Criminal Trials Research Articles

Charting the Indicted Crimes in Trump’s New York Criminal Trial

Charting the Indicted Crimes in Trump’s New York Criminal Trial

Exploration of New Paths for Juvenile Criminal Trial Work

Exploration of New Paths for Juvenile Criminal Trial Work

Research on the Historical Origin of the Victim’s Participation in the Criminal Trial System

Research on the Historical Origin of the Victim’s Participation in the Criminal Trial System

시민불복종의 법적 정당화 고찰

The general view is that civil disobedience cannot be ‘legally justified’ because it is ‘an act that violates the law’, and that the disobedient must be willing to accept the legal consequences of his or her disobedience. However, as long as the value of civil disobedience is needed to resolve the partial breakdown of the system that the representative system cannot properly handle, is it impossible to recognize the legal justification beyond acknowledging moral justification for civil disobedience that fully accepts the entire legal order? This paper starts from this question and seeks to explore the possibility of legal justification of civil disobedience in relation to positive law. This is because acknowledging the role of civil disobedience in supplementing the blind spots of the representative system and seeking ways to legalize it to a certain extent is rather a way to expand the realm of the rule of law.
 The concept of legal justification for civil disobedience is being used vaguely, with its specific relationship to positive law unclear. Therefore, first of all, it is necessary to confirm the concept of legal justification of civil disobedience in relation to the Constitution and positive laws. This must begin with distinguishing between direct and indirect civil disobedience. That’s because the legal justification of civil disobedience itself or individual acts of disobedience varies depending on whether the target rule violated by civil disobedience is consistent with or inconsistent with the target law or policy that civil disobedience aims to protest.
 Jury nullification in the US jury system is an exceptional system in which a jury acknowledges that the accused is guilty of a crime charged in a criminal trial, but finds him innocent for various reasons. As long as jury nullification, which is an important part of the jury system, is understood as a constitutional issue, the implications of jury nullification on the legal justification of civil disobedience are relevant. The device of jury nullification, which sometimes grants legal immunity to civil disobedience, provides an implication in interpreting the social rule provisions(Article 20) of our criminal law.
 As a result of a large-scale protest against the installation of nuclear missiles in Germany in the 1980s, the German Federal Constitutional Court finally discussed civil disobedience. In particular, in the 1986 decision, some Constitutional Court judges put forward a theory referred to as the constitutional influence of civil disobedience. The majority opinion in the 1995 decision, which followed over time, also presented an interpretation that respond implicitly to the theory presented by the dissenting opinion in 1986. Therefore, we will examine this theory, which provides important implications for the interpretation of the social rule.

Law, Nationhood and Religion: Trial Defences of English Priests, 1585–c.1640

Abstract This article examines how defendants indicted under the 1585 statute against seminary priests and Jesuits conducted their defences at trial. It explores why, although the indictment—for having returned to England after Catholic ordination overseas—accurately described defendants’ actions, and although chances of acquittal were remote, many priests spent considerable effort defending themselves. The paper argues that strenuous efforts to make good a not-guilty plea illustrate Catholic engagement with the English polity and enabled Catholics both to acknowledge and to circumscribe its authority; also explored are refusals to plead, which were more common than studies of Catholic martyrs have usually recognised, and their motivation. Exploiting these multiple descriptions of low-profile (if not ordinary) criminal trials also enhances our understanding of how law and justice were perceived, and how they operated, during this relatively information-sparse period, and is thus of interest to historians of the law. The essay argues that examining trials of Catholics shows how legal proceedings can reveal dissidents’ engagement with political authority, and how they negotiated its claims while maintaining the justice of their oppositional cause.

Protecting juvenile defendants in the trial and from the trial: special safeguards in EU and Italian regulations

