Judicial Punishment Research Articles

Healed limb amputations in human osteoarchaeology and their causes: A case study from Ipswich, UK

An adult male skeleton of Medieval date from Ipswich, UK, shows amputation of the right hand. The morphology of the bones suggests a quiescent stump, in which healing had been completed some time before death. Osteometric, morphological and radiographic data show that the mutilated limb continued to function but was used to a lesser degree than the intact side. A review of some of the literature on the osteoarchaeological evidence for healed limb amputations showed that interpretations generally fall into three broad categories: surgical intervention, judicial punishments and blade injuries. In the Ipswich case the skeletal evidence offered few clues as to the reasons for the mutilation, but historical evidence suggested a possible personal identification for the burial and that the cause of the amputation was a blade injury sustained as a result of a violent assault.

Judicial punishments in Iraq

EDITOR,—Reports in the BMJ have drawn attention to a series of recent decrees of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council introducing amputation of the right hand as judicial punishment for theft, with amputation of the left foot for a second offence.1 2 Amputation of one ear is decreed as punishment for evasion of the draft, military desertion, or harbouring deserters. Amputation of the other pinna is the penalty for a second offence, and the death penalty is decreed for a third. In addition, an X is branded on to the forehead. It seems that these sentences …

Drug offenders and criminal justice. Careers, compulsion, commitment and penalty

In the light of recent shifts in the availability of illicit drugs to, and use by, young people in the UK the article argues that current drug policy in the criminal justice system, which is fashioned around a model of problem or dependent use, is increasingly irrelevant as a diversionary (from punishment) mechanism. It is further suggested that many users of the key drug of the 1980s, heroin, have routinely eluded various “realistic” therapeutic/rehabilitative interventions because the model of problem or dependent use was refused by them, or, they were, in turn, refused by it. Despite the treatment ambitions of the “British System” of drug control, those seeking illicit pleasures and getting in trouble with the law have largely been subject to traditional judicial penalties. Finally, a re-incorporation of drug studies within general criminology and (youth) cultural studies is put forward.

The Fall and Rise of The Cane in Zimbabwe

The legality of judicial corporal punishment is an issue which has caused considerable disagreement amongst jurists, legislators and criminal justice personnel, for its use has serious moral, constitutional and penological implications. In Zimbabwe, two decisions handed down by the Supreme Court together with a later constitutional amendment Act have highlighted the divergence of views on this matter. It is thus the intention of this article to examine critically the issue from a constitutional and penological perspective.In 1987 in S v. Ncube a full bench of the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe unanimously held that the sentence of whipping for adults contravened section 15(1) of the Declaration of Rights which is contained in the Constitution of Zimbabwe in that it constituted a punishment which in its very nature was both inhuman and degrading. In his seminal judgment, Gubbay, J. A., had regard to four factors, namely: (i) the current trend of thinking amongst distinguished jurists and leading academics; (ii) the abolition of whipping in many countries of the world as being repugnant to the consciences of civilized men; (iii) the progressive move of the courts in countries in which whipping is not susceptible to constitutional attack to restrict its imposition to instances where a serious, cruel, brutal and humiliating crime has been perpetrated; (iv) the decreasing recourse to the penalty of whipping in Zimbabwe, especially over the previous ten years and the declining number of laws on the statute book in which it remained a permissible penalty.

Post-Emancipation Protest in the Caribbean: The “Belmanna Riots” in Tobago, 1876

Abbreviations CO Colonial Office Series, Public Record Office, Kew SM Special Magistrate When slavery in the British West Indies was formally ended in 1833, the great majority of the freed men and women remained within the orbit of the plantation system. Even if many succeeded in establishing themselves as small-holders who cultivated food crops on their own account, most were driven by their cash needs to work part-time on the estates. It would be naive to think that the managerial attitudes and practices developed during slavery were abandoned with the end of the legal institution; the ill-disguised contempt and hostility of many plantation staff, their lack of sensitivity towards the labourers' new status, were constant sources of friction in the post-slavery decades. In addition, legal freedom brought a host of new irritants - wage rates, wage stoppages and irregular payment, the size of tasks, the mode of payment by day or by task - to complicate relations between labour and management.1 The result of these problems, and other, more specific grievances, was a series of labour protests, disturbances and riots in the post-slavery decades throughout the Caribbean. If revolts were an inescapable consequence of formal slavery, demonstrations and riots by labourers seeking to defend their rights and to protect their hard- won gains were equally characteristic of the difficult post-Emancipation period. Tobago, which was permanently British after 1814, was linked administratively to Barbados and the Windward Islands in a loose union after 1833. Several labour protests and riots took place in this group of islands in the forty or fifty years after Emancipation. In Dominica a serious rising occurred in 1 844 in protest against the taking of a census, an action which many Dominican freedmen interpreted as the first step in their re -enslavement. In 1856, peasants who were technically squatters on Crown Lands resisted attempts to evict them at Batalie on Dominica's Leeward coast, and attacked the policemen who were trying to execute the order. Towards the end of the century, in 1 893, peasants of La Plain village violently protested against the eviction of one of their number for defaulting on his land tax in a time of serious rural depression. The Navy had to be summoned and four persons lost their lives St Vincent experienced riots in 1 855 sparked off by a severe judicial punishment inflicted on a woman for stealing canes worth one or two shillings, and a serious labour disturbance took place in 1862.4 In St. Lucia, the public flogging of a 14-year-old boy from a respectable coloured family for perjury triggered off riots in Castries in 1844; as in the Dominica Guerre Negre of the same year rumours spread in St. Lucia that slavery would be re-imposed. More serious was the St. Lucia riot of March 1 849 in protest against the land tax imposed on small-holders whose cash incomes were extremely small: eight persons lost their lives in this riot. 5 Even in Barbados, the headquarters of the Windward Islands government, where the island's complacent ruling class traditionally represented the labourers as docile and contented, the pressures of extreme poverty led to occasional explosions. In 1872 a Bridgetown crowd looted the cargo of a wrecked ship as it was brought ashore; the looters only dispersed when the police fired, killed one, and arrested 77 persons.6 In April 1876, the Confederation Riots broke out, and although political issues were probably most salient, there is little doubt that more traditional grievances such as low and irregular wages, oppression by individual plantation managers - as well as stark poverty - played their part Tobago The spectrum of grievances and different forms of oppression that led the Windward Islands Creoles to protest violently in these decades were also present in Tobago, the smallest island in the group, where the total population was only 17,054 by 1871. …

