Improving our Practice of Sentencing

Utilitas ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda M. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Personal Costs

Restorative justice should have greater weight as a criterion in criminal justice sentencing practice. It permits a realistic recognition of the kinds of harm and damage caused by offences, and encourages individualized non-custodial sentencing options as ways of addressing these harms. Non-custodial sentences have proven more effective than incarceration in securing social reconciliation and preventing recidivism, and they avoid the serious social and personal costs of imprisonment. This paper argues in support of restorative justice as a guiding idea in sentencing. As part of this defence, it considers whether the use of the idea of restorative justice will conflate criminal law with civil law or displace the authority of the criminal courts, and whether the sentences it recommends are best thought of as punishments or alternatives to punishment.

Children and the Expanding Role of the Criminal Law

1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Bandalli
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Justice Practice ◽  
Looking Back ◽  
Public Demand

Looking back, the 1980s was a decade of enlightenment and success in juvenile justice practice in this country; diverting youngsters away from the criminal courts and reducing the severity of response towards those who were prosecuted did not result in crime waves or public demand to stop this lenient treatment of the young. In the 1990s, the whole criminal justice system took a significant turn towards retribution and punishment. The movement may have been aimed initially at certain groups of criminals, particularly the persistent and serious, but swept all in its wake, including children aged 10–14 who were neither. There is little apparent appreciation of the damaging consequences of this trend, not only for individual children but also for the whole concept of childhood. There is now a wide discrepancy between the approach taken by the criminal and civil law towards children which current criminal justice policies indicate is to continue into the foreseeable future.

scholarly journals Restorative Justice in the Conditions of the Slovak Republic

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-53
Author(s):  
Tomáš Strémy ◽  
Miroslava Vráblová
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Slovak Republic ◽  
Criminal Policy ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
New Models ◽  
Financial Penalty

Summary Nowadays, traditional criminal policy is facing its limits and is unable to cope with the rising criminality. Current criminal justice based on repressive approaches is unable to face serious obstacles and problems, namely in efficiency of punishment, poor protection of victims, and slow and overburdened criminal courts. New models of criminal judiciary based on principles of restorative justice have been unveiled while traditional systems of criminal justice are facing a serious crisis. The conception of restorative justice is one of the most modern and progressive of current approaches to criminal law that deserves to be implemented into the Slovakia criminal judiciary system. Author focused on punishments as home arrest, compulsory labour and financial penalty.

Connecting Tort and Crime: Comparative Legal History in England and Spain since 1850

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 247-288
Author(s):  
Matthew Dyson
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Complete System ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Tort Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
English System ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This chapter explores the relationship between tort law and criminal law. In particular it tracks one line of developments in the procedural co-ordination of criminal and civil law: the ability of criminal courts to award compensation for harm. It is a study of legal change or development: how and why law has evolved from the middle of the nineteenth century through to the present day. The chapter is also comparative, looking at the English and Spanish legal systems. The history of powers to compensate has highlighted two fundamentally different ways to resolve claims based on a concurrently tortious and criminal wrong. The English system has slowly moved from disparate and piecemeal provisions to a general if under-theorised system. On the other hand, Spain created a novel and complete system of liability to be administered by the criminal courts. This chapter seeks to trace and explain this development with a view to understanding how much civil and criminal law can perform the same function: compensation.

Boundaries of Criminal Liability: Participation in Crime, Preparatory Offences and Omissions

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 392-408
Author(s):  
Miriam Gur-Arye
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Criminal Liability ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
The Common ◽  
Anglo American

The book Core Concepts in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice: Anglo-German Dialogues is the first volume of an Anglo-German project which aims ‘to explore the foundational principles and concepts that underpin the different domestic systems and local rules’. It offers comparative perspectives on German and Anglo-American criminal law and criminal justice as ‘examples of the civil law and the common law worlds’. The comparisons ‘dig beneath the superficial similarities or differences between legal rules to identify and compare the underlying concepts, values, principles, and structures of thought’. The review essay focuses on the topics of omissions, preparatory offences, and participation in crime, all of which extend the typical criminal liability. It presents the comparative German and Anglo-American perspectives discussed in the book with regard to each topic and adds the perspective of Israeli criminal law. It points out the features common to all these topics as an extension of criminal liability and discusses the underlying considerations that justify the criminalisation of omissions, preparatory offences, and participation in crime. In evaluating whether extending criminal liability in these contexts is justified, the review essay suggests reliance on two main notions: that of ‘control over the commission of the offence’ and that of ‘liberty (or personal freedom)’.

criminal law, Roman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Riggsby
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Public Office ◽  
The Core ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Agreed Definition ◽  
Personal Crimes

“Crime” lacks a fully agreed definition across modern societies, but competing versions tend to stress notions like punishment, protection of public or collective interests, and a pervasive role for the state in proceedings. Over time the Romans used a series of different procedures (successively, trial before the assemblies, by specialized juries, or by imperial inquisitors) to try most of their offences that would be more or less recognizably criminal today. Substantively, the core of this group were offences against the state in an institutional sense (e.g., sedition, electoral malpractice, abuse of public office, forgery). Over time it also came to include an increasing number of (personal) crimes of violence. Some core modern criminal offences such as forms of theft and forgery of private documents came to be grouped in with these only at a very late date and incompletely. “Moral” offences that are treated as criminal more sporadically today (e.g., use of intoxicants, gambling, prostitution) were not criminalized. Penalties in earlier periods included fines, civic disgrace, and exile; later periods introduced finer differentiation of penalties, as well as execution. Imprisonment was not a formal penalty. Roman criminal law had a deeper and more complicated relationship to politics than did the private, civil law. This is true both in the sense that the jurists were relatively uninterested in the criminal law, especially before the late 2nd century ce, and that known trials in the criminal courts seem to have been little governed by niceties of the law. Common-sense notions of guilt and innocence were relevant, but not legal technicalities.

