Швецова Любовь

The American System of Criminal Justice

Criminal law relates to laws passed by the United States whose violation (нарушение, насилие) constitutes a crime which can result in fines, imprisonment...or even death. Unlike civil law in which private citizens utilize the courts to seek redress (возмещение, компенсация) or enforce their rights, a criminal trial involves either the Federal government or the State government seeking to obtain a guilty verdict against an individual. It is not individuals using the system but the government itself using the legal system to seek to enforce the laws and punish the individual to protect society.

Both the Federal government and the various states all have their own criminal statutes thus criminal trials can occur in either forum depending on which law is violated. By far most criminal trials involve state laws since the Federal government is restricted in its jurisdiction to particular types of crimes. Well over ninety percent of all criminal trials occur in state courts.

Americans are enormously proud and occasionally exasperated by their complex, expensive, and powerful system of criminal law which goes to tremendous lengths to protect the individual rights of the accused. Most people rightly consider the system as slanted towards ensuring the rights of the person charged with numerous safeguards, chief of which is the requirement that the person is presumed innocent until the government meets the highest burden of proof known in American law: proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to a moral certainty. Further, most systems of American criminal law also require a unanimous verdict by the jury to convict. No system of law in the world imposes such a tremendous burden on the State to meet before it can imprison or otherwise punish a citizen accused of a crime.

Yet, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of criminal trials result in verdicts of guilty.

And it is a fact that the recent DNA scientific advances which allowed new methods to verify if convicted murderers were guilty have shown that at least thirty percent and perhaps as much as fifty percent of those convicted and waiting on "death row" for execution were innocent...to the point where the governors of several states have refused to allow further executions until it is determined why this remarkable system seems to have failed.

It would appear that despite these remarkable safeguards to protect the accused, the system seems to be resulting in far more guilty verdicts than justified. In the last section of this article we will discuss the economic aspects of the American criminal law system that may explain the perhaps inappropriate level of guilty verdicts: put simply, the system runs on money and the average accused is poor, thus unable to effectively utilize the various safeguards available. A wag put it well: "if you have money, it is the fairest system in the world."

This article will discuss the basic procedures of a typical criminal trial in the United States and the various tactics that usually become vital in a criminal trial in California. The last section will discuss the practicalities of a criminal trial and selection of counsel to defend.