Every society is faced by a fundamental problem of achieving social control that protects people’s lives and properties as well as establishing desirable levels of order, accord, security and courtesy in the society. Societies, therefore, have developed informal methods of attaining this control where family structures, norms and religious precepts are included. Law is established in contrast as a formal method of social control. Law is then said to be a set of rules that is prescribed and implemented by government to regulate and protect the society. Certain forms of behavior are prohibited and penalties are imposed to those engaging in the barred conduct. The branch of law illegalizing those conducts is referred to as criminal law. In a democratic society, one is not convicted of a crime without committing an offence that is against the law and that provides for a penalty.
Criminal law provides substantive and procedural rules, both governing the criminal justice system’s operations. Substantive rules prohibit certain behaviors and define crime as well as establishing penalties and their parameter. Procedural rules, on the other hand, controls the enforcement of substantive law, determines guilt and the punishment to be imposed to the guilty. This paper explores criminal trial and the procedural steps in a criminal trial.
Criminal Trial
According to John (2010, p.16), there are basic procedural steps that are common to all prosecutions in a crime although some differ greatly among jurisdictions. Agencies enforcing law, arrests, cross-examine persons in custody and then conducts searches and seizures in every jurisdiction. This is followed by formal notification of the accused, the charges facing them and an opportunity is g...
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...010, p.713). The major include capital punishment, that is, a sentence to death, and corporal, which, inflicts to ones body, pain or injury. Cruel and unusual one provides for a physical beating as well as torture to a prisoner (John, 2010).
Conclusion
Crimes such as assaultive, sexual as well detention formed a stable base used to prosecute people whose behaviors offended basic norms of a society over the centuries. To cope with cultural needs of a society that is dynamic, law must be changed and enforced. There should also be fair administration of justice and processes that are orderly. To achieve this, honesty and integrity of authority occupants is a requirement. To maintain security and usefulness of law, confinement of the offenders must be ensured by the society.
References
John M. S. Criminal Law and Procedure, (2010). Cengage Learning. Belmont, USA.
Criminal law attempts to balance the rights of individuals to freedom from interference with person or property, and society’s need for order. Procedural matters, the rights of citizens and powers of the state, specific offences and defences, and punishment and compensation are some of the ways society and the criminal justice system interact.
Siegel, L., & Worrall, J. (2017). Pretrial and Trial Procedures. In Introduction to Criminal Justice (15th ed., pp. 389-395). Wadsworth Pub
Ferdico, J. N., Fradella, H. F., & Totten, C. D. (2009). Criminal Procedure for the Criminal Justice Professional (10th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
The state should always observe them in ensuring that an individual faces a fair and impartial trial which they have been accused of. The procedural due process is concerned with verifying that the law was applicable and convincing. Also involves the arrest and examination of the charges brought forward.
The criminal justice process and the criminal court system go hand in hand. The criminal justice process is a sequence of events that a person who is accused of a felony will progress through. This process varies from state to state or jurisdiction and varies according to the seriousness of a crime or whether the accused is a juvenile or an adult. Generally, the criminal justice process involves several specific stages; however, not every case will include each stage or even follow a certain sequence. According to Matthew Lippman’s Essential Criminal Law (2014), these stages include:
The use of evidence and witnesses is a mechanism in which the law attempts to balance the rights of victims and offenders in the criminal trial process. Evidence used in court are bound by the Evidence Act 1995 (NSW) and have to be lawfully obtained by the police. The use of evidence and witnesses balance the victims’ rights to a great extent. However, it is ineffective in balancing the rights of offenders. The law has been progressive in protecting the rights of victims in the use and collection of evidence and witness statements. The Criminal Procedure Amendment (Domestic Violence Complainants) Bill 2014, which amends the Criminal Procedure Act 1986, passed the NSW Legislative Council on 18 November 2014. The amendment enables victims of
The criminal trial process is able to reflect the moral and ethical standards of society to a great extent. For the law to be effective, the criminal trial process must reflect what is accepted by society to be a breach of moral and ethical conduct and the extent to which protections are granted to the victims, the offenders and the community. For these reasons, the criminal trial process is effectively able to achieve this in the areas of the adversary system, the system of appeals, legal aid and the jury system.
In Western cultures imprisonment is the universal method of punishing criminals (Chapman 571). According to criminologists locking up criminals may not even be an effective form of punishment. First, the prison sentences do not serve as an example to deter future criminals, which is indicated, in the increased rates of criminal behavior over the years. Secondly, prisons may protect the average citizen from crimes but the violence is then diverted to prison workers and other inmates. Finally, inmates are locked together which impedes their rehabilitation and exposes them too more criminal
In every society around the world, the law is affecting everyone since it shapes the behavior and sense of right and wrong for every citizen in society. Laws are meant to control a society’s behavior by outlining the accepted forms of conduct. The law is designed as a neutral aspect existent to solve society’s problems, a system specially designed to provide people with peace and order. The legal system runs more efficiently when people understand the laws they are intended to follow along with their legal rights and responsibilities.
I wanted to look at the investigative and criminal procedures following the arrest of an alleged criminal and the powerful effects via testimonies and evidence (or lack thereof) it can have on a case.There is an importance of the courts in regards to crime that can’t be over looked. The primary function of the criminal justice system is to uphold the established laws, which define what we understand as deviant in this society.
In this essay, I will be discussing how the formal theory of the rule of law is an erroneous means of establishing laws within a state. A central theme to addressing this essay is the distinction between formal and substantive theories of the rule of law. In order to reach the conclusion of the formal theory being proven to be insufficient, one must first appreciate the significant advantages which the substantive theory obtains. However, before doing so, I will briefly mention the importance of the rule of law in society and the requirements it needs to fulfil. Most people would dispute that the significance of law in society is to obtain justice, however justice is simply a term which is determined subjectively, it relates to an individuals moral viewpoint.
Coyle (2005). The 'Standard'. To say whether using prison as a form of punishment has aid in the quest of tackling the crime problem, one must first consider the purposes of the prison.... ... middle of paper ... ...
Every country has a form of criminal justice system. This system consists in a different series of organizations that work together to defend, sentence and punish those that did not follow the law or have been involved in any type of crime. In most of the countries, the system is similar be-cause is based on law enforcement agencies, attorney generals, judges, courts of law and prisons. All of these organizations work together to contribute towards the better enhancement of the working cooperation within the criminal justice system. However, these procedures won’t al-ways be fully applicable in certain countries.
Laws serve several purposes in the criminal justice system. The main purpose of criminal law is to protect, serve, and limit human actions and to help guide human conduct. Also, laws provide penalties and punishment against those who are guilty of committing crimes against property or persons. In the modern world, there are three choices in dealing with criminals’ namely criminal punishment, private action and executive control. Although both private action and executive control are advantageous in terms of costs and speed, they present big dangers that discourage their use unless in exceptional situations. The second purpose of criminal law is to punish the offender. Punishing the offender is the most important purpose of criminal law since by doing so; it discourages him from committing crime again while making him or her pay for their crimes. Retribution does not mean inflicting physical punishment by incarceration only, but it also may include things like rehabilitation and financial retribution among other things. The last purpose of criminal law is to protect the community from criminals. Criminal law acts as the means through which the society protects itself from those who are harmful or dangerous to it. This is achieved through sentences meant to act as a way of deterring the offender from repeating the same crime in the future.
Law is the foundation of central structures of social life on which society’s integrity depends, which is why Petrazycki, Ehrlich and Habermas perceive it to be a key steering mechanism in society,