Both the Directive 2016/800/EU and the Italian national law on juvenile criminal trial (presidential decree no. 448/1988) aim to provide specific safeguards for young suspects and defendants to protect their fragile and still-developing personality, and to ensure that any crime allegedly committed by the minor is an isolated incident in their past. These safeguards are required throughout criminal proceedings, especially during the trial stage, which can be confusing and overwhelming for a juvenile and may seriously impact their development. The trial phase – along with the precautionary limitation of personal freedom – seems to be the most dangerous procedural segment for children’s personalities. The trial is where the justice ‘play’ comes to life on its main stage, with its whole ritual, language, and characters. When attempting to identify safeguards intended to operate during the trial phase, two main fields seem to emerge: one focuses on the issue of assistance, which has to be more profound due to the unique nature of juvenile personality and experience of life; while the other one aims to protect children’s privacy so that their public image will be shielded as much as possible from the negative consequences of the trial. The article first focuses on these aspects by analysing legal regulations and the jurisprudence. In some cases, Italian legal regulation exceeds European directive standards, serving as a model for other legal systems. However, even though the internal regulation formally matches the EU requirement in some instances, it needs further improvement. Also, in terms of the law in action, the Italian jurisprudential approach sometimes weakens the safeguards provided by law, demonstrating the need for different interpretative solutions that are adequate to respect children’s rights fully. In the light of such issues, the author suggests some exegetical solutions.

Procedural opportunities of the victim in a criminal trial

The scientific study is devoted to clarifying the procedural possibilities of the victim’s participation in an adversarial judicial criminal process, based on which recommendations were developed aimed at improving the tactics of conducting certain procedural actions, as well as the provisions of the criminal procedural legislation, which regulate the procedure for the victim’s participation at the stage of the trial. It is substantiated that legal guarantees of the realization of the procedural rights of the victim at the stage of the trial are aimed at creating certain opportunities for the victim in the examination of evidence, prevention (prevention) of violations by other participants in criminal proceedings, termination of violations of procedural rights and restoration of the violated right. It was determined that the basic legal guarantees of the victim during the trial include the following procedural possibilities: to be informed in advance about the time and place of the trial; submit evidence to the court and participate in their direct examination; to file objections and motions; to ensure safety for oneself, close relatives or members of one’s family, property and housing; give explanations, statements or refuse to give them; to challenge decisions, actions or inaction of authorized persons; support the prosecution in court in case the prosecutor refuses to support the state prosecution; to appeal court decisions in accordance with the procedure provided for by the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine and others. Also, in order to provide additional guarantees for the realization of the rights of the victim in the adversarial criminal process, arguments are given for making relevant changes to the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine in terms of: establishing for the victim the opportunity to be present when the preventive measure is selected, changed or canceled, to provide explanations and evidence to support their position, as well as the right to appeal decisions on the specified issues; indicating that the interrogation of the victim begins with the proposal of the presiding judge to give testimony regarding the criminal proceedings, after which his interrogation is carried out by applying direct and cross-examination.

Interpretation and translation in atrocity trials: insights from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

This article draws attention to some of the ways the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’s (ECCC) proceedings have been shaped by the process of translation, interpretation and vernacularisation. In doing so, it seeks to add a novel case study to a growing literature that exposes the central role of language professionals in the operation of international courts and tribunals. The article highlights challenges that arose at the ECCC around the interpretation, translation and vernacularisation of legal concepts, using the examples of ‘genocide’ and ‘reparation’ to demonstrate how a focus on linguistic translation can obscure the more substantial vernacularisation work involved in rendering legal concepts legible. It then explores the challenges raised by victims’ and witnesses’ use of euphemism, interrogating different approaches towards translating and interpreting euphemism in the context of a criminal trial. Finally, it explores victims’ and witnesses’ use of Khmer Rouge jargon, and the challenges that posed for Khmer language professionals born after the fall of the regime. Drawing from these examples, the article emphasises the need for international criminal institutions to take the process of translation seriously, to understand it as significantly more than a technical linguistic exercise, and to give thought to the additional resources, training and expertise that might be needed to ensure accuracy both in the courtroom and when communicating concepts and processes outside the courtroom. This extends both to the training and resources that interpreters and translators might need, and the cultural awareness and sensitivity that legal practitioners might need in order to engage with victims and witnesses across language barriers.

HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE PROBLEM RELATED TO THE LEGAL AND MATERIAL SITUATION OF WAR PRISONERS DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The article is dedicated to the 105th anniversary of the end of the First World War, which causes, along with the special military operation being conducted in the Ukraine and the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, close attention of the world community to the problems of war captivity. Colossal geopolitical changes in the international arena are forcing the world community to look more seriously and from a different angle at the aspects of this complex issue, which threatens a humanitarian catastrophe in the conditions of current high-tech ruthless war.
 
