Developments in criminal law and criminal justice

Conclusion It follows from what has been said above that history, principle, and authority combine to compel the conclusion that § 80's guarantee of trial by jury precludes a verdict of guilty being returned in a trial upon indictment of an offence against a law of the Commonwealth otherwise than by the agreement or consensus of all the jurors. That being so, § 57 of the Juries Act, 1927, cannot, consistently with § 80, operate to authorize the conviction of either of the appellants by a majority verdict. Their convictions were unconstitutional and must be set aside.The appeal should be allowed. The orders of the South Australian Court of Criminal Appeal should be set aside and in lieu thereof it should be ordered, in the case of each appellant, that the appeal to that court be allowed, that the conviction be quashed and a new trial ordered.B.A., Columbia University 1972; J.D., Hofstra University 1975.     

Developments in criminal law and criminal justice

Developments in criminal law and criminal justice     

Developments in criminal law and criminal justice

LL.B., Victoria University of Wellington 1969; J.S.M., Stanford University 1972.     

Publication productivity of criminal justice faculty in criminal justice journals

An important dimension of university faculty life is publication expectation. Often the level of publication productivity is used to assess general program prestige or to evaluate individual faculty performance. The publication rates of faculty in PhD and master-level programs have been unclear. This study examined the publication rates using a general list of criminal justice journals, and a select list of the leading journals, over a five-year period. The faculty members were located in criminal justice programs that granted PhD and master degrees. Publication productivity rates were established for the two different degree level programs, and the institutions with the strongest publication rates were identified. Publication rates are only one factor used in the assessment of program quality and the relationship of publication rates to other program features is discussed.     

Comparative criminal justice

Present state of electronic technology makes it possible for state authorities to control citizens' activity in every moment oh his/her life. On the other hand none of us want to be controlled this way and democratic rights shall guarantee our privacy to be preserved. Yet proactive police techniques can be useful in protecting us against those of our co – citizens who do not respect the legal order. The criminal investigation nowadays cannot exist without using proactive techniques – no matter if it takes place in Poland or USA. Thus the problem emerges how to choose when these techniques should be used and who should make this decision. The key-guarantee of respecting human rights in this case is external control of police activities. Proactive techniques are usually kept secret; therefore control seems to be impossible. Disclosure in criminal trial is the necessary condition for preventing abuses. Post fact revealing of all the actions taken by the Police is the best way to ensure legality. Both Polish and American legal systems try to balance the right to a fair trial and efficiency of an investigation. Surveillance, infiltration and police "provocation" are used in both countries but the legal solutions are quite different; especially considering checks and balances. It seems that polish legislator intentionally omitted most strict limitations as they cause problems for state authorities. Police lobby must have been much more effective than "human rights" lobby. Analyzing the level of protection of the citizen during criminal trial, it must be noticed that current American solutions are much more appropriate.     

Literature in criminal justice education

Although generally accepted as an interdisciplinary field, criminal justice has focused on the social sciences. Criminal justice education, if it is to remain vital and growing, has to experiment with courses involving material beyond the social sciences. Using examples found in many law schools, criminal justice instructors can employ the art or humanity of literature in their classes. Fiction, especially short stories and one-act dramas, can be inserted into core courses or used as the basis for a special course on criminal justice and literature. The new approach offered by literature encourages students to reexamine various aspects of the criminal justice system.     

Spatial justice and criminal victimization

Spatial variation in crime rates generally has been attributed to differences in culture, economic status, and the social organization of communities. Rarely have policies and practices of criminal justice professionals been examined as causes of this variation. If these policies and practices do place citizens at a higher risk of victimization, a sense of fairness requires that all communities in a region share equally in this increase. This article examines the spatial justice resulting from sentencing practices in Pennsylvania. It demonstrates that certain locations in Philadelphia bear an unequal burden because of these practices. The relatively high crime rates of these areas are due partly to decisions made by criminal justice professionals.     

Teaching restorative justice to education and criminal justice majors

In academia, departments in Education and Sociology/Criminal Justice are in different colleges, but professionals in these fields frequently interact, such as probation officers working in schools and teachers working in prisons. This paper describes a course that addressed a commonality of the two by focusing on Restorative Justice. The content of the course was multi-disciplinary and co-taught by two professors from these different disciplines, and students were from a wide range of majors. Not only did the course content focus on Restorative Justice, this perspective guided how the course was taught. All classes were conducted within a Circle, students participated in the creation of the syllabus, students contracted for grades, and students organized many of the discussions. Emphasis was on critical analysis of Restorative Justice practices and theories. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations were provided as well as reflections by the teachers.     

Conservative ideology in criminology and criminal justice

As often as the label “conservative” is used in criminological and criminal justice books, papers, articles, lectures and discussions, rarely is the substance of what “conservative” might mean raised. Its use as a prejoritive by those who are not conservative clouds the word and the complex of ideas it represents with a negative imagery. The author, a confessed conservative, seeks to dispel that cloud by identifying the common features of contemporary American conservative thought in its five major divisions: secular and theological fundamentalism, core conservatism, conservative pragmatism, and libertarian conservatism. How adherents of each of these five camps impact on criminal justice policy and criminological theory is explained. Proposals for a conservative pedagogy in criminal justice are offered to sympathizers and a conservative who’s who and reading list are provided for further reading.     

General systems theory and criminal justice

Criminal justice agencies are organized sequentially — “output” from one agency is “input” to the next — but most scholars argue that criminal justice is not a system in a theoretical sense. In this article, it is argued that general systems theory (GST) reveals important insights into criminal justice structures and functions. Specifically, it is argued that the criminal justice system processes “cases” rather than people, and that the common goal of criminal justice processing is to “close cases so that they stay closed.” It also is argued that processing capacity progressively declines, in that at each system point the subsequent agency cannot input as many cases as the previous agency can output. Each agency therefore experiences “backward pressure” to close cases in order to reduce input to the next agency. Overall, this article highlights that criminal justice agents and agencies are best understood as operating in the context of the larger whole, thus it is concluded that criminal justice is a system in the sense of general systems theory.     

Linear programming in criminal justice administration

Most criminal justice administrators can no longer rely on a single problem solving technique. Consequently, effective administrators must become familiar with (though no experts in) various techniqes. Linear programming (LP) is a powerful managerial technique which provides narrow-range solutions to problems in which the impact of key variables is both linear and certain. LP is especially useful when applied to problems involving the allocation of limited resources. This article discusses a simple how-to appraoach to LP, which is a mathematical problem solving computation that provides solutions which can be applied under conditions of certainty. Besides defining the key characteristics of LP, this article illustrates the procedures used to calculate the simplex method, the most widely used method for calculating a set of LP equations. The simplex method is mathematically efficient because it considers only the best solutions with a minimum number of solutions computed. Once the solution is computed, it is relatively easy to interpret the computer output.