Beyond reasonable doubt: how to think like an expert detective

2022 ◽  
pp. 267-295
Author(s):  
Ivar Fahsing
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (S9) ◽  
pp. S1342-S1345
Author(s):  
Gianluca Lucchese ◽  
Omar A. Jarral
Keyword(s):  

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (04) ◽  
pp. 881-917
Author(s):  
John Hagan ◽  
Richard Brooks ◽  
Todd Haugh

Internal and international conflicts can often involve a level of impunity that allows sexual violence to persist unchecked by military and political leaders. The recent reversal by an appeals panel at the International Criminal Court of a pretrial decision not to charge President al‐Bashir of Sudan with genocide in Darfur offers an important foundation for introducing new types of evidence that can increase the investigation and prosecution of sexual violence during conflicts. The reversal cited the incorrect use of the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard when the lesser standard of “reasonable grounds” applied. Social science provides methods and measures that can be uniquely used to develop reasonable grounds evidence, for example, to demonstrate the roles of physical perpetrators acting together in horizontal relationships, as well as to establish the indirect participation through vertical relationships of higher‐level defendants, in a chain of command of superior responsibility. We illustrate these points by presenting social science evidence of the responsibility of President al‐Bashir and middle‐ and lower‐level figures in genocidal violence in Darfur.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Curr

ABSTRACT This article uses the US Supreme Court’s line of cases beginning with Apprendi v. New Jersey to illuminate territory in which English law, in comparison to American law, is comparatively underdeveloped—currently affording a Newton-style hearing only where a guilty plea obliterates any previous evidence. This need not be so. Both before and after Apprendi, US federal and state courts have implemented post-trial fact-finding procedures for sentencing purposes, and we could do the same. The Davies case, where the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt was imported from the trial phase, into consideration of the statutory starting points for murder sentencing, will, for reasons to be given, be doubted.


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