Victimhood, Dignity, and the Criminal Justice System: A Comment

2011 ◽  
Vol 44 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 301-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Sebba
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Justice System ◽  
System A ◽  
Meaningful Role ◽  
Alternative Remedies

While this comment primarily addresses the article by Anat Horovitz and Thomas Weigend on human dignity and victims' rights in the German and Israeli criminal process, it begins with a consideration of the role of the victim in other component parts of the criminal justice system, and in particular the substantive criminal law—a topic addressed in other articles included in this issue. There follows a review of the comparative analysis of the victim's role in Germany and Israel put forward by Horovitz and Weigend and a critique of the issues they raise, particularly as to the salience of the victim's procedural role. It is argued here that the victim should have a somewhat more meaningful role than that envisaged by these authors. The comment concludes with a brief consideration of the potential for the advancement of alternative remedies currently neglected by both systems, such as restorative justice.

Responsibility for Bystanders in Mass Crimes: Towards a Duty to Rescue in International Criminal Justice

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 879-908
Author(s):  
Auriane Botte-Kerrison
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Attribution Of Responsibility ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Dimension

This article examines the viability of integrating the duty to rescue concept in international criminal justice to deal with the responsibility of bystanders. Despite the fact that they often contribute to create the social context in which mass crimes occur, bystanders are almost absent from the scope of international criminal justice, focusing mainly on the perpetrators and the victims. This article explores a possible avenue to fill this gap so that the attribution of responsibility for mass crimes can be more coherent with their collective dimension. It assesses whether the duty to rescue concept, commonly found in the legislation of civil law countries, could provide a ‘ready-made’ solution to deal with bystander responsibility. Following a comparative analysis of the different approaches to the duty to rescue in civil law and common law countries, it examines how the duty to rescue would fit with similar concepts in international criminal law.

scholarly journals Being (almost) invisible: Victims of crime in the Italian juvenile criminal justice system

Temida ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Susanna Vezzadini
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Juvenile Justice System ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Judicial Discretion ◽  
Application Of Law ◽  
Emilia Romagna Region ◽  
Victims Of Crime

From 2008 to 2013 the author has been a Special Judge in the Juvenile Criminal Court of the Emilia Romagna Region. From that privileged perspective, it was possible to observe the dynamics of how victims of underage offenders were considered before the law, no differences if they are adults or minors, too. The reflections presented will first consider EU and UN provision on victims of crime; then, the normative framework supporting the Italian criminal juvenile justice system will be considered by an examining of the difficulties victims meet in that peculiar context. The implementation of juvenile criminal law shows the paradox victims of crime have to cope with. The Juvenile Criminal Court in Bologna recently started to promote a wide use of restorative justice measures as an attempt to correct the unfair consequences in the application of law, with judicial discretion interpreted as an instrument to favour victims? harm recognition and to protect their dignity as persons.

Restorative Justice and Technology

2016 ◽  
pp. 80-94
Author(s):  
Pedro Miguel Freitas ◽  
Pablo Galain Palermo
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Retributive Justice ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Online Version ◽  
Mediation Model ◽  
Relevant Alternative ◽  
Administration Of Justice

In civil law countries, criminal justice is beginning to experience a shift from retributive justice towards restorative justice. Amongst other goals, restorative justice aims to give the victim a pivotal role in the administration of justice, which until now, with the traditional criminal justice, has not happened at a desirable level. It covers very different processes, but victim-offender mediation is certainly the most established one. Although an online version of the victim-offender mediation model is yet to be implemented, we believe that it could be a relevant alternative to an offline setting. It is nevertheless clear that further studies are necessary to fully comprehend the extent of the structure and implications of a ODR system for criminal conflicts.

1. Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
John Child ◽  
David Ormerod
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Internal Structure ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Criminal Process

This book focuses on substantive criminal law, that is, how offences such as theft and murder are defined. This introductory chapter sets in context criminal offences and defences, first by considering the basis upon which certain conduct is criminalised and other conduct is not. In continuing to set the context, the chapter goes on to consider criminal justice and criminology; criminal evidence; criminal process (including the court structure and central actors); sentencing; civil law protections; and so on. Narrowing to our focus on substantive criminal law—how offences and defences are defined—the chapter moves on to discuss the sources of criminal law; the internal structure of offences and defences; principles of the substantive criminal law; and the subjects to which it applies. Finally, the chapter introduces features on reform and legal application.

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