in a team lab-based approach with undergraduate and graduate student trainees and post-doctoral fellows. The projects use a multi-method approach combining observational data, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), surveys, experimental designs, and in-depth ethnographic work.Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Theoretical Politics and other journals.Prior to joining Stanford in 2001, Professor Magaloni was a visiting professor at UCLA and a professor of Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). She earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University. She also holds a law degree from ITAM.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC - LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED