Criminal Justice

Violence against lesbians and gay men has increasingly captured media and scholarly attention. But these reports tend to focus on one segment of the LGBT community—white, middle class men—and largely ignore that part of the community that arguably suffers a larger share of the violence—racial minorities, the poor, and women. In Violence against Queer People, sociologist Doug Meyer offers the first investigation of anti-queer violence that focuses on the role played by race, class, and gender. Drawing on interviews with forty-seven victims of violence, Meyer shows that LGBT people encounter significantly different forms of violence—and perceive that violence quite differently—based on their race, class, and gender. His research highlights the extent to which other forms of discrimination—including racism and sexism—shape LGBT people's experience of abuse. He reports, for instance, that lesbian and transgender women often described violent incidents in which a sexual or a misogynistic component was introduced, and that LGBT people of color sometimes weren't sure if anti-queer violence was based solely on their sexuality or whether racism or sexism had also played a role. Meyer observes that given the many differences in how anti-queer violence is experienced, the present media focus on white, middle-class victims greatly oversimplifies and distorts the nature of anti-queer violence. In fact, attempts to reduce anti-queer violence that ignore race, class, and gender run the risk of helping only the most privileged gay subjects. Many feel that the struggle for gay rights has largely been accomplished and the tide of history has swung in favor of LGBT equality. Violence against Queer People, on the contrary, argues that the lives of many LGBT people—particularly the most vulnerable—have improved very little, if at all, over the past thirty years.

When seeking drug reform we should avoid the deeply entrenched anti-drug narratives that have dominated drug policy debate. These narratives are often rooted in fallacy, distortion and sweeping generalisations, whereas, reform must maintain integrity and stay firmly rooted in reason, rationale, science and evidence. We need to be clear, we don't have a global drug problem - we have a global drug policy problem, and the cause of the problem isn't gangsters - it's governments.

This chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Criminal Process offers a critical, comparative account of pretrial evidence disclosure laws in common law jurisdictions. Disclosure law was once minimal throughout the common law world; the longstanding norm was that one party need not aid the other's preparation by sharing evidence prior to trial. Substantial pretrial disclosure duties are comparatively recent, and reflect several developments. One is the fact that trials are now exceptional as the process by which to resolve prosecutions; guilty pleas are the norm. Evidence can face adversarial scrutiny, and facilitate negotiated resolutions, only if parties have pretrial access to it. Another is changes in the nature of evidence; expert analysis, for example, often cannot be confronted effectively without advance preparation. Moreover, pretrial disclosure has gradually become understood to make both trials and negotiated resolutions more efficient, and—despite some dissent—to improve the truth-finding capacity and fairness of criminal process.
Common law jurisdictions show considerable similarity on disclosure rules. In the last half-century, there emerged a strong consensus that the government must disclose relevant evidence in its possession that does not support the prosecution's case and thus that it would not present at trial. Rules also typically impose greater duties on the defense to disclose significant portions of its evidence before trial. The critical exception to this international consensus relates to inculpatory evidence. Rules in England, Canada, and elsewhere outside the United States generally require the prosecution to disclose evidence it will rely on to prove guilt. Many U.S. jurisdictions, however, have resisted this trend, mandate very little prosecution disclosure, and even limit judicial authority to compel such disclosure.
As a framework for critical assessment, the chapter examines structural choices that adversarial justice systems must make in disclosure schemes and their rationales doing so. Those choices include how much to empower judges rather than parties to control disclosure, and how to enforce parties' obligations to disclose when their partisan interest counsels otherwise. Those decisions reflect assessments about how to balance competing epistemic and non-epistemic goals including the goal of accurate truth-determination and divergent interests of the parties, constitutional principles, and the security or privacy victims and witnesses.

The book deals with the relations between anger, emotions and trial rites in sixteenth century. After a general introduction on the values of emotions, justice and anger the book presents the story of Marcantonio Trissino, the grandson of Giangiorgio Trissino, the famous man of letters and humanist. In the year 1583 Marcantonio, abruptily and amazingly, killed Giulio Cesare Trissino outside Vicenza's dome while he was surrounded and protected by numerous friends and followers. Giulio Cesare Trissino was suspected by the public opinion being the mandant of Ciro Trissino's murder, the father of Marcantonio, killed in february 1576 in his palladian villa located in Cornedo, a Vicentine village, by a group of goons, masked and dressed in black suits. During the trial instructed in Padua by appointment of the Counsel of ten, Marcantonio Trissino defended his violent behavior advocating that his mind was run over by anger and furor. The trial rhetoric vehicles the great themes of vendetta and honor and introduce to the tensions between retributive and restorative justice. The second part of the book presents some of the documents which availed to the lawyers for preparing Marcantonio Trissino's defence.

The essay deals with the judicial activity of a criminal court of the Regno Lombardo-Veneto in the firs half of nineteenth century. It is particularly analysed the legal reasoning of the judges in front of crimes which were submitted to their jurisdiction. Their discussions were about the codex foresight, but also of clues and evidences.

Unlike the bulk of penological scholarship dealing with managerialist reforms, this article calls for greater theoretical and research attention to the often pernicious impact of managerialism on criminal justice professionals. Much in an ideal-typical fashion, light is shed on: the reasons why contemporary penal bureaucracies endeavor systematically to strip criminal justice work of its inherently affective nature; the structural forces that ensure control over officials; the processes by which those forces come into effect; and the human consequences of submission to totalitarian bureaucratic milieus. It is suggested that the heavy preoccupation of present-day penality with the predictability and calculability of outcomes entails the atomization of professionals and the dehumanization of their work. This is achieved through a kaleidoscope of direct and indirect mechanisms that naturalize and/or legitimate acquiescence.

The termination of parental rights of parents with mental disabilities is a growing and crucial issue.  In 2010, an estimated 45.9 million adults in the U.S. had experienced a mental illness in the past year. This represents 20% of the adult population.  More than five million children in the U.S. have a parent with a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression.  Courts and child welfare systems too often assume that a parent is not amenable to treatment and is a danger to his or her child when strong symptoms of mental turmoil surface.  Some studies report that as many as 70 to 80% of mentally ill parents have lost custody.  Public systems are overwhelmed by this matter in an era of shrinking resources for such systems.  However, often parents with mental health needs are willing to accept treatment, are able to participate in programming, and are worthy of regaining custody. 
• There are gaps in federal and state law on this issue.  The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) requires that state child welfare agencies and courts make “reasonable efforts” towards family reunification before the termination of parental rights (TPR) can take place.  However, federal statutes and case law provide little guidance to states about what “reasonable efforts” means, and states have been left to interpret that concept individually.  Many state statutes even enable a “bypass” of the “reasonable efforts” standard when “clear and convincing” evidence allegedly shows that a parent's mental condition cannot be changed.  Many states likewise place unjust, statutory and common law time limits on family reunification efforts in TPR cases. 
• Gaps in legal scholarship are also evident here.  Legal scholars have begun to discuss the inadequacy of reunification services for mentally challenged parents, the tenuous link between mental health services and child welfare agency action, the need for enhanced attorney and child welfare worker preparation in this arena, and a need for cultural competence in reunification services.  Others have even suggested that there be a rebuttable presumption in favor of family reunification.  However, those discussions lack a sound theoretical basis and a practical application of solutions. 
• As is featured in previous work of this author, a new theoretical framework of Family Systems Theory-- which is utilized in clinical behavioral health and human rights arenas-- must first be applied.  Under this theoretical framework, the vague and outdated “best interests of the child” standard, which is a legal standard used exclusively in family law cases, must be replaced with a more sound standard of “holistic family wellbeing.”  Vulnerability Theory can add credence to this theoretical framework.
• The discussion of reunification services for families featuring parents with mental disabilities should then be conducted utilizing Family Systems Theory and a legal standard of “holistic family wellbeing.”  Under these circumstances, the “family integrity” defended by our highest courts through the “reasonable efforts” provision should be upheld through the delivery of highly effective family reunification services.  The application of Family Systems Theory ultimately requires reform in the law, service delivery, and professional practice.  State and federal legislators must revisit the “reasonable efforts” standard, to include specific statutory language about the types of reunification services required and the need for flexible timelines.  Courts, child welfare agencies, and service providers need to deliver proven reunification services and coordinated mental health treatment.  In specific court cases, attorneys for the parent(s), the child(ren), and the state should focus on “holistic family wellbeing” utilizing collaborative family law and alternative dispute resolution, while advancing the agency of their clients.  Child welfare workers and practitioners likewise require training in advanced methods of conflict resolution and clinical practice.  These recommendations can ensure more effective family law practice and more successful family - serving systems.

The need for greater efficiency in legal process is an undisputed premise of modern policy, and efficiency’s virtues hardly merit debate, notably by the U.S. Supreme Court.  A central part of the story of modern adjudication is the steady gains in case processing efficiency.  This, above all else, explains the “vanishing trial” and its replacement by civil settlement and, in criminal courts, by plea bar-gaining.
Defining efficiency in any context, however, is a more complicated en-deavor than courts, policymakers, and many commentators commonly acknowledge.  It requires first defining ends and means, and even whether a given practice is an end or a mean.  Jury decision making, for example, was once an end of trial process that served public interests beyond rendering verdicts.  Over time it has become merely a means; case resolution became the overriding dominant goal.  Making a process more efficient can thus change both its nature and purposes.  Moreover, efficiency’s consequences are more ambiguous than is often recognized.  Producing any product more cheaply—including criminal convictions—can have a range of effects.  It can reduce production costs if demand is constant; it can help to meet rising demand without a rise in production costs; it can also generate greater demand for the good.
This Essay develops these ideas in criminal adjudication and links adjudication’s efficiency-driven transformation to the expansion of criminal law enforcement and punishment in recent decades.  By lowering the unit-cost of convictions, efficient adjudication can encourage more prosecutions and marginally subsidize more incarceration.  In the process, efficiency has redefined adjudication’s aims and reordered its priorities, valuing clear, measurable aspects such as numbers of convictions and devaluing qualitative components related to juries, participation, the substantive nature of judgments, and perhaps factual accuracy.

As ciências criminais - criminologia, direito penal e política criminal - têm assumido distintas configurações desde a proposta de Franz von Liszt no início do séc. XX. O direito penal já foi a principal ciência que contava com o auxílio de ciências assessórias. Mais adiante, transformou-se no instrumento jurídico da política-criminal. Atualmente, existe a tendência a ver as disciplinas numa condição de igualdade com autonomia científica. As qualidades científicas próprias da criminologia e do direito penal constam insuficientemente sublinhadas, impedindo o melhor funcionamento complementar no entendimento e no tratamento do fenômeno desviante. O presente estudo busca descrever quatro diferenças essenciais entre a criminologia e o direito penal.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada.

While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates.

Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities.

A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.

Aboriginal incarceration rates are much higher than the general Australian population. Moreover, indigenous women represent 34% of the total number of inmates. As if this wasn't enough, the legal and welfare systems are removing indigenous children from their families and culture, serving as a mechanism of forced assimilation.

By Suzi Hutchings for Debates Indígenas.

People abused by angry discipline as children, may tend to abuse or overly punish other people or themselves for perceived wrongs in their adult life. In some individuals, aggressive personality traits may be genetically inherited. The aggressive personality may feel weakened by having guidelines or boundaries for anger. Anger is a normal human emotion, and these guidelines can help express anger in a healthy way.

The visual reconstruction of shooting at Maidan protesters and journalists demonstrates that Maidan protesters were shot by snipers in the Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled buildings during the Maidan massacre in Ukraine on February 20, 2014. The bullet holes identified in government forensic expert reports, videos, and photos from directions of the Maidan-controlled buildings are in the area, height, and directions that match the shooting of the protesters.  The forensic examination reports by government investigators, videos and photos by journalists suggest that journalists from ABC (Australia), ARD TV (Germany) twice, Associate Press, BBC, Sky News, and RT in the Hotel Ukraina rooms facing Maidan were shot at from the Maidan-controlled areas. The visual reconstruction and the same data along with videos and media reports by journalists from these media suggest that ABC News (US) and TVP (Poland) journalists in the Hotel Ukraina were most likely shot at by snipers from the Maidan-controlled Bank Arkada. They suggest that a Ruptly reporter in the Hotel Ukraina was hit by a ricochet from a direction of a Berkut barricade. Russian journalists in other three locations of the Hotel Ukraina were shot at by Maidan snipers and/or by Berkut and Omega, which shot at snipers at the Hotel Ukraina.               

The visual reconstruction based on similar data shows that the Berkut police and Omega were generally shooting above protesters at the second and higher floors of the Hotel Ukraina and in electric poles, a flower box, and trees. Synchronized videos show that Maidan protesters in the massacre zone were in a blind spot below the line of Berkut police fire from behind a truck.             

This is an online appendix H of papers presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston and the “Regimes and Societies in Conflict: Eastern Europe and Russia since 1956” conference by the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University and the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies in Uppsala in 2018.

Abstract: While the use of mapping in criminal justice has increased over the last 30 years, most applications are retrospective - that is, they examine criminal phenomena and related factors that have al-ready occurred. While such retrospective mapping efforts are useful, the true ...