 The purpose of the study is to make an analytical review of Soviet, Russian, regional and foreign historiography of the problem related to the legal and material situation of war prisoners during the First World War, which makes it possible to conclude about the degree of knowledge covering the problem in general and the issue of downbedding and using war prisoners during the First World War in the territory of Chuvashia in particular.
 
 Materials and methods. The aspects of the issue are investigated on the basis of the method of analyzing scientific publications of domestic and foreign historiography, information materials of the thematic collection of documents of the State Historical Archive of the Chuvash Republic dated 2014. The historical science contains the historiographical analysis of the experience in studying this topic in Russia and abroad which made it possible to clarify the chronological and geographical framework of the problem of war prisoners during the World War. A comprehensive historiographical assessment helped to establish the level of knowledge of the topic, which affects formulation of tasks, and also highlights those aspects of the issue under study that need additional study. The historical method, which refers to the methods of the theoretical level, made it possible to study the emergence and development of the object of research – the problems of war prisoners – in chronological sequence both abroad and in Russia, and at different stages of its historical development in particular and in a regional context. The general scientific method of generalization enabled us to express the main results in the general position, to draw conclusions on the problem we are studying.
 
 The scientific novelty of this work is complete absence of fundamental research works on the topic under study at the regional level. This article is based on scientific publications of domestic and foreign historiography, information materials of the thematic collection of documents kept in the State Historical Archive of the Chuvash Republic dated 2014.
 
 Study results. The author considers the urgency of the topic which is dedicated to the 105th anniversary of the First World War’s end, and which is due to colossal geopolitical changes in the international arena. The Soviet historiography was studied, which paid very little attention to the problem of the war prisoners arrival to the territory of the Russian Empire during the World War, examining the issue only in the context of statistics of military losses. The article covers the aspects of the research work carried out by Russian and regional scientists, whose works closed many gaps in the scientific problem related to the legal and material situation of prisoners of war. The article pays attention to the degree of covering the issue in foreign historiography, the main aspects of the study in which were: firstly, psychological practices of mass experience by soldiers and officers behind the barbed wire; secondly, the humanitarian component of military captivity, associated primarily with the exchange of disabled people between warring countries; thirdly, the study of themes related to criminal prosecution and trials against German war criminals who had committed criminal acts against British and French was prisoners; fourth, the topic of social experience of war prisoners in Russia, as well as charitable activities and diplomatic settlement of maintaining war prisoners as the key moments of international politics during the World War.
 
 Conclusions. Despite the extent of previous research of the problems related to military captivity in Russian and foreign historiography, many issues at the regional level were not covered, including the aspects considered in this work. Therefore, it is necessary to continue fruitful research work in this direction.

ELITELE ȘI SOCIETATEA ROMÂNEASCĂ ÎN TIMPUL GUVERNĂRII LUI GHEORGHE GHEORGHIU DEJ

Under the notion of state socialism, Romania, during the period when it was led by Gheroghe Gheorghiu Dej, began to know the harmful effects of censorship, collectivization, centralizing policies. Romanian society, as a whole, and individuals, in particular, were subjected to severe transformations in order to achieve the "ideological purity" so desired by the rulers. Motivating his actions by eliminating arbitrariness from the economy and social life, the regime of Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej worked against the great mass of the peasantry, the private capital existing at that time and the intelligentsia. The existing order, whose democratic approaches had now become a threat to the new state order, had to be changed. The destruction of civil society and all its forms of free expression was also possible with the help of changes in national legislation. Abusive arrests, criminal trials without the slightest defense of the accused, the application of harsh punishments, all these were tools used to create the "new man".

Improved Word Segmentation System for Chinese Criminal Judgment Documents

ABSTRACT In this paper, a system for automatic word segmentation of Chinese criminal judgment documents is proposed. The system uses a hybrid model composed of fine-tuned BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), BiLSTM (Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory) and CRF (Conditional Random Field) for named entity recognition, and introduces a custom dictionary that includes common professional terms in Chinese criminal trial documents, as well as a rule system based on judicial system and litigation procedure related regulations, to further improve the accuracy of word segmentation. BERT uses a deep bidirectional Transformer encoder to pre-train general language representations from large-scale unlabeled text corpora. BiLSTM uses two LSTM networks, one for the forward direction and one for the backward direction, to capture the context from both sides of the input sequence. CRF uses a set of features and weights to define a log-linear distribution over the output sequence. Experimental results show that the proposed system has significantly improved word segmentation accuracy compared to the current commonly used Chinese word segmentation models. In the results of the segmentation of the test data, the F1 scores for jieba, THULAC and the segmentation system proposed in this paper are 85.59%, 87.94% and 94.82%, respectively.

