犯罪论体系的维度

犯罪论的事实判断是对外界客观行为的实然认识,价值评价是主体对客观事实的应然判断,两者应当是协调统一的。行为入罪具有客观规律性。犯罪论的事实判断包括客观事实判断与主观事实判断,具有普遍性与特殊性、恒定性与可变性。犯罪论的价值评价包括客观价值评价、主观价值评价和混合价值评价。行为入罪在价值评价上需要遵循目的有效性、手段有效性、司法有效性、效益均衡性和后果均衡性原则。大陆法系国家的犯罪论体系缺乏实质的混合价值评价要素;我国平面的犯罪论体系缺乏形式的混合价值评价要素。重构论不可行的理由是:作为其哲理根据的事实与价值二元论早已崩溃,作为其立论基础的德日阶层犯罪论体系在评判次序上并非先事实后价值。     

刑法方法论与司法逻辑

从程序法、证据学以及司法改革的角度切入错案防止问题是必要的,但实体法也应该为减少错案贡献自身力量。合理的刑事实体法理论,必须考虑方法论的合理性,必须考虑司法规律、司法逻辑,必须有助于解决某些司法难题,以最终实现人权保障的目标。以刑法为切入点,要防止错案,最为根本的是要坚持刑法客观主义立场。在这一立场指导下,形成客观优先、分层次判断、实质判断的刑法方法论及相应的司法逻辑。刑法基本立场、刑法方法论、刑事司法逻辑三者之间应该具有内在统一性。为此,有必要对我国犯罪构成四要件说进行改造,确立客观要素在犯罪论体系中的核心地位和优先性,将传统上的主观判断尽可能还原为客观判断,并建构判断主观要素的"客观标准",建构阶层的犯罪论体系。蕴含在新的理论构造背后的刑法基本立场、刑法方法论作为一种观念形象,对于合理的司法逻辑的形成必定会发挥积极影响。     

三阶层犯罪论体系与犯罪构成体系：实证考察下的廓清、反思与借鉴

德日犯罪论三阶层体系在其理论多元化的背后存在实定法背景。三阶层犯罪论体系在司法运行中自觉修正了其理论预设中的逻辑错误,呈现出构成要件符合性判断的实质化与违法、责任要件弱化与空洞化的局面,从而使得该体系与我国犯罪构成体系的基本模式呈现趋同的趋势。基于对我国犯罪构成体系司法运行状态的实证考察,我国刑法理论与实践最需要借鉴的是德日刑法的解释论而非体系论。     

论犯罪论体系中合理性价值判断的实现

犯罪论体系的核心内容是价值判断,如何实现合理性的价值判断是犯罪论体系构建的首要目标。对于价值判断,在大陆法系犯罪论体系的发展过程中存在过实证主义、新康德主义、现象学和目的论等解决途径,这些解决途径都难以在实质和形式两个方面保证价值判断的合理性。根据主体间性和法律论证理论,如果能够以法益保护原则、责任原则和罪刑法定原则作为犯罪论体系中价值判断的前提,并且遵循一定的程序要求就可以最大限度的实现合理性要求。     

需罚性在犯罪论体系中的功能与定位

作为对我国近年来发生争议的热点案件的一个理论回应,需罚性在犯罪论体系中的功能与定位被提出。我国目前的犯罪论体系均是以应罚性为中心展开的,缺乏对需罚性的判断,从而带来严重的理论与实践困境。犯罪论体系须认真对待刑法体系内的应罚性与刑法体系外的需罚性。从理论上,需罚性就是从刑事政策或宪法上判断有无刑罚处罚的必要性,是以预防的必要性为理论根据架设起刑事政策或宪法与刑法体系之间的桥梁,具有兼顾体系正义与个案正义的合目的性。同时,将需罚性导入我国犯罪论体系具有立法与司法基础,与我国实定法之间具有融贯性。我国应当建构应罚性与需罚性并重的犯罪论体系。     

价值共识与犯罪论体系的中国选择

在理论多元化的当今时代,犯罪论体系选择的本质乃是形成法学通说。而犯罪论体系通说之形成与该国当下刑法的终极价值之间存在着内在关联,价值导向内在性地决定着某种犯罪论体系的外在建构及其理论价值,在不同犯罪论体系对立之时,应把价值共识作为犯罪论体系选择的判断标准。从本体上看,犯罪论体系乃是犯罪的评价标准与评价方法的有机统一,其功能在于帮助法官明确罪与非罪之判断标准及法律方法。随着人权原则成为当代刑法的基本价值立场,由于“三阶层论”在犯罪标准之外,同时重视法律方法的运用,比“四要件论”更有利于实现人权原则,因此,应成为中国犯罪论体系的选择。     

形式和实质的解释论之争与犯罪论体系的选择

当前,在我国刑法解释领域内,形式解释论与实质解释论之争是一种颇为引人注目的争论。因为各学者在对这两类解释论基本涵义的认识上并不统一,所以这一论争在目前呈现出一种较为混乱的状态。通过深入分析这两类解释论主要倡导者的学术观点,可以发现,两类解释论之争的核心问题依然是犯罪论体系的选择问题,即是选择德日古典的三阶层判断式的犯罪论体系,还是选择一种综合判断式的犯罪论体系。在犯罪的认定上,主张分层式逻辑判断的德日犯罪论体系并不具有明显的合理性,而主张平面式综合判断的我国传统犯罪构成体系,不仅在理论上具有相对的合理性,而且在实践中也是可行的。     

犯罪构成符合性判断的价值属性辩正

在立法层面，犯罪构成是立法者所作的价值判断；在司法层面，犯罪构成符合性判断是司法者所作的价值判断；在我国与大陆法系犯罪论体系之比较层面，我国的犯罪构成符合性判断也应是价值判断。因而，价值判断当属我国犯罪构成符合性判断的灵魂，进而应是整个刑法问题的核心。     

犯罪论体系：范畴论抑或目的论

刑法中的犯罪论体系,依据其是根据事物本身论理还是根据一定目的而建立,可分为范畴论和目的论。犯罪论体系是范畴论还是目的论,是形式犯罪论与实质犯罪论的原点问题。要解决形式与实质犯罪论这一新的刑法学派之争,必须联系犯罪论体系的范畴论与目的论予以考察。现代刑法提倡目的论的犯罪论体系,同时,由于刑法法益保护目的的要求,在判断行为是否成立犯罪的问题上,它要求由以往形式判断转向从处罚必要性和合理性的角度来理解刑法中的构成要件。这种基于实质可罚性把握的犯罪论体系即为实质目的论的犯罪论体系。     

行为规范与裁判规范分离下法定犯的限缩方案

应当重新审视法定犯的刑法规范属性,从行为规范与裁判规范的统一论转向分离论。行为规范与裁判规范统一论混同了立法和司法原理,势必得出行为成立犯罪就一定处罚的结论,这不仅与司法实践不一致,也会导致在立法扩张的同时加剧司法的进一步扩张。刑法立法的类型性和抽象性,为分离论提供了充分的依据,刑法立法不可能完全杜绝司法的个案裁量,司法可以在立法的框架下针对个案予以情景化判断。分离论有助于形成“立法扩张+司法限缩”的模式,促进个案裁判的实质公正。分离论符合司法综合判断的立场,通过裁判对刑法规范的具体适用予以实践性建构,可弥补刑法立法偏重一般性的不足。分离论有助于实现犯罪的分层评价,行为规范的主要功能在于宣示行为的规范违反性,裁判规范则侧重处罚必要性的判断。基于法定犯行为规范与裁判规范的分离论思路,首先,应当摒弃形式化的机械认定犯罪的思路,强化刑法规范目的对于刑事违法判断的制约,避免行政法和刑法规范目的混淆,同时避免后果主义对构成要件的“软化解释”。其次,注重法定犯罪量要素的客观判断,在认定模糊罪量要素时,应当坚持客观违法的立场。最后,应当建构法定犯应罚性与需罚性区分的司法逻辑,应罚性是以罪刑法定原则为...     

The Forces of Conviction: The Power and Practice of Mandatory Prosecution upon Misdemeanor Domestic Battery Suspects

This article provides an ethnographic account of the power and practice of mandatory prosecution upon misdemeanor domestic battery suspects. Integrating law and society studies, domestic violence research, and poststructuralist theories of power, it finds that mandatory prosecution engages suspected batterers in multiple power operations that shape their agency in different ways. While many of these operations are familiar from past law and society research, mandatory prosecution alters their practice. In general, the different tactics that legal authorities deploy in their interactions with domestic battery suspects coalesce in an effort to have them plead guilty. The impact of these tactics on batterers, however, is far from clear. Mandatory prosecution increases the number of persons convicted of domestic violence. But abusers' violence is repeatedly redefined and displaced, as they are processed through the court setting, thus casting doubt on the criminal court's power to affect their accountability. By detailing the court's various points of encounter with domestic battery suspects, this study offers a much-needed empirical framework for future evaluations of court interventions against domestic batterers.     

Limitations on the ability to negotiate justice: attorney perspectives on guilt,innocence, and legal advice in the current plea system

In the American criminal justice system the vast majority of criminal convictions occur as the result of guilty pleas, often made as a result of plea bargains, rather than jury trials. The incentives offered in exchange for guilty pleas mean that both innocent and guilty defendants plead guilty. We investigate the role of attorneys in this context, through interviews with criminal defense attorneys. We examine defense attorney perspectives on the extent to which innocent defendants are (and should be) pleading guilty in the current legal framework and investigate their views of their own role in this complex system. We also use a hypothetical case to probe the ways in which defense attorneys consider guilt or innocence when providing advice on pleas. Results indicate that attorney advice is influenced by guilt or innocence, but also that attorneys are limited in the extent to which they can negotiate justice for their clients in a system in which uncertainty and large discrepancies between outcomes of guilty pleas and conviction at trial can make it a sensible option to plead guilty even when innocent. Results also suggest conflicting opinions over the role of the attorney in the plea-bargaining process.     

有罪答辩与量刑减让

被告人的有罪答辩对其获得的量刑减让有着重要的作用和影响。在英美等国 ,有罪答辩是量刑减让的正当依据 ,但有罪答辩与量刑减让之间并不存在必然的因果关系 ,法官对被告人施以的量刑减让以及减让的程度 ,还需考虑犯罪的性质、被告人的基本情况等其他因素。同时 ,量刑减让制度对于被告人有罪答辩的作出又存在反作用。被告人有罪答辩的作出来自于律师、检察官和法官传递的量刑减让的信息 ,在英美等国 ,法官对量刑减让信息的披露是受到严格限制的。我国传统意义上的坦白属于被控人的一项法定义务 ,具有实体意义 ,不同于有罪答辩 ,故坦白从宽政策不具有正当性。与此同时 ,我国简易程序中对有罪答辩的量刑减让则具有正当性 ,但减让的实施较英美等国有较大的限制。     

Guilty plea hearings and judicial supervision: Some differences between federal and state judges regarding Rule 11 and a defendant’s right to due process

Samples of 120 district court judges from six randomly selected circuit court jurisdictions were compared with 62 circuit and criminal court judges in Tennessee concerning their compliance with Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (U.S.C.A., 1986) governing guilty plea hearings. Among other things, Rule 11 provides that judges will inquire of defendants in open court about the voluntariness of their guilty pleas, whether they understand that they are waiving several important constitutional rights, whether there is a factual basis for the guilty plea, whether they realize they have a right to an attorney, and whether they understand the nature and consequences of the charges against them. It was found that federal judges are substantially in compliance with these provisions of Rule 11, although full compliance was not observed for all issue areas. By comparison, Tennessee trial judges adhered to these provisions (duplicated in the Tennessee Rules of Criminal Procedure verbatim) much less frequently. Various reasons for these discrepancies are discussed, as are some implications for defendant’s access to due process and certain constitutional guarantees.     

Why Would Two-Level Consequentialists Punish Only the Guilty?

The most commonly encountered and most serious objection against consequentialist theories of punishment is that they could sometimes endorse punishing innocent people. Two-level consequentialists can resist this objection. Because of how deterrence works, a system of social protection would clearly need to be careful, most of the time, to pick out only the guilty for punishment. What about exceptional cases? Any institution empowered to secretly frame innocent people would pose a grave danger to democracy, a danger that could prove lethal under only moderately unusual conditions. Meanwhile, individual consequentialists working within the criminal justice system should fear that their own views could be distorted by confirmation bias and other cognitive errors. These officials should normally trust any moderately well-functioning adversarial trial process more than they trust their own judgment of who needs to be punished. They should use extra-legal discretion only in cases where both their confidence and the stakes are extremely high; and in cases where the stakes are extremely high, the consequentialist answer is no longer counter-intuitive.     

To Waive or Not to Waive: The Right to Trial and Plea Bargaining

Criminal defendants in many countries are faced with a dilemma: If they waive their right to trial and plead guilty, they typically receive charge or sentence reductions in exchange for having done so. If they exercise their right to trial and are found guilty, they often receive stiffer sanctions than if they had pled guilty. I characterize the former as ‘waiver rewards’ and the latter as ‘non-waiver penalties.’ After clarifying the two and considering the relation between them, I briefly explicate the grounds for a moral right to trial. I then assess the defensibility of such rewards and penalties. In addition to considering whether waiver rewards and non-waiver penalties serve the aims of legal punishment, I address the three main arguments for permitting them. The first suggests that defendants willing to plead display more remorse for their crimes and thus are deserving of lighter sentences. The second defends waiver rewards and non-waiver penalties in cases where prosecutors are alleged to know that defendants are guilty but face problems establishing their guilt at trial. The third holds that guilty defendants who are willing to plead conserve scarce state resources and should be rewarded for it, whereas those unwilling to plead squander such resources and should be penalized accordingly. I contend that none of these arguments provides persuasive grounds for waiver rewards or non-waiver penalties, even on the assumption that we can distinguish those defendants who should waive their right to trial from those who should not. This conclusion presents a fundamental challenge to contemporary plea bargaining practices.

