Today’s society finds it necessary question to what range a jury can take the laws of America, change them, and make them their own. A jury can subject laws created through aggressive hindsight and discussion which leads to a dismissal of a case. This leaves the question as to if jury nullification weakens the rule of law that is in the American Constitution. The altercations of the laws are the result of the juries repeated use of jury nullification. If juries continue to use jury nullification, it will result in a weakened democratic system.
The fact that officers know that illegally obtained (but true) evidence will quite possibly be thrown out, and therefore dangerous criminals will be freed, will encourage them to follow the proper procedures. (Woodfin, 2009) In addition, there are already several exceptions to requiring a warrant, such as “stop-and-frisk”, airport and school searches, voluntary searches, and emergency situations (Scheb, 2008) While these arguments supported the continued use of the exclusionary rule, there are also many argue against its value to our criminal justice system. One of the most
Jury Nullification For many years the question of whether jury nullification should be allowed has been debated. Some believe that it is a great decision that juries can make to regulate the influence of legislature. For others they think that jury nullification should not be allowed and it gives too much power to the jury to the point where they can ignore laws. There is a small minority of people that think jury nullification should be allowed but have some sort of boundary or rules that could be put in place, such as the jury explaining why they believe the law is unjust. Ultimately, the facts and arguments should be examined on both sides so that a decision can be made on whether to keep jury nullification the same or whether it is in the nation’s best interest to change it by either limiting it in some way or abolishing it completely.
Illegal Immigration Is illegal immigration a good thing or a bad thing? A lot of people have their opinions. Some say it’s a good thing and some say it’s a bad thing. There is plenty information out there supporting both sides of the argument. In this essay I am going to talk about how illegal immigration can be a good thing but also can be a bad thing for some people.
Eyewitness testimony can leave a deep and lasting impression on the jury, perjury is a harshly frowned upon crime as lying whilst under oath is practically a mockery of the integrity and legitimacy of the court system. However perjury is defined as the act of knowingly making a false statement while under oath – determining the truth is made difficult enough without the added possibility that the witness may not actually be aware of inaccuracies in their testimony. Eye witness testimony is evidence of what a witness believes to have occurred and although eye witness testimonies aid in making a conviction creditable they are often backed up by a lot of supporting evidence as an eye witness testimony can be harmful to a conviction as memories change. The growing length of time, the emotion experienced before and after the event and the pace of which the event happened can alter the memories drastically, there is also the chance that memories can be altered by third parties, enhanced features and false claims; the list above are just some reason for why our court system doesn’t base conviction on eye witness claims and try to find as much supporting evidence as possible to from a creditable conviction. One of the first identifiable flaws in the case of James Taylor is that his conviction was based on eye witness testimonies that throughout the case had been inconsistent and altered after the witnesses were shown a photo of James Taylor several months after the crime had occurred and given information about his past however the witnesses remained unsure and were left with the possibility that it could’ve been him.
4 Pg. 1) It is clear the writers of the constitution used views on natural law when they put in, “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The makers of the constitution wrote this because they believed the people of the colonies were not being treated fairly by British government and they were not happy. They believed this gave the citizens of the colony every right to overthrow the government based on natural law when they said, “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government,
Thoreau wrote the Essay on Civil Disobedience, in which he addressed the question, “when do larger moral imperatives justify violating a law supported by the majority”. His response was that when a law “… is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law’’. This follows from basic English Common Law, in which you can do something as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else. Thoreau’s philosophy is that you disobey a command (law) when it is hurting someone else. Another area of his thinking is that government is symbolic of a ‘machine’, and man should commit non-violent disobedience to ‘gain access to the machine’.
Thus, as this happens, it would be right for punishment as this is believed to wrong. In the United State’s Court Systems, the conventional method is for jurors as “evaluator of fact” and judges as the interpreter of the law and the instructor of the jury with regards to the application of the law. In an instance wherein the jury replaces its personal interpretation of the law and ignores the law fully to come up with a verdict, this results to jury nullification. In the courts, the commonly established perception of jury nullification is when a juror acknowledges power but has no right to nullify the law. Jury nullification is frequently practiced, but rarely occurs, in criminal trials and theoretically applicable to civil trials too – where it is focus to civil procedural solutions.
Summary for Racism and Juvenile Justice The Juvenile Justice topic I chose to focus my term paper on is “Racism and the Juvenile Justice System.” This topic has been very controversial due to the implications of racism being practiced by judges, attorneys, police and the justice system as a whole. My report will focus on the blatant disparities between minorities and Caucasian juveniles. I will present documentation showing extreme differences when both parties are arrested for the same crime but the minority is treated far worse than the Caucasian juvenile. I will also show that this is not a new issue but has been around for many years. Due to more organizations taking interest into the fair treatment of “all” juveniles, the unfair treatment is coming out to the public.
While these issues become more and more a problem, people are beginning to speak up on each sides. From ordinary people, all the way to US senators, people are proposing new ideas that can impact the laws of gun control. Finding this perfect balance of gun control can be rather difficult, even though many people become outraged when laws are put against their side. Gun control is like many other controversial topics, exploring both sides and taking feedback as well as inputting that feedback to making new laws may be the only way a happy medium can be