Download or read book Prosecutors and Democracy written by Máximo Langer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-26 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the relationship between prosecutors and democracy, this volume throws light on key questions about prosecutors and the role they should play in liberal self-government. Internationally distinguished scholars discuss how prosecutors can strengthen democracy, how they sometimes undermine it, and why it has proven so challenging to hold prosecutors accountable while insulating them from politics. The contributors explore the different ways legal systems have addressed that challenge in the United States, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe. Contrasting those strategies allows an assessment of their relative strengths - and a richer understanding of the contested connections between law and democratic politics. Chapters are in explicit conversation with each other, facilitating comparison and deepening the analysis. This is an important new resource for legal scholars and reformers, political philosophers, and social scientists.
Download or read book The Politics of Federal Prosecution written by Christina L. Boyd and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Federal prosecutors have immense power and discretion to decide when to bring criminal charges, what plea bargains to offer, and how to implement the federal government's legal priorities in their districts. While U.S. Attorneys take pains to emphasize their independence, we know relatively little about the extent to which politics colors federal prosecutorial staffing and decision making. The Politics of Federal Prosecution draws upon a wealth of data from 1990s to the present to examine the interplay of political factors and federal prosecution. First, the authors find that congressional and presidential politics affect who becomes federal prosecutors and how long those individuals serve. Second, the book demonstrates that signals of presidential and congressional preferences, along with local priorities, affect key prosecutorial decisions: whether to bring prosecutions, how to approach plea bargaining negotiations, and when to utilize criminal asset forfeiture to cripple criminal activities. In short, the book demonstrates that politics affects the behavior of U.S. Attorneys at nearly every stage of their service.
Download or read book Crime and Justice Volume 41 written by Michael Tonry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prosecutors are powerful figures in any criminal justice system. They decide what crimes to prosecute, whom to pursue, what charges to file, whether to plea bargain, how aggressively to seek a conviction, and what sentence to demand. In the United States, citizens can challenge decisions by police, judges, and corrections officials, but courts keep their hands off the prosecutor. Curiously, in the United States and elsewhere, very little research is available that examines this powerful public role. And there is almost no work that critically compares how prosecutors function in different legal systems, from state to state or across countries. Prosecutors and Politics begins to fill that void. Police, courts, and prisons are much the same in all developed countries, but prosecutors differ radically. The consequences of these differences are enormous: the United States suffers from low levels of public confidence in the criminal justice system and high levels of incarceration; in much of Western Europe, people report high confidence and support moderate crime control policies; in much of Eastern Europe, people’s perceptions of the law are marked by cynicism and despair. Prosecutors and Politics unpacks these national differences and provides insight into this key area of social control. Since 1979 the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cure.
Download or read book Prosecuting the President written by Andrew Coan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[This book provides a] history of special prosecutors in American politics. For more than a century, special prosecutors have struck fear into the hearts of presidents, who have the power to fire them at any time. How could this be, [the author] asks? And how could the nation entrust such a high responsibility to such subordinate officials? [The author] demonstrates that special prosecutors can do much to protect the rule of law under the right circumstances. Many have been thwarted by the formidable challenges of investigating a sitting president and his close associates; a few have abused the powers entrusted to them. But at their best, special prosecutors function as catalysts of democracy, channeling an unfocused popular will to safeguard the rule of law. By raising the visibility of high-level misconduct, they enable the American people to hold the president accountable. Yet, if a president thinks he can fire a special prosecutor without incurring serious political damage, he has the power to do so. Ultimately, [the author] concludes, only the American people can decide whether the President is above the law."--
Download or read book Free Market Criminal Justice written by Darryl K. Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Free Market Criminal Justice explains how faith in democratic politics and free markets has undermined the rule of law in US criminal process. It argues that, to strengthen the rule of law, US criminal justice needs less democracy, fewer market mechanisms, and more law.
