Introduction to Criminal Justice
Part A
1. With criminology, theChicago Schoolalso known as the Ecological School is the first scholarly literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s that focused on urban sociology and involved ethnographic fieldwork as well as theoretical frameworks.
2. Cessare Beccaria was an Italian criminologist, who is also considered one of the most talented jurists. He produced On Crime and Punishments in 1764which advocated for a lack of torture and a lack of the death penalty for those convicted of crime.
3. A complaint is when someone who has a problem with someone else brings it before the court. These complaints can either be of a civil or criminal matter. An information is the information that the court receives regarding matters before the court. These are documents that are handled within courtrooms. A grand jury indictment is set forth by a prosecutor and is presented by the prosecutor to a grand jury at the federal level of the United States government.
4. The adversarial legal system is based on the English model of law. With this system, two parties involved debate on the guilt or innocence of a person or persons. The inquisitorial system is used in most civil law situations. A judge and the police are involved with this system.
5. Punishment may include a fine, penalty or imprisonment. Philosophically, it is important that a punishment be doled out by an authority, involves a loss to the convicted, is done due to an offence and the person who is given the punishment is indeed the person who is responsible for the offence.
Part B
1. In a given case, it is the judge that decides on sentencing and would make the final decision regarding the death penalty. If the jury rules in favor of the death penalty, the judge would or may factor that into his or her sentencing; however the final decision of whether or not the death penalty is imposed is up to the judge. As well, judges have sentencing guidelines that are determined by the federal government and/or the Attorney General in a given state that would help them to make decisions, such as the guidelines of the Supreme Court, on what factors are at play in a given case that would warrant a sentencing of the death penalty.
2. Apartfromdiscretionaryreview,supremecourtspermitdirectappeal,orappealbbyright,onalimitedsetofcases.Atthestatelevel,appealsoffirst-degreemurderanddeathpenaltycasesareheardbysupremecourts,bypassingtheintermediatecourtofappeals.TheU.S.SupremeCourthearsdirectappealsofcasesinvolvingfederalreapportionment, disputes betweenstates,andafewotherissues (Court of Last Resort, n.d).
3. Freud discusses in 1928 about the absence of love or empathy that is present in a psychopath’s mind. Brain map imaging also indicates that the mind of a psychopath is indeed different from the minds of other people who are not psychopaths. The “house of a psychopathy” is characterized by no attachment, under arousal and minimum anxiety. According to Hare (2003), psychopaths also lack the ability to internalize things. Psychopaths have problems with identifications and interjections.
4. Personal relationships and homosexual relationships in women’s prisons tend to be more based on friendship and do not involve as much violence as they tend to in men’s prisons.
5. A court-appointed attorney is paid for by the government and usually defends the plaintiff. A public defender is also paid for by the government and usually defends the defendant. A contract lawyer is a private lawyer that works either with a firm and/or independently and is on contract to be the client’s lawyer for a defendant in a criminal matter and for both the plaintiff and defendant in a civil matter.
6. Preventive detention is when an accused person is arrested and then put into jail or detained. The accused person must go through a bail hearing or an arraignment hearing shortly thereafter where they are usually let out on bond with certain conditions to their release until the trial takes place or decide to plead guilty if they are guilty.
7. Teen court is also known as youth court or peer court and is operated by youth volunteers. It acts similarly to the way traditional courts are set up, with the exception that the teen courts are meant to try to help the teen not to commit a crime again and do public service or volunteer work as a way to pay for the crimes they have done. Sometimes as well counselling is involved to try to solve the problem that is at hand.
8. The exclusionary rule forbids evidence that is not allowed in a criminal case. This ultimately prevents evidence that violates the U.S. Constitution and to protect the rights of U.S. citizens and the persons who reside within the United States that have committed crimes so that their constitutional rights can be upheld.
9. Ellwyn Stoddard identified the following as being aspects of police misconduct: bribery, chiseling, extortion, favoritism, mooching, perjury, prejudice, premeditated theft, shakedown and shopping.
10. InVarieties of Police Behavior, Wilson sought to understand the nature of police work by starting at the bottom of the chain of command (rather than at the top) with the cop-on-the-beat. What he learned was that the “patrolman’s role is defined more by his responsibility for maintaining order than by his responsibility for enforcing the law.” Patrolmen do not enforce clear rules; they use the substantial discretion at their disposal to “handle the situation.” The difficulty of their job is “exacerbated by the fact that the patrolman’s discretion is exercised in an emotional, apprehensive, and perhaps hostile environment.” That means that they must make quick judgments about people’s intentions and dangerousness on the basis of very limited information. These “situational imperatives” make hierarchical control extraordinarily difficult. Thus, cops on the beat expect their managers to support them. But their managers have very little control over the ways that discretion is used — or abused — at the street level. And they cannot simply ignore citizen complaints about official misconduct. There is no obvious solution to this problem. Police departments arecoping organizations, in which internal controls will always be weak or non-existent.
Wilson described the various styles —watchman,legalistic, andservice— that police departments developed to cope with this problem. One important way the styles differ is the emphasis they place on law enforcement rather than on order maintenance. Wilson observed that cities run by professional managers or with a strong “good government” tradition tended to favor the former; cities run by elected politicians tended to favor the latter. Here, once again, are the consequences of the amateur-professional divide. And here, once again, Wilson suspected that the amateurs, with their inordinate faith in impersonal rules, had gotten things wrong (R. Shep, 2012).
References
Court of last resort. (n.d.)West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. (2008). Retrieved June 29 2016 fromhttp://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Court+of+last+resort
Freud S. (1928). Dostoevsky and parricide. Standard Edition, XXI, 177-194.
Hare RD. (2003). Hare psychopathy checklist-revised 2nd edition technical manual. Toronto: Multihealth Systems, Inc.
R. Shep Melnick. (2012). “Political Science as a Vocation: An Appreciation of the Life and Work of James Q. Wilson,”New York: The Forum.