Criminal Responsibility Of Suspects And Victims Of Corruption In The Private Bribery Sector In Indonesia

Suspects and Victims of the Arbitrariness of Authorities in the Criminal Justice System Examining whether the Criminal Enforcement Process in the case of Corruption Crimes has been carried out correctly both in the order of Making Legal Norms and in terms of Law Enforcement. Correct and fair resolution of criminal cases is not only seen from the results of the verdict handed down by the judge. Rather, it is seen from the victim who is asked to be held accountable based on the principle of business judgments and is made a suspect for the business decisions he takes in the criminal justice system.. To realize the objectives of criminal justice within the framework of the criminal justice system, the criminal justice model that is guided is actually based on the due process of law. Whether the criminal justice is enforced from the start in accordance with the provisions of procedural law (due process of law) or not (undue process), if it has been implemented in accordance with the provisions of procedural law then the justice has implemented and upheld the ideology envisioned by the rule of law (Rechtstaat). and a democratic society. In order to uphold an honest criminal justice system from start to finish as a form of ideological commitment and justice for people who are dealing with criminal trials, whether suspects, witnesses or victims, this is the main or absolute goal. The aim of this research is to determine the responsibility of a suspect and victim as a manifestation of law enforcement ideology. The method used in writing this research is normative juridical using statutory and conceptual approaches.

Culture and the Illusion of Self-Evidence: Spiritual Beliefs in the Ongwen Trial

Abstract By definition, criminal trials are set to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. In this process, judges are tasked with assessing not only evidence that presents itself in quantifiable forms, but also as personal experiences. In the case of Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier and commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army (lra), the issue of spiritualism played a significant role, particularly in relation to the affirmative defences of mental incapacity and duress. Assessing such culturally charged evidence, inherently interconnected to local beliefs, through the lens of an international criminal law trial raises a number of challenges. In the construction of the legal truth, such immaterial evidence undergoes a process through which only certain elements, which are deemed relevant in light of specific arguments, are ultimately selected, filtered through the legal framework, contested by the parties and ultimately decided upon by the judges. Spiritual beliefs therefore become patterns, and patterns become certainties. Based on an in-depth analysis of 408 trial transcripts, along with main submissions and decisions, this article sheds light into how framing spiritualism according to the criteria laid out in the Rome Statute has played out in the trial of Dominic Ongwen. It maps the way in which cultural concepts related to spirituality have been introduced into the trial, by which parties and for what purpose. It also looks at how the system of spiritual powers guiding the lra and its fighters was assessed by the judges and potentially why.

Dilemmatic of the Proofing Testimonium De Auditu: Indonesian Legal Studies

The proof of testmonium de auditu cannot be used in criminal cases but the constitutional court's decision number 65/PUU-VIII/2010 gives the position of witness de auditu which creates a new dilemma in criminal trials. the method used is normative with a legal approach and a conceptual approach. The results showed that testmonium de auditu statement actually did not have the same evidentiary power as a factual witness, but because of the constitutional court decision that acknowledged the evidence of testmonium de auditu witness, the statement could be considered which in this case can be used as evidence in criminal trial accordance with what is in the criminal procedure code. The importance of witnesses does not lie in their own statements, but in the relevance of their statements to criminal cases that are being processed so that judges in assessing a criminal case do not rely solely on belief but must be based on the search for material truth in accordance with legal objectives in KUHAP. Keywords: Evidence, Testimonium De Auditu, Criminal Procedure Code (KUHAP).

Legal and Epic Alienation. Fritz Bauer’s Critique of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-1965) and Peter Weiss’s Dramatic Treatment of the Trial in the Investigation. Oratorio in 11 Cantos (1965)

Beginning with the influences of Schiller’s humanist ideals on Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer’s expectations of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial as a legal working through of the past, this article compares the Holocaust narrative created by the West German criminal trial to Peter Weiss’s reworking of the transcripts, The Investigation. Oratorio in 11 Cantos. The article aims to show that literature is able to convey and commemorate aspects of the Holocaust that German criminal law misrepresents and omits.