The massacre of almost 50 Maidan protesters on February 20, 2014 was a turning point in Ukrainian politics and a tipping point in the conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. This mass killing of the protesters and the mass shooting of the police that preceded it led to the overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych and gave a start to a civil war in Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. A conclusion promoted by the post-Yanukovych governments and the media in Ukraine that the massacre was perpetrated by government snipers and special police units on a Yanukovych order has been nearly universally accepted by the Western governments, the media, and many scholars. The Ukrainian government investigation identified members of the special company of Berkut as responsible for killings of the absolute majority of the protesters, but did not release any evidence in support, with the exception of videos of the massacre.
              The question is which side organized the “snipers’ massacre.” This paper is the first academic study of this crucial case of the mass killing. It uses a theory of rational choice and a Weberian theory of instrumental rationality to examine actions of major actors both from the Yanukovych government, specifically various police and security forces, and the Maidan opposition, specifically its far right and oligarchic elements, during the massacre.
          The paper analyzes a large amount of evidence from different publicly available sources concerning this massacre and killings of specifics protesters. Qualitative content analysis includes the following data: about 1,500 videos and recordings of live internet and TV broadcasts from mass media and social media in different countries(some 150 gigabytes), news reports and social media posts by more than 100 journalists covering the massacre from Kyiv, some 5,000 photos, and nearly 30 gigabytes of publicly available radio intercepts of snipers and commanders from the special Alfa unit of the Security Service of Ukraine and Internal Troops, and Maidan massacre trial recordings. This study also employs field research on site of the massacre, eyewitness reports by both Maidan protesters and government special units commanders, statements by both former and current government officials, estimates of approximate ballistic trajectories, bullets and weapons used, and types of wounds among both protesters and the police. This study establishes a precise timeline for various events of the massacre, the locations of both the shooters and the government snipers, and the specific timeline and locations of nearly 50 protesters’ deaths. It also briefly analyzes other major cases of violence during and after the “Euromaidan.” This study includes two video appendixes.
            This academic investigation concludes that the massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas. The various evidence that the protesters were killed from these locations include some 70 testimonies, primarily by Maidan protesters, several videos of “snipers” targeting protesters from these buildings, comparisons of positions of the specific protesters at the time of their killing and their entry wounds, and bullet impact signs. The study uncovered various videos and photos of armed Maidan “snipers” and spotters in many of these buildings. The paper presents implications of these findings for understanding the nature of the change of the government in Ukraine, the civil war in Donbas, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine.

The new century brings with it growing interest in crime places. This interest spans theory from the perspective of understanding the etiol- ogy of crime, and practice from the perspective of developing effec- tive criminal justice interventions to reduce crime. We do not attempt a comprehensive treatment of the substantial body of theoretical and empirical research on place and crime

Проаналізовані окремі проблемні питання, пов’язані із направленням кримінального провадження з одного суду до іншого; виявлено «найпопулярніші підстави» для зміни підсудності; зроблено висновок, що сучасна модель зміни підсудності характеризується поліджерельністю та неповнотою правового регулювання, що у кінцевому рахунку призводить до різного тлумачення положень і, як наслідок, до відсутності єдності судової практики; «організаційно-технічний», на перший погляд, характер направлення кримінального провадження з одного суду до іншого не привертає увагу науковців та обумовлює відсутність наукової розробки.

Though in many ways rooted in indigenous Chinese custom and political tradition, the Chinese legal system nevertheless bears the imprint of Western influence. This article uses the Chinese criminal justice system as the medium for exploring the foreign legal traditions -- particularly the civil law tradition of continental Europe and the socialist law tradition of the Soviet Union -- that have influenced the modern Chinese system of law. This Article examines six elements of the structure of the formal criminal justice system, placing special emphasis on those aspects of that system that are derived from, or analogous to, features of European or Soviet civil law. The six elements are: (1) the Organic Law of the People's Courts; (2) the Organic Law of the People's Procuracy; (3) the Code of the Criminal Law; (4) the Code of Criminal Procedure; (5) the Constitution of 1982; and (6) the opinions of the Supreme People's Court. [The article also includes English translations of these six elements.]The article argues that the major legacy bequeathed to the Chinese by the European and Soviet legal traditions is a judiciary which is neither expected, nor able, to exert significant checks or restraints on the arbitrary exercise of state power by the executive and legislative branches of government. The article also asserts that the structure of the formal criminal justice system contains many distinctively Chinese features the thrust of which is to inject flexibility into the criminal justice system so as to allow for the exercise of administrative discretion founded in and guided by political ideology.