When Due Process Is of No Consequence: Moral Mandates and Presumed Defendant Guilt or Innocence

Most current theories of justice are focused on how social identity, instrumental concerns, or both shape how people decide whether something is fair or unfair. A neglected consideration is that people may also be concerned with justice because they strive to be authentic moral beings by acting on the basis of values closely tied to their personal identity. We posited that self-expressive moral positions or stands (moral mandates) are important determinants of how people reason about fairness. Supporting this notion, we found that (a) people see some trial outcomes in morally mandated terms, e.g., that the guilty must be convicted and punished, and the innocent must not; (b) convicting a defendant believed to be innocent or acquitting a defendant believed to be guilty were seen as unfair, regardless of whether the verdict was achieved by a fair or unfair investigation and trial (Study 1); and (c) a guilty defendant's death was seen as equally fair, and an innocent defendant's death was equally unfair, if it was achieved by a trial that led to the death penalty or by vigilantism (Study 2). Procedural propriety only mattered when defendant guilt was ambiguous.     

Analysis of decision criteria in military plea negotiations

This research examines plea bargain decision making by analysis of 535 case records in five U.S. Army, Europe, court-martial jurisdictions for one twelve-month period in 1977–1978. The paper reports on a study of the impact of eleven variables on three pleading outcomes. Using discriminant function analysis, the pleading variables are defined as consisting of three groups (negotiated guilty, non-negotiated guilty, and not guilty), or two groups (guilty, not guilty) (negotiated guilty, all other cases). The results indicate that the independent variables are not too successful in separating the groups, especially the smallest group of non-negotiated guilty pleas; the same small proportion of variance is explained regardless of how one splits the sample and defines the number of groups in the discriminant model. In each analysis, the number of charges stands out as having the most discriminating power. The study's findings are compared with Feeley's, and Eisenstein and Jacob's conceptual perspectives of court processing. Application of their approaches suggests that organizational and legal factors produce the distinctive pattern of plea negotiation in the military.     

Direct and Indirect Effects of Case Complexity, Guilty Pleas, and Offender Characteristics on Sentencing for Offenders Convicted of a White-Collar Offense Prior to Sentencing Guidelines

Previous research on the punishment of offenders convicted of a white-collar offense estimated models that specify only direct effects of defendant characteristics, offense-related variables, and guilty pleas on sentence severity. Drawing from conflict or labeling theories, much of this research focused on the effects of offender's socioeconomic status on sentence outcomes. Findings from this research are inconsistent about the relationship between defendant characteristics and sentence severity. These studies overlook how differences in case complexity of white-collar offense and guilty pleas may intervene in the relationship between offender characteristics and sentence outcomes. This study seeks to contribute to an understanding of federal sentencing prior to the federal sentencing guidelines by testing a legal-bureaucratic theory of sentencing that hypothesizes an interplay between case complexity, guilty pleas and length of imprisonment. This interplay reflects the interface between the legal ramifications of pleading guilty, prosecutorial interests in efficiency and finality of case disposition in complex white-collar cases, and sentence severity. Using structural equation modeling, a four-equation model of sentencing that specifies case complexity and guilty pleas as intervening variables in the relationship between offender characteristics and length of imprisonment is estimated. Several findings are noteworthy. First, the hypothesized interplay between case complexity, guilty pleas, and sentence severity is supported. Second, the effect of offender's educational attainment on sentence severity is indirect via case complexity and guilty pleas. Third, offender's race and gender effect length of imprisonment both directly and indirectly through the intervening effect of case complexity and guilty pleas. These findings indicate the need to specify sentencing models that consider the direct and indirect effects of offender characteristics, offense characteristics, and guilty pleas on judicial discretion at sentencing.     

The occurrence of eye blinks during a guilty knowledge test

Abstract

In the present experiment we examined whether eye blinks could discriminate between guilty and innocent examinees in a Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT). Based on the assumption that guilty examinees would experience more cognitive load when responding to the key items than to the control items, we hypothesized that they would display fewer eye blinks during the key items than during the control items. For innocent examinees, responding to the key and control items should be equally demanding, and no differences in eye blinks between key and control items were expected. A total of 26 participants took part in an experiment where 13 guilty examinees committed a mock theft (of an exam paper) and the remaining 13 innocent examinees went on with their normal business. All participants underwent a GKT whereby their eye blinks were measured. Both guilty and innocent examinees displayed the pattern of eye blinks that we predicted. The implications of the findings are discussed.