Finding Solutions to Drink-Driving: The Lessons of Research

The need to manage the problem of drink-driving often results in simplistic solutions being suggested. This approach relies on the idea of a magic cure, namely, that identification of a single, presumed, responsible causative factor allows for the development of a preventive measure that will control or eliminate the problem. The naivety of this view in developing possible, effective drink-driving countermeasures is examined in the light of experience with one magic-cure approach; the view that introduction of legislative deterrents in the form of judicial penalties is the key to eliminating the drinking driver from the road. The limitations of this approach are analysed on the basis of the research evidence, and a number of reasons are presented to explain why this is the case. A more complex intervention approach to the problem of drink-driving is suggested.

Doctors and judicial punishment

Doctors and judicial punishment

Doctors and judicial punishment

Doctors and judicial punishment

Doctors and judicial punishment

Doctors and judicial punishment

Doctors and judicial punishment

Doctors and judicial punishment

Doctors and judicial punishment

Doctors and judicial punishment

Juvenile delinquency and the psychology of general deterrence.

The study was concerned with the relevance of the judicial concept of general deterrence of juvenile delinquency. A comparison of attitudes of high-school boys, in areas of low and high delinquency, towards the likelihood of apprehension and the painfulness of punishment for criminal offences, and of the boys' factual knowledge of judicial punishment, did not support the hypothesis that potential juvenile offenders are deterred by fear of apprehension and punishment, or by having an objective knowledge of penal measures. The attitudes of the boys were found to vary with different combinations of socio-economic status and delinquency levels in their geographic areas. The findings were discussed in the light of the relevant literature. It was concluded that prevention of juvenile delinquency should be based on the acquisition of appropriate social values at home and in school, and not on fear of judicial retribution.

Inherent and Acquired Difficulties in the Administration of Punitive Justice

That there is a general and well-grounded dissatisfaction with the administration of punitive justice in America, I shall take for granted. It is, if I may say so, a condition, not a theory. The criminologist complains that whereas the fear of punishment does not restrain crime, it is none the less the chief reliance of law for protecting society; that whereas his science has shown the necessity of special institutions with expert management for many classes of delinquents, the legal theory of ideal equality before the law leads criminal law to consign all offenders to a common prison; that whereas he has “demonstrated positively that crime is a disease,” the law persistently deals with the criminal as a normal person. The sociologist complains that whereas the true purpose of punishment is protection of society, the basis of judicial punishment is revenge; that whereas the rights of society ought to be borne in mind continually, the law looks chiefly at individual rights; that whereas sociology has shown the necessity of study of the actual criminal, the law deals with him in the abstract and speculates over responsibility; that whereas the certainty, not the severity of punishment operates as a deterrent and protects society, the law provides for the latter and takes scant account of the former. The plain citizen who, without scientific investigation, knows only that he pays taxes to maintain prisons, courts, sheriffs, constables, police, and public prosecutors, complains that notwithstanding the enormous cost—said to amount the world over to $400,000,000 annually—society is not protected, crimes are not punished, and lawlessness is general.

Inherent and Acquired Difficulties in the Administration of Punitive Justice

That there is a general and well-grounded dissatisfaction with the administration of punitive justice in America, I shall take for granted. It is, if I may say so, a condition, not a theory. The criminologist complains that whereas the fear of punishment does not restrain crime, it is none the less the chief reliance of law for protecting society; that whereas his science has shown the necessity of special institutions with expert management for many classes of delinquents, the legal theory of ideal equality before the law leads criminal law to consign all offenders to a common prison; that whereas he has “demonstrated positively that crime is a disease,” the law persistently deals with the criminal as a normal person. The sociologist complains that whereas the true purpose of punishment is protection of society, the basis of judicial punishment is revenge; that whereas the rights of society ought to be borne in mind continually, the law looks chiefly at individual rights; that whereas sociology has shown the necessity of study of the actual criminal, the law deals with him in the abstract and speculates over responsibility; that whereas the certainty, not the severity of punishment operates as a deterrent and protects society, the law provides for the latter and takes scant account of the former. The plain citizen who, without scientific investigation, knows only that he pays taxes to maintain prisons, courts, sheriffs, constables, police, and public prosecutors, complains that notwithstanding the enormous cost—said to amount the world over to $400,000,000 annually—society is not protected, crimes are not punished, and lawlessness is general.