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Author: Erin I. Kelly
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989414
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration. The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.
Author: Erin I. Kelly
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989414
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Get Book Here
Book Description
Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration. The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.
Author: Larry Laudan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848901995
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
This is a book about the law's failure as a system of empirical inquiry. While the US Supreme Court repeatedly says that the aim of a trial is to find out the truth about a crime, there is abundant evidence that many of the rules of evidence and legal procedure are not truth-conducive. Quite the contrary; many are truth-thwarting. Relevant evidence of defendant's guilt is often excluded; reasonable inferences from the available evidence are likewise often excluded. When a defendant elects not to testify, jurors are told to draw no inculpatory inferences from the former's refusal to be questioned. If evidence of prior crimes committed by the defendant is admitted (and often it is excluded), jurors are strictly told to use them only for deciding whether the defendant lied during his testimony and not as evidence of his guilt. Making matters worse, the most important evidence rule of all (saying that defendant can be convicted only if there are no reasonable doubts about his guilt) is monumentally vague; and judges are under firm instruction to decline jurors' frequent requests to explain what a 'reasonable doubt' is. Lastly, this book examines the fact that American courts collect little information about how often they convict the innocent and no information about how often they acquit the guilty. This is tragic because ignorance of the error rates in trials and in plea bargains means that citizens have no grounds for confidence in the judicial system; such a condition of non-transparency should be unacceptable in a democracy. Reform is urgent and this book sketches some of the necessary changes.
Author: James Gobert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780406950062
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 422
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Book Description
Critiques the application of the current criminal law system to corporate wrongdoing and assesses the potential for legal control of corporate criminality.
Author: George P. Fletcher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780195136951
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 930
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Book Description
This is a reprint of a book first published by Little, Brown in 1978. George Fletcher is working on a new edition which will be published by OUP in three volumes, the first of which is scheduled to appear in January 2001. Rethinking Criminal Law is still perhaps the most influential and often cited theoretical work on American criminal law. This reprint will keep this classic work available until the new edition can be published.
Author: Gregg D. Caruso
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484700
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
Caruso argues against retributivism and develops an alternative for addressing criminal behavior that is ethically defensible and practical.
Author: Douglas Husak
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198043996
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
The United States today suffers from too much criminal law and too much punishment. Husak describes the phenomena in some detail and explores their relation, and why these trends produce massive injustice. His primary goal is to defend a set of constraints that limit the authority of states to enact and enforce penal offenses. The book urges the weight and relevance of this topic in the real world, and notes that most Anglo-American legal philosophers have neglected it. Husak's secondary goal is to situate this endeavor in criminal theory as traditionally construed. He argues that many of the resources to reduce the size and scope of the criminal law can be derived from within the criminal law itself-even though these resources have not been used explicitly for this purpose. Additional constraints emerge from a political view about the conditions under which important rights such as the right implicated by punishment-may be infringed. When conjoined, these constraints produce what Husak calls a minimalist theory of criminal liability. Husak applies these constraints to a handful of examples-most notably, to the justifiability of drug proscriptions.
Author: John Braithwaite
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521356688
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Crime, Shame and Reintegration is a contribution to general criminological theory. Its approach is as relevant to professional burglary as to episodic delinquency or white collar crime. Braithwaite argues that some societies have higher crime rates than others because of their different processes of shaming wrongdoing. Shaming can be counterproductive, making crime problems worse. But when shaming is done within a cultural context of respect for the offender, it can be an extraordinarily powerful, efficient and just form of social control. Braithwaite identifies the social conditions for such successful shaming. If his theory is right, radically different criminal justice policies are needed - a shift away from punitive social control toward greater emphasis on moralizing social control. This book will be of interest not only to criminologists and sociologists, but to those in law, public administration and politics who are concerned with social policy and social issues.
Author: Bebhinn Donnelly-Lazarov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702983X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Extends and adapts G. E. M. Anscombe's philosophy to reveal attempting as a subjective species of intentional action. Locates criminal attempts therein.
Author: Laura Ausserladscheider Jonas
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900447093X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
War crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression (so-called ‘core crimes’) often could not be committed without financial assistance. This book examines the basis for individual criminal liability under international law for persons who finance core crimes. Despite the need for clear rules, neither international courts nor scholars agree upon whether or not, or under what circumstances, such liability exists. To determine the minimum standard of liability, this work analyses the legal rules relating to complicity, both under international criminal law and domestically in twenty selected jurisdictions in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America and Oceania. The aim of these analyses is to determine whether there are general principles of law recognised by the community of States regarding the minimum standard of liability for aiders and abettors. This book proposes a comparative framework for assessing legal rules relating to complicity, and it advances a normative claim as to how legal rules should be structured concerning the criminal responsibility of individuals who finance the commission of core crimes. The analysis of the applicable international law and the comparative analysis of national jurisdictions lead to the conclusion that, currently, the minimum standard of knowledge for aiding and abetting is active knowledge. However, the author argues that this standard should be revised to include wilful blindness. Regarding the intent requirement, the analyses find that dolus eventualis is included in the definition of intent.
Author: R A Duff
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1847317170
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
In this long-awaited book, Antony Duff offers a new perspective on the structures of criminal law and criminal liability. His starting point is a distinction between responsibility (understood as answerability) and liability, and a conception of responsibility as relational and practice-based. This focus on responsibility, as a matter of being answerable to those who have the standing to call one to account, throws new light on a range of questions in criminal law theory: on the question of criminalisation, which can now be cast as the question of what we should have to answer for, and to whom, under the threat of criminal conviction and punishment; on questions about the criminal trial, as a process through which defendants are called to answer, and about the conditions (bars to trial) given which a trial would be illegitimate; on questions about the structure of offences, the distinction between offences and defences, and the phenomena of strict liability and strict responsibility; and on questions about the structures of criminal defences. The net result is not a theory of criminal law; but it is an account of the structure of criminal law as an institution through which a liberal polity defines a realm of public wrongdoing, and calls those who perpetrate (or are accused of perpetrating) such wrongs to account.
