Justice for All: Putting Victims at the Heart of Criminal Justice?

This article considers the claim in the government's White Paper, Justice for All , to put victims and witnesses at the heart of the criminal justice system and argues that there is an unresolved tension within the paper between instrumentalist crime control concerns and intrinsic concerns for the rights of victims and witnesses. It is argued that many of the proposals now contained in the latest Criminal Justice Bill are so preoccupied with rebalancing the system away from offenders that they risk doing injustice to defendants with little tangible benefit to victims and witnesses in terms of rights and remedies.     

Technology and Criminal Justice

The extent and use of technology in the British criminal justice system is uneven. Two areas are examined; first where technology is used in prisons or by the police, and secondly when it is used to develop new sanctions, as with electronic monitoring, or as attachments to existing sanctions such as drug testing. Technology in prisons is mainly in the form of perimeter security, and in the police through CCTV cameras or databases. In the second the emphasis is on tracker systems which gives the supervisor greater control. Technological development in criminal justice is not without its critics. Some regard existing technological developments with suspicion, seeing them as a means of enhancing control, or as an attack on traditional liberal values, or more importantly as an extension of a form of behaviourism which is concerned only with the observable act. Others note the expensive failures of technology where systems fail to work or are delivered late. It is suggested a Government study is required to examine existing technologies and its likely future impact whether on the criminal justice system generally or on those working within it or as inmates.     

全球化和刑事司法

刑事司法的全球化正在逐步成为现实。而且全球化的进程旨在在世界范围内采取联合行动预防和惩治某些特定的犯罪。然而,刑事司法全球化的构建需要建立在统一的刑事司法文化基础上,与修正的报应模式和法律与秩序模式不同的是,刑事司法全球化必须有整合一致的人权文化。提高个体、政治、社会和经济人权的整体文化,是保障建立刑事司法全球化的最佳途径,它服务于国际公共价值和秩序,同时还致力于社会公正,确保相关人员,特别是被害人和被告人的权利保障。     

联合国刑事司法准则与我国刑事法律改革若干问题

1998年10月5日,我国签署了《公民权利和政治权利公约》。该公约最为明确、集中、具体地规定了联合国刑班司法准则．我们有必要将我国的刑事立法与联合国刑事司法准则相对照．寻找差距．并提出改革、完善的具体措施。从而推动我国刑事法律向前发展。试就涉及刑法、刑事诉讼法方面的问题作了一些探讨。     

Participatory Democracy and Criminal Justice

This essay asks if there is a role for an active public in ratcheting down the harsh politics of crime control in the United States and the United Kingdom that has led to increased use of the criminal law and greater severity in punishment. It considers two opposing answers offered by political and legal theorists and then begins to develop a participatory democratic framework for institutional reform.     

复和正义和刑事调解

犯罪自产生以来 ,其恶性随着人类文明的进步而加大 ,相反 ,人类用于对付犯罪的刑罚手段却渐趋轻缓和文明。毫无疑问 ,到目前为止 ,刑罚仍是对付犯罪最为有效的手段之一 ,审判也是解决犯罪问题的主要方式。但由于建立在报应基础之上的刑罚 ,本质上是一种“以恶制恶” ,因此 ,其弊端也是显而易见的。由此 ,在处理犯罪问题时需要引入复和正义 ,并进一步扩大刑事调解范围     

American Criminal Justice Exposed

In The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and Its Consequences, Matthew Kramer argues that none of the standard rationales used to justify capital punishment successfully vindicates it and that a new justification, the purgative rationale, justifies capital punishment for defilingly evil offenders. In this article, it is argued, first, that a version of retributivism that adheres to the lex talionis as Kramer understands it does seem to call exclusively for the death penalty. Second, it is submitted that the purgative rationale is over-inclusive inasmuch as Kramer considers it applicable to certain offenders with abusive or deprived backgrounds, some offenders indoctrinated to adhere to pernicious ideologies that have impelled their crimes, and wrongdoers who have sincerely repented. Third, doubts are expressed about whether the purgative rationale justifies the execution of any offenders. Even if it is true that the continued existence of an extravagantly evil offender represents an affront to humanity, as Kramer suggests, a moral obligation to execute him does not follow. Since repentance is intrinsically valuable and since repentance would extinguish the affront to humanity, the community in which an unrepentant evil offender abides is duty-bound to foster repentance on the part of the offender by imposing banishment or life imprisonment, sanctions that afford the offender the most extensive opportunity for repentance. The community is therefore obligated to impose one of these sanctions instead of capital punishment.     

The Criminal Justice Approach: Case Examples

The article presents a special form of a European comparative synopsis. For this case examples have been chosen ranging from administrative or minor (criminal) offences to increasingly serious offences and offenders. In this way it can be comparatively demonstrated how the criminal justice systems studied handle specific cases and whether they do so in a similar or different way.     

The International Criminal Court and Africa: Exemplary Justice

This is a theoretical and empirical investigation into the causal link (if any) between international criminal trials and preventing violence through exemplary prosecutions. Specifically how do representative trials of persons accused of having the greatest responsibility for the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole, supposedly bind recurrent violence? The argument pursued is that by using an accused as an example, a court engages in an indirect and uncertain substitution of personal rights for social harmony and order. These prosecutions combine a peculiar rhetoric, logic and aesthetic, all which substitute the responsibilities for a society in general to a particular individual in order to redeem that society by transferring its communal responsibility onto the individual punished as a form of atonement or expiation. International and domestic trials, as well as truth and reconciliation commissions, are part of a suite of options addressing communal mass violence that can work in tandem. However, because those convicted do not have a monopoly on criminality, nor do those merely reconciled have a monopoly on virtue, exemplification through punishment only targets a few on behalf of the many. Indeed such a redemptively sacrificial economy distinguishes legal justice from mere vengeance.     

Assessing Criminal Justice Practice Using Social Justice Theory

In this article, I introduce two of the leading theories of social justice put forth by John Rawls and David Miller. Then, I assess criminal justice practice, from law-making to corrections, in terms of ways in which it is consistent and inconsistent with these theories of social justice. Throughout the article, I also identify ways in which criminal justice practice is inconsistent with social justice. Finally, I make recommendations for reforming criminal justice to make it more consistent with social justice.