Over the last two decades, and in the wake of increases in recorded crime and other social changes, British criminal justice policy has become increasingly politicised as an index of governments' ...competence. New and worrying developments, such as the inexorable rise of the US prison population and the rising force of penal severity, seem unstoppable in the face of popular anxiety about crime. But is this inevitable? Nicola Lacey argues that harsh 'penal populism' is not the inevitable fate of all contemporary democracies. Notwithstanding a degree of convergence, globalisation has left many of the key institutional differences between national systems intact, and these help to explain the striking differences in the capacity for penal tolerance in otherwise relatively similar societies. Only by understanding the institutional preconditions for a tolerant criminal justice system can we think clearly about the possible options for reform within particular systems.
Beginning with the premise that the principal function of a criminal trial is to find out the truth about a crime, Larry Laudan examines the rules of evidence and procedure that would be appropriate ...if the discovery of the truth were, as higher courts routinely claim, the overriding aim of the criminal justice system. Laudan mounts a systematic critique of existing rules and procedures that are obstacles to that quest. He also examines issues of error distribution by offering the first integrated analysis of the various mechanisms - the standard of proof, the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof - for implementing society's view about the relative importance of the errors that can occur in a trial.
This book provides a comprehensive legal analysis of the twelve war crimes trials held in the American zone of occupation between 1946 and 1949, collectively known as the Nuremberg Military Tribunals ...(NMTs). The judgments the NMTs produced have played a critical role in the development of international criminal law, particularly in terms of how courts currently understand war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression. The trials are also of tremendous historical importance, because they provide a far more comprehensive picture of Nazi atrocities than their more famous predecessor, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (IMT). The IMT focused exclusively on the ‘major war criminals’ — the Goerings, the Hesses, the Speers. The NMTs, by contrast, prosecuted doctors, lawyers, judges, industrialists, bankers — the private citizens and lower-level functionaries whose willingness to take part in the destruction of millions of innocents manifested what Hannah Arendt famously called ‘the banality of evil’. The book is divided into five sections. The first section traces the evolution of the twelve NMT trials. The second section discusses the law, procedure, and rules of evidence applied by the tribunals, with a focus on the important differences between Law No. 10 and the Nuremberg Charter. The third section, the heart of the book, provides a systematic analysis of the tribunals' jurisprudence. It covers Law No. 10's core crimes — crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity — as well as the crimes of conspiracy and membership in a criminal organization. The fourth section then examines the modes of participation and defences that the tribunals recognized. The final section deals with sentencing, the aftermath of the trials, and their historical legacy.
This book presents arguments and proposals for constraining criminalization, with a focus on the legal limits of the criminal law. The book approaches the issue by showing how the moral criteria for ...constraining unjust criminalization can and has been incorporated into constitutional human rights and thus provides a legal right not to be unfairly criminalized. The book sets out the constitutional limits of the substantive criminal law. As far as specific constitutional rights operate to protect specific freedoms, for example, free speech, freedom of religion, privacy, etc, the right not to be criminalized has proved to be a rather powerful justice constraint in the U.S. Yet the general right not to be criminalized has not been fully embraced in either the U.S. or Europe, although it does exist. This volume lays out the legal foundations of that right and the criteria for determining when the state might override it. The book will be of interest to researchers in the areas of legal philosophy, criminal law, constitutional law, and criminology.
This book examines how the democratic process and social trust shape penal sanctioning in the United States. The research shows that higher levels of civic engagement tend to support milder ...punishments whereas lower levels tend to support more coercive criminal justice policies. The book challenges a taken‐for‐granted assumption about the democratic process and punishment. It shows that the apparent link between public participation, punitiveness, and harsh justice is not only historically contingent but dependent on specific institutional contexts and patterns of civic engagement, patterns that tend to vary within the United States and across liberal democracies. But perhaps more importantly, the research suggests the opposite relationship: increased democratization can support and sustain less coercive penal regimes. By comparing state‐level imprisonment variation and state‐level democratic traditions, this book highlights the importance of place, locality, and context in a globalizing social world.
How the attorney-client relationship favors the
privileged in criminal court-and denies justice to the poor and to
working-class people of color The number of Americans
arrested, brought to court, ...and incarcerated has skyrocketed in
recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and
economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly
different ways. Privilege and Punishment examines how
racial and class inequalities are embedded in the attorney-client
relationship, providing a devastating portrait of inequality and
injustice within and beyond the criminal courts. Matthew Clair
conducted extensive fieldwork in the Boston court system, attending
criminal hearings and interviewing defendants, lawyers, judges,
police officers, and probation officers. In this eye-opening book,
he uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court
interactions. When disadvantaged defendants try to learn their
legal rights and advocate for themselves, lawyers and judges often
silence, coerce, and punish them. Privileged defendants, who are
more likely to trust their defense attorneys, delegate authority to
their lawyers, defer to judges, and are rewarded for their
compliance. Clair shows how attempts to exercise legal rights often
backfire on the poor and on working-class people of color, and how
effective legal representation alone is no guarantee of justice.
Superbly written and powerfully argued, Privilege and
Punishment draws needed attention to the injustices that are
perpetuated by the attorney-client relationship in today's criminal
courts, and describes the reforms needed to correct them.
Fact-Finding Without Facts explores international criminal fact-finding - empirically, conceptually, and normatively. After reviewing thousands of pages of transcripts from various international ...criminal tribunals, the author reveals that international criminal trials are beset by numerous and severe fact-finding impediments that substantially impair the tribunals' ability to determine who did what to whom. These fact-finding impediments have heretofore received virtually no publicity, let alone scholarly treatment, and they are deeply troubling not only because they raise grave concerns about the accuracy of the judgments currently being issued but because they can be expected to similarly impair the next generation of international trials that will be held at the International Criminal Court. After setting forth her empirical findings, the author considers their conceptual and normative implications. The author concludes that international criminal tribunals purport a fact-finding competence that they do not possess and, as a consequence, base their judgments on a less precise, more amorphous method of fact-finding than they publicly acknowledge.
Africa and the ICC Clarke, Kamari M; Knottnerus, Abel S; Volder, Eefje De
04/2016
eBook
Africa and the ICC: Realities and Perceptions comprises contributions from prominent scholars of different disciplines including international law, political science, cultural anthropology, African ...history and media studies. This unique collection provides the reader with detailed insights into the interaction between the African Union and the International Criminal Court (ICC), but also looks further at the impact of the ICC at a societal level in African states and examines other justice mechanisms on a local and regional level in these countries. This investigation of the ICC's complicated relationship with Africa allows the reader to see that perceptions of justice are multilayered.
Whether it is a question of the age below which a child cannot be held liable for their actions, or the attribution of responsibility to defendants with mental illnesses, mental incapacity is a ...central concern for legal actors, policy makers, and legislators when it comes to crime and justice. Understanding the terrain of mental incapacity in criminal law is notoriously difficult; it involves tracing overlapping and interlocking legal doctrines, current and past practices including those of evidence and proof, and also medical and social understanding of mental order and incapacity. Bringing together previously disparate discussions on criminal responsibility from law, psychology, and philosophy, this book provides a close study of mental incapacity defences, analysing their development through historical cases to the modern era. It maps the shifting boundaries between normality and abnormality as constructed in law, arguing that ‘manifest madness’ — the distinct character of mental incapacity revealed by this interdisciplinary approach — has a broad significance for understanding the criminal law as a whole.
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