Download or read book U S Attorneys Political Control and Career Ambition written by Banks Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-26 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: United States Attorneys (USAs), the chief federal prosecutors in each judicial district, are key in determining how the federal government uses coercive force against its citizens. How much control do national political actors exert over the prosecutorial decisions of USAs? This book investigates this question using a unique dataset of federal criminal prosecutions between 1986 and 2015 that captures both decisions by USAs to file cases as well as the sentences that result. Utilizing intuitions from principal-agent theory, work on the career ambition of bureaucrats and politicians, and selected case-studies, the authors develop and advance a set of hypotheses about control by the President and Congress. Harnessing variation across time, federal judicial districts, and five legal issue areas - immigration, narcotics, terrorism, weapons, and white-collar crime - Miller and Curry find that USAs are subject to considerable executive influence in their decision making, supporting findings about the increase of presidential power over the last three decades. In addition, they show that the ability of the President to appoint USAs to higher-level positions within the executive branch or to federal judgeships is an important mechanism of that control. This investigation sheds light on how the need to be responsive to popularly-elected principals channels the enormous prosecutorial discretion of USAs.
Download or read book Independent Justice written by Katy Jean Harriger and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Congress created the Office of the Special Prosecutor in 1978. Its mandate was to insure the rule of law, to check abuses of power in the executive branch, and to restore public confidence in government after the Watergate scandal. Harriger (politics, Wake Forest U.) focuses on the symbolic, constitutional, and political dimensions of her subject to provide a comprehensive, in-depth review of the Office of the Special Prosecutor and how it has operated in practice. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Politics and Criminal Prosecution written by Raymond Moley and published by . This book was released on 1929 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Evolving Role of the Public Prosecutor written by Victoria Colvin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern public prosecutor is a figure both powerful and enigmatic. Legal scholars and criminologists often identify “three essential components” of criminal justice systems: police, courts and corrections. Yet increasingly, the public prosecutor occupies a distinct role independent from any of these branches. Acting outside of the court, and therefore largely out of the public eye, the prosecutor’s control over whether and what charges proceed to court can limit judicial discretion on sentencing, open pathways to alternative measures and even deny entry into the criminal justice system entirely. In this sense the prosecutor serves as a true “gatekeeper” to the criminal process. This book addresses key aspects of the evolving role of domestic and international prosecutors in common law and civil law systems in the twenty-first century, and the challenges posed by this evolution. This collection of chapters from respected scholars takes an international, comparative approach and explores how these different legal systems have borrowed theorisations and articulations of the prosecutorial role from each other in adapting the office to changing conditions and expectations. The volume is structured around four main themes relating to the role of the modern prosecutor: the nature of the prosecutor’s office, the role of the prosecutor in investigations, prosecutorial discretion and how it is exercised, and politicisation and accountability of prosecutors. This book is essential for scholars and students in criminal justice, pre-law/legal studies, criminology, justice studies and political science, and is useful as a resource for those interested in legal change around the world.
Download or read book The Prosecutors written by James B. Stewart and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 1987 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Very Good,No Highlights or Markup,all pages are intact.
Download or read book Blind Injustice written by Mark Godsey and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unprecedented view from the trenches, prosecutor turned champion for the innocent Mark Godsey takes us inside the frailties of the human mind as they unfold in real-world wrongful convictions. Drawing upon stories from his own career, Godsey shares how innate psychological flaws in judges, police, lawyers, and juries coupled with a “tough on crime” environment can cause investigations to go awry, leading to the convictions of innocent people. In Blind Injustice, Godsey explores distinct psychological human weaknesses inherent in the criminal justice system—confirmation bias, memory malleability, cognitive dissonance, bureaucratic denial, dehumanization, and others—and illustrates each with stories from his time as a hard-nosed prosecutor and then as an attorney for the Ohio Innocence Project. He also lays bare the criminal justice system’s internal political pressures. How does the fact that judges, sheriffs, and prosecutors are elected officials influence how they view cases? How can defense attorneys support clients when many are overworked and underpaid? And how do juries overcome bias leading them to believe that police and expert witnesses know more than they do about what evidence means? This book sheds a harsh light on the unintentional yet routine injustices committed by those charged with upholding justice. Yet in the end, Godsey recommends structural, procedural, and attitudinal changes aimed at restoring justice to the criminal justice system.