The tactics of talking the statement of the protected witness

The article introduces the main forensic tactical rules applicable to the evidentiary procedure of listening to protected witnesses during the criminal trial, through an aggregate analysis of the forensic procedures with the relevant legal norms, as well as with references to national and international jurisprudential solutions, and finally brief conclusions are expressed and Ferenda law proposals to improve the legislative framework and forensic methods in the field.

Compliance with the principle of equal finding the truth in criminal proceedings – "sine qua non" principle

Criminal procedural law includes a series of fundamental and specific principles and strict rules according to which the judicial bodies have the obligation to find out the truth in the criminal process.
 Finding the truth is subject to the collection of evidence related to the facts and circumstances of the case, the suspect, the defendant, as well as the other parties and the injured person.
 In order to fulfill this principle, it is necessary to comply equally with other basic rules embodied in the presumption of innocence, the right to defense, respect for human dignity, in fact all the rules that govern the conduct of the criminal process.
 Searching, discovering and finding out the truth are, in essence, the elements of a knowledge process. We can conclude, therefore, that any criminal trial fundamentally represents an extensive process of knowledge.

Proposition de réforme de l’expertise psychiatrique et de l’expertise psychologique présentencielles en France par la mise en place d’une expertise mentale de qualité

It is regularly observed that in France “psychiatric expertise” and “psychological expertise” for criminal trials can present two pitfalls in their implementation: the lack of experts (psychiatrists experts in particular) and possible content that is sometimes erroneous. Given the number of psychiatrists and psychologists, these two terms of expertise could be abandoned in favor of a single concept of “mental expertise” carried out indifferently by psychiatrists or by psychologists selected as being well trained, professionally experienced and competent to carry out these missions. This decompartmentalization with the establishment of some other major principles (creation of a clinical and legal consensus of mental expertise, obligation of harmonized and updated training of experts, taking into account the professional experience of experts, time spent and appropriate periods for carrying out expert assessments, revaluation of expert acts, development of research on expertise, creation of body(ies) for the control and regulation of expert practices) could make it possible to make available to justice and litigants with sufficient numbers of quality experts throughout the national territory.

Can criminal justice be predicted? Using regression analysis to predict judges’ decisions on petitions for new criminal trials

Predictability of legal decisions is usually considered a prerequisite for the rule of law, following the maxim ‘like cases should be treated alike’. Yet, this presupposes that the case outcome can be predicted based on the merits of the case, rather than other factors. The purpose of this study was to test whether and to what extent legal decisions on petitions for new criminal trials can be predicted on the basis of other fairly superficial criteria that one could access without even reading the case file, e.g. which Court decided, whether the applicant had legal representation etc. To this end, all petitions for new criminal trials submitted to the Swedish Supreme Court and the six Courts of Appeal in the time period 2010–2020 (n = 3915) were reviewed. This data formed the basis of a regression model which was then used to predict decisions regarding petitions in 2021. On the basis of access to legal representation and crime type, the regression model predicted accurately 100 % of the decisions made in 2021. This raises questions about the evidentiary basis for the decisions and also the role of judges in situations where their decisions are fully predictable.

Video Structure Extraction using Shot Boundary Detection for Forgery Detection

In the digital era, video and pictures are perceived as more reliable than words. Considering the popularity of the internet, forging digital videos is probably nothing new. The recording, archiving, and sharing images and videos on media platforms are frequently done with mobile phones and digital cameras. Additionally, anyone may easily adjust or edit an image because of the availability of software editors. Technology and technological advancements have made video authentication detection a prevalent issue. As a result, digital recordings are being used as visual evidence in many susceptible domains, including media, politics, civil or criminal trials, and military and intelligence activities. Digital videos are an essential source of information with a high degree of evidence, but they may also be easily manipulated on purpose. As a result, in situations where reliance on video evidence is required, it is crucial to authenticate the contents of the video evidence before accepting it as an accurate picture of reality. This research focuses on several strategies for detecting shot boundaries to determine whether video content has been altered or tampered with. Although shot boundary detection is difficult, it is commonly used in structured video because these techniques can detect changes brought on by a regular shot change rate. In the meantime, this research will provide a novel shot boundary detection-based video authentication algorithm essential for developing practical tools to evaluate the video's authenticity based on its fundamental structure.