CHILDRENS EVIDENCE IN CUSTODY DISPUTES CASES IN THE SHARIA COURTS

In the process of trial in court, evidence disclosure is essential to uphold justice. Basically, every party is qualified to provide evidence before the judge decides. In the case of child custody disputes, besides the statements by the mother and the father, statements from the child involved can help the court in making the right decision. According to Islamic law, children who have attained the age of mumayyiz can be given the opportunity to choose. In addition, their views can also be taken as a support evidence to help the court make a decision. This article will analyse childrens rights to express their views, particularly in the determination of child custody disputes. The debate also looks at current legal provisions and practices in the Sharia Court. The analysis found that judges approach in accepting childrens evidence varies. There are still no specific procedures that can be used as a guide by the Sharia Court. The differences include the methods of interviewing or taking recorded statements, the procedures applied and the location where statements are recorded.

Reducing Unjust Convictions: Plea Bargaining, Trial, and Evidence Disclosure

We develop a dynamic model of a criminal case, from arrest through plea bargaining and (possibly) trial, allowing for the potential discovery of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors (who choose whether to disclose it) and defendants. We consider three regimes: (1) no disclosure required; (2) disclosure only required before trial; and (3) early disclosure required from arrest onward. These regimes have complex distributional consequences for the defendants. We find that innocent defendants ex ante prefer early disclosure whereas guilty defendants prefer disclosure only before trial. We also explore some of the social costs attributable to the regimes (JEL K4, D82, D73).

Main Reasons for the Crisis in the United States Civil Litigation in the Second Half of the Twentieth — Early Twenty-First Century

In the 1970s and 1980s, a crisis of the judicial system (litigation explosion) broke out in the United States. It manifested itself in a multiple increase in the number of appeals to the courts, the duration of cases, and the legal expenses of the parties. Under the pressure of the idea of reducing the burden on the judicial system, the US civil procedure undergone changes. This paper is a part of a larger study of the nature of these transformations. Thus, the author analyzes the causes and factors that contributed to the development of this crisis. It is established that they are largely related to the sphere of civil procedure. In particular, these are features of the distribution of legal costs between the parties to the dispute — the so-called American rule, which does not impose the legal costs of the opponent on the losing party and therefore does not prevent the presentation of obviously unfounded claims (as in the case of the "loser pays" rule). The possibility of a contingency fee contract between the lawyer and the plaintiff, combined with other factors, led to the emergence of a huge industry based on damages, including class actions. The 1938 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure significantly simplified the requirements for a claim, which also contributed to an increase in the number of appeals. Abuse by the parties during the evidence disclosure procedure became a significant problem, since it is during this procedure that the parties incur the maximum costs. Identifying the factors that contributed to the development of the crisis will allow us to better understand the essence of the changes that the US civil procedure has undergone in recent decades.

What to Reveal and what to Conceal? An Empirical Examination of Guilty Suspects’ Strategies

With Study 1 (N=140), we aimed to examine how different ways of disclosing evidence during an interview would influence guilty suspects’ perception of interviewer’s prior knowledge and elicit statement-evidence inconsistencies. We predicted that interviews with evidence disclosed would elicit low statement-evidence inconsistencies whereas interviews where evidence was not disclosed would result in high statement-evidence inconsistencies. The outcome did not support our predictions. Guilty suspects revealed crime-related information about non-critical themes and withheld information regarding critical themes irrespective of evidence disclosure. We explored this unexpected finding in Study 2 (N=216), which was designed to understand if guilty suspects would reveal information regarding themes of the crime that are not incriminating (not critical) in comparison to themes that were incriminating (critical) as observed in Study 1. We used the evidence disclosure tactics of Study 1 in Study 2 and also measured how these influence their perception of interviewer’s knowledge. The outcome replicated findings from Study 1 that guilty suspects reveal or withhold information based on the cost of disclosing the information. This is a novel finding in the Strategic Use of Evidence literature.

Evidence Discovery and Disclosure in Common Law Jurisdictions

This chapter examines issues surrounding evidence disclosure and discovery in common law jurisdictions, focusing primarily on the disclosure regimes in England and Wales and in the United States. It first traces the evolution of pretrial evidence disclosure rules and provides an overview of common law approaches to disclosure obligations. In particular, it considers three kinds of evidence: evidence that the prosecution plans to present at trial to prove the defendant’s guilt, government evidence that does not favor the prosecution’s case, and evidence in possession of the defense that it plans to present at trial. The article proceeds by discussing the rationales and structural choices that adversarial justice systems are required to make in their disclosure schemes. One such choice is how much to empower judges, rather than the parties, to make decisions about disclosure requirements.

Bargaining With Hard Evidence

This article studies how the presence of concealable hard evidence affects the timing of agreement and the size and distribution of surplus in bargaining. A buyer and a seller receive randomly arriving, verifiable, but concealable evidence about the value of a tradable good. Each party discloses individually favourable information but conceals signals that benefit the other side, giving rise to mutual suspicion; the seller repeatedly posts prices valid for one period. In the leading case of interest with a finite horizon and sufficiently patient players, the equilibrium is characterised by an interval of skimming (a sequence of prices acceptable only to a buyer who has learned that the good’s value is high) concluded by a single settlement period in which agreement is reached for sure. The length of delay until agreement and the corresponding efficiency loss are decreasing in the time horizon and in the abilities of the trading parties to identify the good’s value, but increasing in impatience. An arbitrarily long time horizon leads to immediate agreement if the parties are even slightly impatient and interaction is frequent enough; if the parties are perfectly patient, there is no trade without evidence disclosure.

Disclosure of Evidence in Central and Eastern European Countries in Light of the Implementation of the Damages Directive

The article looks primarily at the material comprised in the volume edited by A. Piszcz, Implementation of the EU Damages Directive in Central and Eastern European Countries published in 2017 and based on that compares aspects of the disclosure of evidence issue in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. The purpose of this article is to look into how the process for the disclosure of evidence has evolved in eleven countries of the European Union in light of Directive 2014/104/EU. The article looks at six key issues with regard to disclosure of evidence in light of Directive 2014/104/EU: general procedural issues; procedure for the submission of evidence; criteria for the disclosure of evidence; restrictions on the disclosure of evidence; disclosure of evidence by parties other than the defendant; and consequences of the failure to comply with a request to submit evidence. The article relies on primary data from eleven EU countries from Central and Eastern Europe.