Balancing Law And Justice Research Paper

1. one thing that surprised me was that you can write a letter to the judge beforehand. Discussing their concerns and recommendations. I thought that you can talk to the judge when you go to court I never knew how you could write a letter to him discussing concerns they have.

In addition to our other rights, we have the rights to enforce the law and judge on our own behalf. We may intervene in cases where our own interests are not directly under threat to help enforce the law of nature. Still, the person who is most likely to enforce the law under these circumstances is the person who has been wronged. The basic principle of justice is that the punishment should be proportionate to the crime. When victims are judging a crime; they likely to judge it of greater severity than an impartial judge. As a result, there will be miscarriages of justice.

The justice system is just but the procedures within are somewhat flawed. Human nature is to have greed and power, that's what crumbles the system. People use the system for what it isn't intended for and get away with it whether it's good or bad. Such as the Tarina Garnet case. Trina Garnett, was a mentally disabled teenage girl who was charged with murder, after setting a fire that killed two people and was sentenced to life in prison.

Criminal law is a construct of the government, enforced through tangible measures. In a democratic society, the government is elected by the citizens, and as such, laws are generally conceived with the aim to reflect whatever ethical or moral standards are presently acceptable. However, in order to be truly effective, some legislation must circumvent current sociological viewpoints in order to create laws that are genuinely in the best interests of society. This results in a delicate balancing act, as lawmakers attempt to weigh the views of the majority against the need for laws to be both reasoned and objective.

While the United States’ justice system has been a model for many countries around the world, the injustice of certain aspects in our court’s system is prominent. Mandatory minimums are just one example the of injustice in our justice system. The Supreme Court has “…casted doubt on the constitutionality of the federal sentencing guidelines used for nearly two decades” (Kenneth Jost, 2004), despite this, nothing has been done to correct it. And while the idea of mandatory minimums is a good thing, they don’t work in the American justice system or in current American society.

Miscarriage of justice is reflected in various states across the nation, where there are far too many occurrences where individuals have been convicted of crimes and subjected to unfair mandatory sentencing. “Mandatory minimum sentencing laws require binding prison terms of a particular length for people convicted of certain federal and state crimes” (Famm, n.d.). “Mandatory minimum sentences imposed by statute are intended to achieve consistency in sentencing at the expense of individual consideration of the contextual sentencing factors” (Harvard Law Review, 2011). “These inflexible, one-size-fits-all sentencing laws may seem like a quick-fix solution for crime, but they undermine justice by preventing judges from fitting the punishment to the individual and the circumstances of their offense” (Famm, n.d) “Mandatory sentencing laws cause federal and state prison populations to soar, leading to overcrowding, exorbitant costs to taxpayers, and diversion of funds from law enforcement” (Famm, n.d.)

Justice is defined by the fairness in protection of rights and punishment of wrongs. This concept intends to offer a fair punishment that fits the offense. The term itself holds a positive connotation, in contrast to the word injustice. The United States’ judicial system built its operations off of granting justice to those put on trial. Judges within the judicial system strive to hold fair trials in order to prosecute offenders accordingly.

It is not without questionable doubt that the United States judiciary branch is in need of a major political reform in terms of the injustice that has become so common within the system. The main purpose of the judicial system is to rightfully resolve disagreements according to law. In 1988, Ronald Kitchen was wrongfully convicted for committing five murders, after serving nearly 21 years in prison in which 13 of them on death row he was released. There was an insufficient amount of evidence against him, however, it was the tortures that he endured for almost two days that coerced false confessions from Kitchen to pleading guilty to the murders. The justice system has lost its true purpose of finding justice for whoever is truly at fault. Instead of truth-seeking, court cases have become more about self-interest and winning. Majority of cases do not even reach trial, before then the guilty are let go free or let off easy while the innocent take guilty pleas in fear of risking loosing at trial. Today’s trials just involve two sides in continuous debate that end in the hope for the judge and jury to be able to emerge the truth. Modern judiciary branch has become so accustomed to the idea that court is a neutral course and the judges

The author was very interested in writing about issues such as truth and honesty, fairness, equality, right, wrong and justice by analyzing how the things that the characters in the televisions series say and do reflect law in a general sense. In his article, “Brady Justice: How the Brady Bunch Taught Jurisprudence to Generations,” Russ, Versteeg makes the argument that justice comes with fairness. It is common for us to acknowledge that justice and the role of law in society are critically important. According to Versteeg , “One principle that we often associate with Justice is the notion of equality. It is also common to refer to this principle as fairness (135).” In other words for one to exhibit justice, one must portray the quality of being fair and reasonable in all situations. What this means is fairness is not always

One of the most interesting things I learned from doing my research on community corrections in my jurisdiction is how the criminal justice system is committed to being fair and balanced. I have observed in a court arraignment how a judge briefed everyone in the court about proper protocols during the hearings .The judge said he could not start court hearings unless a prosecutor was present, and that he cautions the inmate the right to remain silent, and also discussed to the inmate his rights. Community-based corrections developed as a result of dissatisfaction with institutional confinement and in recognition of the problems encountered by inmates reentering society after prolonged incarceration. Belinda R. McCarthy, Bernard J. McCarthy, Jr,& Matthew C. Leone (4th edu.). (2001) Community-Based Corrections. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Group. In writing this paper I will inform and discuss the various programs and rules applied to handle offenders who have violated state laws according to the criminal justice system in NC. I will write about the following subjects in the following order: 1) Parole and probation, 2) Community and drug courts, 3) Pretrial release, 4) Victim aid, and 5) Community service (as a function of service of sentence).

How Justice Works In the novel, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, right and wrong is determined in a way that is much like ours. Society determines between right or wrong and those people in society are mostly white people who own land or slaves. Lawmakers control what people in society can and cannot do, but sometimes laws aren’t enough to stop people from doing as they please. Some exceptions are made such as Augustus being allowed to stay in Virginia after 12 months and being able to claim his family members as part of what he owns.

The Criminal Justice Systems have various objectives to achieve, one of them being reduction of crime levels. Another core objective is practicing justice. These two objectives can be achieved in various ways. Evidence has been presented by the authors that the judicial systems sometimes play unfair in solving crime cases.

Since we were kids and became conscious of our surrounding, our parents and grandparents instilled in us an awareness of what is right and wrong. In other words, it is a trait of all human beings and fosters from our desire to get along with each other to live a harmonious life. Laws are a set of rules and behaviors set by governments that society illustrate on what people can or cannot do. The purpose of this paper is three-fold: it will identify and define what distinguishes law from ethics and what similarities they share. The second is an analysis of examples of where law and ethics either meet or diverge. Third is the role where law and ethics either meet or diverge.

The rule of law is a difficult concept to grasp and proves elusive to substantive definition. However, the following work considers the attempts of various social and legal theorists to define the concept and pertinent authorities are considered. Attitudes and emphasis as to the exact shape, form and content of the rule of law differ quite widely depending on the socio-political perspective and views of respective commentators (Slapper and Kelly, 2009, p16), although there are common themes that are almost universally adopted. The conclusions to this work endeavour to consolidate thinking on the rule of law in order to address the question posed in the title, which is at first sight a deceptively simple one.

Law is the very foundation of society and the true function of justice is to keep the scales even between man and man to adjudicate the merits of the problem brought before the courts in the true light.