Download or read book The Changing Political Landscape for Elected Prosecutors written by David Alan Sklansky and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years the only serious question about district attorney elections was whether they were pernicious or merely a charade. One view was that running for reelection turned prosecutors into politicians, and that politics demanded that prosecutors appear tough, unforgiving, and staunchly pro-police. The rival view was that prosecutorial elections were meaningless, because incumbents hardly ever lost, and campaigns focused on personalities, not on policies. Recently, though, a surprising number of district attorneys have won office by promising some combination of less aggressive charging, more vigilance against wrongful convictions, and greater scrutiny of the police. This essay examines these results and draws three tentative lessons. First, claims about the inexorable logic of criminal justice politics should be greeted with skepticism. Second, there is room for guarded optimism about electoral democracy as a tool for reforming prosecutors' offices, but voters need better tools for evaluating how those offices are performing. Third, as reformers increase their focus on prosecutorial elections, there is a danger worth bearing in mind: the risk that prosecutorial decision-making will become inappropriately politicized, especially when elections focus on the handling or the outcome of particular cases.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Good Intentions written by Paul Craig Roberts and published by Crown. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thousand years of legal protections against tyranny are being stolen right before our eyes. Under the guise of good intentions, personal liberties as old as the Magna Carta have become casualties in the wars being waged on pollution, drugs, white-collar crime, and all of the other real and imagined social ills. The result: innocent people caught up in a bureaucratic web that destroys lives and livelihoods; businesses shuttered because of victimless infractions; a justice system that values coerced pleas over the search for truth; bullying police agencies empowered to confiscate property without due process. "A devastating indictment of our current system of justice." — Milton Friedman In this provocative book, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton show how the law, which once shielded us from the government, has now become a powerful weapon in the hands of overzealous prosecutors and bureaucrats. Lost is the foundation upon which our freedom rest—the intricate framework of Constitutional limits that protect our property, our liberty, and our lives. Roberts and Stratton convincingly argue that this abuse of government power doesn't have ideological boundaries. Indeed, conservatives and liberals alike use prosecutors, regulators, and courts to chase after their own favorite "devils," to seek punishment over justice and expediency over freedom. The authors present harrowing accounts of people both rich and poor, of CEOs and blue-collar workers who have fallen victim to the tyranny of good intentions, who have lost possessions, careers, loved ones, and sometimes even their lives. This book is a sobering wake-up call to reclaim that which is rightly ours—liberty protected by the rule of law.
Download or read book The Politics of Court Reform written by Melissa Crouch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an analysis of the politics of court reform through a focused review of Indonesia's complex court system.
Download or read book Governing Through Crime written by Jonathan Simon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-03 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal?In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilled over into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime.This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules our everyday life.
Download or read book Politics by Other Means written by Benjamin Ginsberg and published by W W Norton & Company Incorporated. This book was released on 2002 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As scandals increasingly dominate the political agenda, Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter argue in this illuminating book, the United States is entering an era of postelectoral politics, with media revelations, congressional investigations, and judicial proceedings replacing elections as the primary tools of political competition.
Download or read book Prosecuting Heads of State written by Ellen L. Lutz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-16 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1990, 65 former heads of state or government have been legitimately prosecuted for serious human rights or financial crimes. Many of these leaders were brought to trial in reasonably free and fair judicial processes, and some served time in prison as a result. This book explores the reasons for the meteoric rise in trials of senior leaders and the motivations, public dramas, and intrigues that accompanied efforts to bring them to justice. Drawing on an analysis of the 65 cases, the book examines the emergence of regional trends in Europe and Latin America and contains case studies of high-profile trials of former government leaders: Augusto Pinochet (Chile), Alberto Fujimori (Peru), Slobodan Milosevic (former Yugoslavia), Charles Taylor (Liberia and Sierra Leone), and Saddam Hussein (Iraq) – studies written by experts who closely followed their cases and their impacts on wider societies. This is the only book that examines the rise in the number of domestic and international trials globally and tells the tales in readable prose and with fascinating details.
