International and comparative criminal justice Essay

International and comparative criminal justice - Essay Example This is the way things should be. It is unacceptable for the police to contaminate evidence or obtain it through duress. However, its actual exclusion should rest at the discretion of a judge. This is the correct law and is followed in many common law jurisdictions, while it is less prevalent in civil law jurisdictions. In the course of this essay the rationale for this rule will be examined as will a number of cases and statutes relating to it. It is first important to discuss context. Crime has been an unfortunate aspect of human existence from the beginning of time. Each civilization and country has had to determine a method for dealing with it within their own moral vision. Different approaches to dealing with crime come from different values systems. Everyone is different and believes in different things. For people that believe a criminal is a product of his environment and is not personally responsible for committing of crime, it is likely that resources will be used on rehabi litation and treatment. Imprisonment will play a less important role. But for those who believe individuals are responsible for the things that they do and that if they intend to commit crimes they should be punished, the emphasis is likely to be on punishing or detaining the criminal. These different values play a role in determining how evidence is excluded. These two ways of dealing with crime can be broken up into two models. One will be likely to exclude contaminated evidence in order to preserve the human rights of the criminal, the second model would be much less likely to exclude evidence1. The first is the famous due process model present in most developed countries. The main idea of this model is that an individual should not be deprived of their human rights, even if it is clear that he or she has committed a terrible crime. To put someone in prison is to take away the criminal’s right to liberty. That is a very serious thing. The process must be scrutinized to ens ure that everything is done by the book. At its heart the due process model is the idea that the system would rather see ten guilty people go free than one innocent person in prison. The result of this model is many hours of painstaking work checking evidence and a long time-line of the court case moving slowly through the system. Because, historically, the legal system railroaded individuals by planting false evidence and by abusing human rights, we must be very careful when examining evidence. Permitting contaminated evidence into the legal system would encourage law enforcement officers to commit illicit acts. The due process model would strongly argue to exclude evidence obtained in the course of an abuse of human rights. The second way of looking at criminal justice regarding evidence is the crime control model. This model puts a high value on locking up guilty people. Its aim is to protect society and it tries to do this by detaining as many people as it can as quickly as it c an. Typically, in this model more money is spent on policing and deterring and prosecuting criminals as quickly as possible so that the police and prosecutors can start again quickly on the next group of criminals. If it happens that an innocent person is